In the showers of the U.S. Military Academy, Sgt. Michael McClendon surreptitiously video-recorded young, female future military officers during some of their most vulnerable and intimate moments. Today, as a result of policies implemented by the Obama administration, women who serve are getting victimized similarly.
To the peril of natal females, the Pentagon has granted males access to the very spaces that McClendon once prowled. During this well-intentioned but misguided thought process, American taxpayers have gotten victimized as well. That’s because, despite the hard work of medical professionals to help these men appear female to alleviate their gender dysphoria and the marching orders of the policymakers forcing everyone to accept them as women, the charade is a failure. They are and always will remain male.
Mirroring the policies of the Pentagon, in the girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms of Boyertown Area Senior High School in Pennsylvania, similar guidelines for the transgender population are jeopardizing the health and welfare of young girls. When female student Alexis Lightcap encountered a biological male in the girl’s bathroom at Boyertown, she abruptly left the restroom. The male calls himself female. What happened to Lightcap is not some made-up tale by religious groups to portray trans people as bathroom predators, because the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit legal organization, has a video of her quickly exiting the restroom in fear.
While transgender people claim their gender identity, a relatively modern invention from the 1960s, is hard-wired, Lightcap’s primal reaction of feeling threatened by suddenly encountering an unknown male is traceable to the beginning of time. Her response was a protective survival mechanism embedded into her female biology.
The Unreasonable Side Is the Transgender Side
On Lightcap’s behalf, the ADF is suing the Boyertown, Pennsylvania school district where she attended classes. On some transgender military personnel’s behalf, a throng of LGBT legal organizations have filed several lawsuits against the Pentagon and the president because of their restrictions on transgender people serving in the U.S. military. Both types of cases are heading to the Supreme Court.
There’s a common theme at the heart of these legal actions. Lightcap says she doesn’t care if transgender people share a bathroom with her as long as they share her biological sex. The attorneys for the Pentagon argue the same. They don’t care if you’re transgender either, providing that you serve in the military as I did, in your biological sex.
According to the logic of the LGBT legal advocates behind these lawsuits, all filed in carefully chosen jurisdictions on both coasts, why should anyone care if a soldier goes on light duty or becomes non-deployable for 270 days or more? These advocates believe getting cosmetic vaginoplasties to appear as women or undergoing a double mastectomy to look like men justify these long absences from duty. They claim these are lifesaving surgical procedures to protect these troops from suicide. Medical groups such as the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) disagree, believing we need to find more humane methods for treating gender dysphoria.
The problem with this erroneous line of thought about suicidality is that Pentagon regulations have historically barred anyone with suicidal ideation or behavior from military service. Allowing transgender soldiers has left Trump’s military leaders in a quagmire as they struggle to control the 41 percent attempted suicide rate in the trans population while rolling back the unrealistic transgender military regulations implemented during the Obama regime.
It’s Not Medically Necessary to Amputate Healthy Organs
Drawing from equal protection cases, the do-gooder legal argument for transgender surgeries goes as such. If a sick person can get surgical procedures for diseases such as breast cancer, then these same type of radical surgeries have to be made available for transgender people to treat their gender dysphoria, an equally deadly malady in their eyes.
However, black and white thinking regarding equal protection is severely flawed in these circumstances, because, for example, phalloplasty for transgender men is significantly more dangerous than vaginoplasty is for transgender women. However, both types of surgeries would have to get approved by the military from an equal protection standpoint. The Pentagon is rightfully pushing back against this flawed reasoning.
As these legal and cultural battles rage, transgender people are flocking to LGBT-friendly places such as Oregon to get transgender surgeries performed through the state’s generous Medicaid program. This “follow-the-benefits” trend suggests they’ll join the military for the same entitlements. However, regardless of where the hormonal treatments or surgical procedures get rendered, and no matter which government agency pays for them, the poor surgical and physical outcomes for the recipients will be the same.
I Served My Military Career Without Transgender Care
I know this to be true on both fronts because, as one of eight children with blue-collar parents, I joined the Army at 19, serving 18 years before getting medically retired. As an enlisted transgender soldier, I spent my entire military career without any transgender health treatments, surviving without it.
The Trump administration believes this is sound and reasonable military policy. Based on my experience with the dangerous medical treatments for gender dysphoria since retiring, I do too. Military service shouldn’t get awarded to those who succumb to the mental ravages of gender dysphoria and the ideologies of transgenderism. It should instead be a right for only those who can persevere through the struggle.
I left the military riddled with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. While PTSD is the signature mental wound of trauma, anxiety and depression are the hallmark traits of gender dysphoria. This truth is something extensively documented in the February 2018 “Department Of Defense Report And Recommendations On Transgender Military Service By Transgender Persons.”
The data in the news articles I regularly collect on my transgender archives website paints the same picture as that Pentagon report. According to that Department of Defense (DOD) data, between October I, 2015 and October 3, 2017, the 994 active-duty service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria accounted for 30,000 mental health visits.
The Harm From These Off-Label Treatments Is Real
After I left the Army, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) began treating me for gender dysphoria. To protect themselves of liability from the well-known side effects of cross-sex hormone therapy and antiandrogen drugs such as sterilization, blood clots, vein problems, and damage to my vital organs, my VA physicians forced me to a sign what’s known as an “informed consent” document.
I did so willingly because the beginning of the long form alleged improved mental health and alleviation of my gender dysphoria through consuming or injecting off-label cancer and menopause medications. Five years later, however, there’s been no improvement in my mental health, and I still have a gender dysphoria diagnosis. I’m just as plagued with anxiety and depression as I was before the initiation of treatment.
However, the side-effects were real. Formerly healthy, I’ve twice landed in the VA emergency room with leg and vein problems, and I’ve had two psychiatric hospitalizations after a series of estrogen injections severely destabilized my mental health. Even after my hospital stays, I spent a couple of weeks in a psychiatric rehabilitation program that cost the taxpayers nearly $30,000. Do I sound cured or fit for military duty because of transgender health care?
Identity Is Not Biology
A year-long, gut-wrenching investigation by the Associated Press (AP) shows why it’s not fair to treat Lightcap or those who share her views as bigots or label them as transphobic because they refuse to share a bathroom or locker room with males who identify as females. From the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2015, investigative journalists from the AP uncovered close to 17,000 official reports of sexual assaults in schools.
These were all documented cases of students assaulting other students. The investigation found these crimes were likely to occur wherever students were unsupervised, notably in bathrooms and locker rooms. In light of this, Lightcap prudently followed her instincts and bolted from the girl’s bathroom after suddenly encountering a biological male inside.
Besides concluding that male-to-female transsexuals are at increased risk for suicide despite undergoing cosmetic genital surgeries, the 2011 “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden” reported another disturbing fact about men who surgically alter their bodies to appear as women. It found male-to-female transgender people had a significantly increased risk of offending compared to females, but not compared to other males. The findings indicated these men retained a male pattern regarding criminality despite the surgery. The conclusion was the same for violent crime, the study said.
Criminal Patterns that Match Their Biology
The years-long media article based research on my Transgender Archives website supports that study’s conclusion. To date, I’ve identified 67 transgender murderers. Fourteen of those killed multiple people, some are serial killers who murdered numerous women. Of the 67 I’ve found in news articles, the number born male identifying as female is 63. Three others were female at birth. One identifies as non-binary, with his or her birth sex not clear in the news reports
My findings on sex crimes involving transgender people are similar. Of the 75 incidents, I’ve gathered and cataloged 49 involved crimes against a person under 18 years of age. Males who identify as females were responsible for committing 66 of them and biological women were responsible for nine. However, many of the sex offenses involving biological women as the perpetrators involved tricking other women into believing they were men during sexual relations and were often consensual sexual activities.
Like the statistics for violence, my sex crime data likewise supports the conclusion of the Swedish study, justifying the primal fears natal women such as Lightcap have about sharing intimate spaces with the broad transgender population of males with various transgender identities.
In other research conducted for a bathroom, locker room, and dressing room incident website, I’ve spent hundreds of hours and more than a year scouring search engines for these crimes. It’s arguably the most extensive collection of such data on the internet. Of the nearly 1,000 incidents I’ve collected to date, I was able to identify the biological sex of the person responsible in 952 of the instances.
In these documented incidents reported by the media, adult males were responsible 839 times; male juveniles were responsible 70 times; men dressed in women’s clothing were responsible 25 times; male-born transgender people who identify as women were responsible 7 times; adult females were responsible 25 times; female-born people who identify as males were responsible 1 time, and female juveniles were responsible 12 times. The crimes committed by women or girls rarely involve sexual activity or motivation, but they are hands down the biggest victims of such crimes.
Based on the evidence from the AP’s research and my own, women and girls such as Lightcap aren’t wrong to demand safe, private female spaces, offering protection from male aggression. Because of that, the ADF should get applauded for helping them to accomplish that goal.
Likewise, President Trump also isn’t wrong to demand mentally and physically healthy candidates for military service, personnel who can deploy at a moment’s notice and able to withstand mental or physical challenges. Lawyers for the Pentagon should get similarly applauded for working to achieve that goal.
