What does this mean? Well, for now we dont exactly know, since it is clear that the presidents tweets were not exactly well thought out. But it could mean that trans people will have to pack up and go home for pretty much no reason other than you cant stay here. For no other reason than, we feel like using you as political pawns today, or we dont understand you, or you simply are not welcome here. <\/p>\n
Money is the excuse today. It was supposed to be expensive to provide trans people with adequate health care. The reality is that the costs are negligible. Military spending wastes billions of dollars on projects that are canceled or dont work, every day. <\/p>\n
Medicine was the old excuse. The old military regulations were laced with medical terms to justify discrimination. They psychopathologized us trans people as having manifestations of paraphilias, and psychosexual conditions, transsexual, gender identity disorder to include major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia such as change of sex or a current attempt to change sex, that would render an individual administratively unfit to serve. <\/p>\n
These old regulations could come back. The rhetoric about trans people having mental disorders could come back, too. Its the same thing we see in state houses across the country. Trans people are mentally ill. We are predators. We are the ethereal enemy of the moment. Even though there is a medical consensus, a legal consensus, a military consensus that none of this is true. <\/p>\n
This is about bias and prejudice. This is about systemic discrimination. Like the integration of people of color and women in the past, this was a sign of progress that threatens the social order, and the president is reacting against that progress. <\/p>\n
But we will move forward. We will make sure that all trans people in the military, and all people outside the military after serving, receive the medical care they need. We will not back down. Our progress will continue. Our organizing and activism will grow stronger. <\/p>\n
We are neither disruptive nor expensive. We are human beings, and we will not be erased or ignored. <\/p>\n
Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) is a former United States Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 by court martial under the Espionage Act. Her sentence was commuted by President Obama in January and she was released in May. <\/p>\n
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