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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

Mother Jones

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Starting next week, the Pentagon will pay for gender reassignment surgery for eligible soldiers, a change that comes after the military lifted its long-standing ban on transgender service members earlier this summer.

Soldiers will be eligible for the surgery if they have a medical condition related to their gender identity, such as gender dysphoria, that has hindered their ability to serve, a Defense Department spokesman told USA Today. The military will also cover hormone therapy for eligible soldiers.

“The Secretary of Defense has made clear that service members with a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary will be provided medical care and treatment for the diagnosed medical condition,” Air Force Major Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, told Stars and Stripes.

Out of a total force of about 1.3 million active-duty service members, an estimated 1,320 to 6,630 are transgender, according to a recent study by RAND Corp., which analyzed the health care needs of trans soldiers at the request of Defense Secretary Ash Carter. But “only a small portion of service members would likely seek gender transition-related medical treatments that would affect their deployability or health care costs,” RAND concluded. It estimated that 25 to 130 active-duty soldiers would have gender reassignment surgery annually, while 30 to 140 soldiers would begin hormone treatment every year. That would translate to an additional annual cost of between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, or a 0.13 percent increase in current spending.

Critics of the new policy worry that too many soldiers will be unqualified for deployment for long periods of time because of gender reassignment surgery. But RAND estimated that only 10 to 130 active-duty service members would have reduced deployability every year, and it described this amount as “negligible” compared with the 50,000 active-duty soldiers in the Army who are nondeployable.

For decades, the military had discharged soldiers who received medical treatment for a gender transition. But in June, the Defense Department announced it would allow openly transgender people to serve, and that soldiers would be allowed to transition genders during their service. “We can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications to prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission,” Carter said. But at the time of the announcement, it wasn’t clear whether the Pentagon would agree to pay for gender reassignment surgery as a medically necessary procedure, or if it would instead treat the surgery as an elective, cosmetic procedure.

In September, the Army agreed to provide gender reassignment surgery to Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents. Days later, the Defense Department announced it would begin covering the surgeries for eligible active-duty soldiers, too, starting in October.

“I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing,” Manning said of the Army’s decision, which came after she attempted to commit suicide and went on a hunger strike. “I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted—for them to let me be me.”

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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

Mother Jones

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I’ve been bemused for a while by the support for Donald Trump among hard-core anti-immigrant pundits. Mainly this is because I wonder why they think he’s serious about his wall. Pretty much everything he says and does is a con job of one kind or another, and there’s no real reason to think he’d stick to his guns about the wall if he became president. Instead, since he doesn’t actually care one way or the other about this, he’d probably cut a deal with Paul Ryan for some kind of comprehensive immigration reform—and it would have a far better chance of actually passing than it would if Hillary Clinton proposed it. For the anti-immigrant dead-enders, Trump is likely to be the worst possible choice.

More recently, though, I’ve also begun to think that Trump will be bad for the anti-immigrant crowd even if he loses. For starters, it’s never good to have your signature policy associated with a loser. More to the point, though, we all know that public support for specific policies depends a lot on who they come from. When President Obama supports something, Republicans suddenly hate it. When Trump supports something, people who dislike Trump suddenly hate it. Since Trump is dropping in the polls like a rock, this suggests that support for getting tough on immigrants might be dropping too.

Michael Tesler reports that this is exactly what’s happened:

A number of studies have found that Trump performed best in the primaries among the most anti-immigrant Republicans. But now, in the middle of the general election campaign, Trump is easily the most unpopular major party nominee in modern times. And his historic unpopularity may have also eroded support for the border wall.

The Pew Research Center gauged support for the border fence before and after June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy. The percentage supporting the border fence was the exact same in 2007, 2011, and 2015: 46 percent. However, that dropped to 36 percent in March 2016.

In CBS/New York Times polls, public support for “building a wall along the US-Mexico border to try to stop illegal immigration” also dropped….The results from the RAND Corp’s Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS) are even more telling….The PEPS data reveal who was particularly likely to shift to opposing the border wall: people who did not like Trump in 2015.

….It appears, then, that Trump’s strong support for the border wall has made this policy considerably less popular with the American public.

Supporting Trump was always a high-risk strategy for supporters of a border wall. They put all their money on snake eyes, and it turns out the dice were not their friends.

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

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