The point of World War T is that it's being waged on behalf of a pointlessly tiny minority, yet it's hard for the media warriors not to try to pump up the numbers to make this supposedly major issue sound less trivial. Thus, the NYT editorializes:
Discrimination in the Military
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 14, 2014
Three years after the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” an estimated 15,000 members of the military still must lie about themselves in order to go on risking their lives for their country. When Congress eliminated the law against gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, the Pentagon left in place an equally unfounded prohibition on transgender people....
As with gay and lesbian soldiers, the issue is not whether transgender people can serve in the armed forces. The point is that they — including the estimated 15,000 of them now serving — have to cover up their identities. Some refrain from seeking necessary hormone treatment or other medical care, suffering anguish and risking their physical and emotional health.
This editorial twice asserts that there are an "estimated 15,000" transgender individuals "now serving" in the U.S. military. Yet, there are only 1,369,532 active personnel in the armed forces, which would imply that over 1% are transgender, which sounds wildly inflated.
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73 comments:
Statistics are not about facts but to prove how you feel is correct.
Do they ever say where this "estimate" comes from. The same people who told us 10% of the pop. was gay. The same ones who made the movie about gay penguins only to discover they were, whoops, straight?
So, this figure comes from a report by the Palm Center called "Report of the Transgender Military Service Commission", available here:
http://www.palmcenter.org/files/Transgender%20Military%20Service%20Report.pdf
The second endnote gives the documentation for the 15,000 figure. That endnote cites a report with the following bibliographic information:
"See Gary Gates and Jody Herman (2013). Transgender Military Service in the Unite
d States, Los Angeles, CA:
Williams Institute. As explained below, Drs. Gates and Herman are in the process of updating the calculations in
their 2013 report."
Later on, in the report we find:
"Social scientists estimate that there are 700,000 transgender American adults, representing .3
percent of the nation’s adult population. In addition, Dr.
Gary Gates and Dr. Jody Herman
estimate that 15,450 transgender
service members serve currently in the US armed forces,
including 8,800 in the active component and 6,650 in the National Guard and reserve
components, and that 134,350 veterans are transgender. Transgender adult citizens are
more than twice as likely as non-
transgender Americans (2.2 percent transgender vs .9 percent non-transgender) to serve
currently in the military. Survey data suggest that approximately 90
percent of transgender service members are MTF transgender women."
So, it's 8,800 out of 1,369,532, or about .6% of the active military. What's most surprising is that while there are only 700,000 trans adults, there are 135,000 trans adults who are veterans! So, if we're to believe those numbers, then about 19% of all trans individuals are veterans, as compared to 6.8% of the general population (21,500,000 out of 317,800,000)!
Given, though, that 90% of the trans people in the military are MTF, and only 1.6 million women are veterans, then we should really compare this number to the male figure. There are 151.4 million males in the USA, and of them, about 19.9 million of them are veterans, which means that 13% of all men are veterans.
Still, the number of trans people who are veterans is surprisingly high. Maybe the figure isn't right.
--SoCal Philosopher
http://gopthedailydose.com/2014/05/15/thought-police-take-over-harvard-with-mandatory-power-and-privilege-indoctrination/
Gee, if Harvard bitches about privilege, maybe we won't notice Harvard is ABOUT privilege.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/05/obama-to-loosen-lending-standards-to-boost-home-ownership-what-could-go-wrong/
I'm so glad that my service is 25 years in the past.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/05/the_party_of_the_rich.html
http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/student-censors-your-time-is-up#.U3RlU4FdVA0
Estimated by whom? By the same people who think gays make up 20% of the general population?
Not so sure. "Transgender" nowadays means pretty much anything. Anyone who feels like a special snowflake can claim it, and many do. Most don't undergo any painful operations, especially on their genitals, and many don't even take hormones.
Also, nowadays, claiming transgender is encouraged by society and the medical establishment. An especially gruesome aspect of that are all the "progressive" parents who decide their confused and/or gay kids are trans and keep them on puberty blockers.
Bottom line, whatever the actual percentage, I'm sure it's risen a lot in the last decade or so.
Speaking of actionable 'discrimination' in/by the military...
The best film about transvestites serving in the army - apparently this is nothing new - is the excellent, but unfortunately overlooked, 1982 British movie "Privates on Parade".
Set in the colonial Malaya of the 1950s, this concerned the travails of obviously gay and transgendered serving military troops performing in a so-called 'concert-party' ie an 'entertainment company' in which the soldiers perform theatrical performances, in which the trans men habitually dolled themselves up as drag queens to perform female roles.
Great film and hilarious with it. John Cleese is at his usual best playing an upper-class officer in the midst of constant mental breakdown dealing with non combative madness around him.
What's fascinating about WWT is that it's basically a bunch of dudes co-opting and undermining women, since even outside the military 75% of "trans" people are mtf. It's not even a contest, like homosexuality where you might be able to argue there's a similar level or not too much of a discrepancy between men and women. Trans is almost entirely a male phenomenon.
I'm so glad that my service is 25 years in the past.
For now.
BritRob
Recently in the UK. The Doctor on
"Embarrasing Bodies" said there
were 150 gender reassignment operations per year. Shortly afterwards Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail said there were 200
per year. If these are correct I estimate that between 1/12000 and
1/6000 of the adult population in the UK is transgendered. If by this we mean has had the operation. If we mean people who are vaguely unhappy about something to do with their gender then obviously the figure is higher.
So, this figure comes from a report by the Palm Center called "Report of the Transgender Military Service Commission", available here:
http://www.palmcenter.org/files/Transgender%20Military%20Service%20Report.pdf
Well...the good news is at least some of the fact-checkers are still employed at the NYT.
The percentage could be more than 1% if we normalise for fabulousness.
Gilbert P
Then again, the 'just a phase' factor could dampen the numbers.
Gilbert P
You furnish the Twitter campaign, I'll furnish the transfreak commandos
I don't know what effect these neutrois will have on the enemy, but by God, they'd terrify all my evil dead ancestors.
Let me expand: the same academics who agitate for WWT, believe, almost to an entity, that sexuality is a fluid social construct.
And yet, if some fluid entity reflects a vaguely femme attitude on the day of a given social science survey; then they might as well have signed a lifetime contract with AT&T as far as the agitator-researchers are concerned.
GP
I do recall that a Canadian who taught at Sandhurst (Ari Nusbacher?) ended up with an operation.
He was always on the BBC discussing military policy.
Is the NYT suggesting that the US military is full of repressed perverted serial killing characters from Silence of the Lambs?
Gives a whole new twist to Achilles wrapping a rope around Hector's ankles and dragging him round Troy.
"the issue is not whether transgender people can serve in the armed forces."
When was that decision made?
According to the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health, 1 in 30,000 people is a transwoman (i.e., someone who is biologically male, but who identifies as a woman), and 1 in 100,000 people is a transman (i.e., someone who is biologically female, but who identifies as a man). If these figures are correct -- and the Center claims that they undercount the number of transpeople -- then there are about 5,047 transwomen in the USA and about 1,600 transmen. 5,047 + 1,600 = 6647, which is less than 700,000, by my arithmetic.
--SoCal Philosopher
http://www.ww2f.com/topic/13506-opinions-on-aryeh-nusbacher/
Is it anti-Semitic to dislike Nusbacher or Transphobic? A girl has so many choices.
@Gilbert P
Outstanding comment. In other contexts, I would even say "fabulous."
Whatever happened to Transvestites. That used to be a thing but there wasn't a political aspect. Aren't there any guys who wear dresses anymore because they like it or they find it pervy who don't claim some sort of made up gender disorder victimization.
It could be that those military transgenders are by and large women who imagine themselves as somehow man-like or wish they were men. Which, frankly, sounds like a not altogether implausible *objective* assessment of any woman that wants to be a warrior.
According to the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health, 1 in 30,000 people is a transwoman (i.e., someone who is biologically male, but who identifies as a woman), and 1 in 100,000 people is a transman (i.e., someone who is biologically female, but who identifies as a man). If these figures are correct -- and the Center claims that they undercount the number of transpeople -- then there are about 5,047 transwomen in the USA and about 1,600 transmen. 5,047 + 1,600 = 6647, which is less than 700,000, by my arithmetic.
This does not pass the smell test.
Since males who fail to engage in male-like behavior are heavily selected against (because they tend to have no offspring) while females do not need to engage in typical female-like behavior to get pregnant (I leave it to you to decide how that can), we would expect male sexuality to be strongly genetically stable.
OT http://io9.com/the-debate-over-killer-robots-is-a-guy-thing-1576551697
Suddenly I'm reminded of Corporal Max Clinger.
Well there are 2 things that often get confused here. One is transsexual, which is what I think most people think of when they hear "transgender, where someone literally has both sets of parts or some mix or whatever. These people are very rare, like above 1 in 1000, but it's definitely a real and pitiable condition.
The other is transgender, where someone is male or female but "feels" like they are the opposite, or wants to be the opposite, or whatever. There could be any number of these because it isn't really tied to anything concrete, and any one of us could become transgender tomorrow.
Next up fattie army.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXTq2_3LfXM
Stirling/Tokowitz ought to hire Gervais for his comedy stylings.
Facts and figures from the same people who tell us all about sea level rise. A simple peek behind the curtain reveals there's no "there" there. Manhattan is sinking in more ways than one.
"Three years after the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” an estimated 15,000 members of the military still must lie about themselves in order to go on risking their lives for their country."
We really need to put paid to this falacious notion that most people in the military are "risking their lives". The number of active-duty military personnel who are exposed to possible death by hostile action is probably smaller now than it ever has been. For many of them, their jobs are no more dangerous than if they worked for Fed-Ex or Pep-Boys or Time-Warner Cable.
And they certainly are not "fighting for our freedom". That particular meme - pushed by the mouthpieces on FOX News - is just completely ridiculous horses**t. Members of today's military are soldiers in pharoh's army - maintaining HIS empire. There is not really any pretense to it anymore.
I wonder how serious our government is about making the non-official army queer-friendly. We don't here any outrage about how patriotic she-males are thwarted in their desire to join the DEA or the FBI. Or, the USDA, for that matter, which is gunning up pretty seriously - they've put out a solicitation for .40 caliber submachineguns. Perhaps the elites recognize the need for combat effectiveness in the civilian security forces - the one meant to be used against us.
And what's up with the State Department stocking up on explosives - hundreds of pounds worth - to be delivered right to their diplomatic-pouch unit.
http://godfatherpolitics.com/15568/democrat-carl-levin-pressured-irs-go-conservatives-christians/
http://christiannews.net/2014/05/07/iowa-newspaper-editor-fired-for-criticizing-queen-james-bible-on-personal-blog/
Jews and homos sure love cons.
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2014/05/gender-at-princeton.html
Does this mean that Corporal Klinger was a civil rights hero like Rosa Parks?
Transgender persons, with messed-up ideas about their own sexuality, may be attracted in unusually large numbers to a hypermasculine profession for the messiest of psychological reasons.
The military's always been packed with a lot of men with no personal insight and an obsession with the outward trappings of being male.
I could believe that war trauma drives some into transvestitism
I cannot wait to see Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli running around in WM dress blues. I guess Cpl Klinger from MASH was ahead of his time, albeit for different reasons.
http://www.ar15.com/archive/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=1069328
WM stands for Women Marine. Should we now have GM, LM, and TM?
Sempre Fudge.
"Transgender activists say they are not mentally ill. I concur - men who walk round dressed as women need sending to prison like streakers or other public nudists, not incarceration in a mental asylum. They know what they are doing."
And should be dishonorably discharged accordingly.
I'm not sure I really know what 'transgendered' means. I think this is true for many would be compilers of statistics.
There is simple cross dressing. When I lived in the tenderloin area of San Francisco I would see a lot of that. These were men who wore dresses. Most of them were easy to spot. They were blacks with Pseudo folliculitis - the keloid shaving bumps that black men often get. They would be something like six foot three and be wearing four inch heels and a tight dress.
The point is that they were not in any way deceptive. You could see that they were men from across the street. They were part of the urban fauna like the Christian evangelists who went into trances and spoke in tongues. Very colorful.
Then there were the little Filipino men who used to pretend to be women in the orgy establishments. They would sneak in to the straight side of the house and try to get some action with straight men. There were the pre-op and the post-op varieties. They were trying to deceive normal men but they weren't very successful.
I went out once with what I thought was a girl in San Francisco but when I took her back to her apartment I found that she had a beard. I panicked. Her (his) boy friend burst in. He had been hiding behind the door. Before that very alarming incident I would have sworn that a man couldn't successfully masquerade as a woman.
So there are several varieties of odd men in San Francisco. Which ones are real transgenders and which are something else? I dunno.
So I think it's a little premature to give incidence statistics when we don't have reliable categories.
Pat Boyle
...autogynephile sex fetishists - you know, the type most likely to serve in the army.
Because they want to get their balls shot off?
"Recently in the UK. The Doctor on "Embarrasing Bodies" said there were 150 gender reassignment operations per year. Shortly afterwards Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail said there were 200
per year. If these are correct I estimate that between 1/12000 and 1/6000 of the adult population in the UK is transgendered."
You're not accounting for feminine penises.
If transgender people are over-represented in the military, then doesn't that suggest that the military lifestyle is already "better than average" for transgenders?
Maybe the military situation for transgenders is already "good enough"?
"When was that decision made?"
The implication is that they're already serving but suffering for want of breast implants and inside-out penises.
I have read the comments and I am astounded by the lack of empathy for the transgendered individual who wishes to serve the country. Facilitating the opportunity for transgendered Americans to serve will only strengthen the military by expanding diversity. Before the landmark decision to permit gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve openly without fear of reprisal, the military lacked the diversity offered by the mingling of people with different sexual preferences. By opening the military up to transgendered individuals, it will make it truly a welcoming and nurturing environment to the LGBTQ community. And America will be bettered served for it.
As this article points out, "transgender" is mostly BS. Anyone can call himself TG and ask for an operation, which of course doesn't change his sex at all, just cuts up what he's got and maybe replaces it with some genital window-dressing. Wanting to be, or believing one is, of the opposite sex was always listed as a mental disorder. Nowadays it's anyone who doesn't keep a straight face hearing about transgender problems that's considered a candidate for psychiatric treatment.
"Percy Gryce said...
I'm so glad that my service is 25 years in the past."
You and me both brother.
fredyetagain
I went to a large high school. 2,000 students. The odds that 20 of them were transgendered are roughly no-f-ing-way percent.
When someone you used to know decides to come out as transgendered, it tends to be talked about. At this moment in time, it's still juicy gossip. And how many people have you ever known that were trans? How many, out of the thousands of people you've met along the way? Any? 1 or 2?
I'd be shocked if even 1 in 1,000 people are legitimately sexually dysmorphic. As in, they really want to have surgery to reassign their sex.
What's more common? Gender-role kink among a certain percentage of homosexual men. If you've ever even glanced at the escort classifieds in the back of a big city's weekly entertainment newspaper, you know that a hugely disproportionate percentage of prostitutes tout themselves as trans. It's a very active slice of the kink community more than anything.
And for what it's worth, those fellas aren't signing up for military service as often as heterosexuals. No way.
It's like the estimates of how many gay men are in professional sports. There are some, to be sure, but no way is it as common as the percentage in the general population. Because the culture of sports hasn't been particularly receptive, and very few people want to hang around where they aren't wanted. I'd guess 1 in 200 pro athletes would self identify as gay if there truly was no stigma.
What is the deal with this stuff? Is it just to rub in the nose of the heartland knuckledraggers? Is the NYT really that obsessed with sticking it to them? Does it just cater to the prejudices of their readers?
The NYT is employing an H. Dumptian definition of "transgender," i.e. "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
I'm reserved about believing any this crap about gays, lesbians, and transgenders. A story: My wife and I are in our late 60s. We adopted a 16-year old girl from foster care, which put us deep into the current millennial high school environment. Listening to the hype, occasionally one of our daughters female friends would announce to the crowd that she was a lesbian. What she meant was that she did not have a boyfriend and and needed a foil to avoid humiliation. A little later, a boyfriend materialized and well, you know the rest .... The sanctity of choice: Today I choose to be a lesbian; tomorrow I'm straight; maybe next week I'll be a transgender. And we wonder why this generation can't seem to get on with life and focus on anything productive.
With the military turning away four out of five normal applicants it's essential that no transgender recruit be turned away until there is a sizable cadre of transgender officers to ensure the genitally mutilated can throw fabulous parties on the base.
If the word transgender confuses, consider the time it was chosen as the official label by standardisers.
Firstly, by that time the English language word 'transgender' had become associated with political activism (whilst 'transsexual' was a more reputable medical term.)
Secondly, as activists, autogynephiles push to dissociate their public appearance from mention of sex. Remember the timing of The Man who Would be Queen, undermining this carefully maintained public face.
On that note its no accident that the word 'transgender' is so fuzzily defined, with the consequence that a specific claim of transgenderism is unfalsifiable by diagnosis. This fits with transgender concerns regarding medicalisation - which they fear because claimants must obviously demonstrate something.
There is no such thing in science as 'transgender'. It is newspeak.
The impetus behind this push to change the policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_N._Pritzker
Something is terribly Wong here. The U.S. military has transgenders but SWPL Smith College just bans them? Oh the herwomymity!
1%?
Extraordinary!
That's more than conservatives at the Times!
I blame the movie The Fly -- it gave some people crazy ideas. And then Jeff Goldblum did a remake, which was not at all helpful.
I'm not sure I really know what 'transgendered' means. I think this is true for many would be compilers of statistics.
There is no generally accepted, precise definition of the term.
Now "transsexual" is well defined; it refers to someone with a deep desire to live as the opposite sex (relative to their genetic sex) and who pursues at least some medical procedures in order to do so (finances permitting). At the very least, a transsexual takes hormones and lives full time as their desired sex as soon as they have the chance to do so. It's a genuine condition and we need a term to describe it.
I don't think the term "transgender" serves any useful purpose. It seems popular mainly among leftists/feminists as a catch-all term for anyone who is gender atypical in some regard. To me, it makes sense to call cross-dressers "cross-dressers", butch lesbians "butch lesbians", etc. There's no underlying condition common to these people; they're just different in some way.
It seems to me the point of the word is to create a new protected identity group. Rather than identifying as a drag queen, a man can claim to be "transgender", which sounds like a serious condition akin to transsexualism, and then demand special treatment.
If I were a transsexual, I'd be rather annoyed at attempts to stick me in the same category as a guy who likes to wear panties under his slacks or whatever.
BTW, I always enjoy your comments Pat.
Does this mean that Corporal Klinger was a civil rights hero like Rosa Parks?
I don't know about that, but it means today's well-indoctrinated college kids will be as appalled by "M*A*S*H reruns as my generation was supposed to be by "Amos & Andy." Alan Alda, you craven self-proclaimed feminist, little did you know you were a hater.
A local public radio host talked about how he decided to show his teenaged son Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H," which he remembered as being funny and hip and transgressive. But as he watched, he was horrified to realize how sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal, racist, and homophobic it is! Weird how that never occurred to him in 1970, but he's been updating his progressive views as necessary.
In China the Eunuch's were given the civil service. In the US the Eunuchs are welcome in the military.
It can't be a good thing.
I increasingly get the sense that Cultural Marxists recognize the military as the perfect Trojan Horse for their agenda. Wrap leftist ideology in the flag and then dare conservatives to oppose it.
Related to this is the idea of military service as a civil right. The military has gone from a means by which the state accomplishes an end (namely, killing its enemies) to an end in itself as a showcase for progressivism.
Maybe the military situation for transgenders is already "good enough"?
It will never be "good enough". Even if every single person in the military is gay, black, transgendered, cross eyed and left handed it will still not be "good enough".
What is the deal with this stuff? Is it just to rub in the nose of the heartland knuckledraggers? Is the NYT really that obsessed with sticking it to them? Does it just cater to the prejudices of their readers?
That has to be part of it. Similarly look at Eurovision last week. Same sort of mindset at work.
Is it just to rub in the nose of the heartland knuckledraggers? Is the NYT really that obsessed with sticking it to them? Does it just cater to the prejudices of their readers?
Yes.
"What is the deal with this stuff? Is it just to rub in the nose of the heartland"
Outsider hatred.
Hatred of outsiders is talked about all the time but the hatred of the outsider from feeling like an outsider happens too.
"Is the NYT really that obsessed with sticking it to them? Does it just cater to the prejudices of their readers?"
Yes.
It seems to me the point of the word is to create a new protected identity group. Rather than identifying as a drag queen, a man can claim to be "transgender", which sounds like a serious condition akin to transsexualism, and then demand special treatment.
Seems to me that transsexual:transgender as rape:sexual assault. Particularly in regards to the US military.
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