I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/refo...
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
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>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
Did you know the EO that was rescinded had similar verbiage too?[1]
[1] https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1965/9/28/1...
Trump has outright been banning transgender individuals from enlisting in the military and serving. Presumably in a merit-based society you would judge them on the basis of merit, not on a secondary characteristic.
Consider first of all that the job of the military is to fight and win wars. That requires exceptional prowess physically, mentally, and spiritually. Not only do you need to pass certain tests and exams, you also need to pass the ultimate test of killing your enemies in the field of battle and winning wars. It's a very dangerous, very brutal, very demanding job unlike no other that some may say is even dehumanizing.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that people who are internally confused about themselves and require/demand extensive specialized medical treatments and care are most likely not suited to serve in the military.
Not the least, requiring specialized logistical chains and facilities nobody else needs is a negative judgment against their merit when fighting a war requires effective and efficient utilization of every last speck of national resources.
The US military is not a playground.
>Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
But now you are taking your preconceived notion of what a trans person must think and disqualifying them from the military. Not very merit-based of you.
Trans people I know are very sure about themselves. More than some cis people in fact. I will let RAND Corporation rebut the rest of your speculation.[1]
The effect on force readiness is an important consideration in any military policy change. Many types of medical treatments can lead to lost labor and leave personnel temporarily unable to deploy. Given the small estimated number of transgender personnel and the even smaller number who would seek gender transition–related treatment in a given year, the study found that the readiness impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than 0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component. Even using the highest estimates, less than 0.1 percent of the force would seek gender transition–related treatment that would affect their ability to deploy. As a point of comparison, in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or administrative reasons—a number amounting to around 14 percent of the active component.
A key concern in allowing transgender personnel to serve openly is how this may affect unit cohesion. The underlying assumption is that if service members discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness. Similar concerns were raised in debates over whether to allow gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly, as well as over whether to allow women to serve in ground combat positions. However, evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R...
This is a sensible middle-ground approach for the rest of society too. Just treat it like a minority religious belief, then the issue is solved fairly without stepping on anyone's rights.
If both Republicans and Democrats agreed to this approach and put this issue to bed, they could get on with wrangling over much more important problems of governance.
Unless you're proposing making the military- and the rest of society- radically gender neutral, than as soon as a person interacts with a driver's license, passport, social media account, or bathroom, they will have to adopt a gender identity . Why should a third party's "gender beliefs" about a person be elevated above their own?
(I also can't see a justification for denying hormone replacement therapy treatment- it's cheap and ridiculously beneficial for mental health. But, for the same reasons, I advocate its availability over-the-counter.)
Being an objective measurement of material biological state, sex isn't the same type of thing as a gender identity belief, which is indeed self-declared like a religion is.
Why is this a talking point? Gender affirming surgeries are extremely rare. Very few trans people go through with them. And even when they do, recovery times are in the order of days or weeks which has little to no impact on the efficacy of the fighting force.
The main things trans people want are:
1. That people treat them with basic human dignity and respect.
2. Access to gender affirming medications. It ultimately doesn't really matter who pays for them because they cost nothing. They are quite literally some of the cheapest medications on the market. Estradiol without insurance costs like 10-20USD for a 3 month supply. Testosterone about the same or less. Androgen blockers cost like 1-5USD for a 3 month supply. You could not find cheaper medications and most pharmacies won't even run insurance for them because they are so cheap. The reason the military "needs" to pay for them is because they need to run the medication through their logistics network so that it is accessible where it is needed.
The cost is irrelevant. What matters is that the medication can get delivered to ships and bases in a timely manner. And that is why the military pays for it.
And the reason they should have interest in doing it is because the overwhelming majority of trans people in the military are people who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria while in the military. The military treats that gender dysphoria so that they can continue to be effective members of the fighting force.
These are people who are already in the military and want to continue to be in the military and do their jobs effectively. A few pills a day or an injection every few days or weeks is generally effective at treating gender dysphoria with accommodations such as social transition further treating it while doing nothing to diminish the efficacy of the fighting force.
Not treating or accommodating them means they either leave the military (which is a problem because the military has a critical shortage of senior personnel due to horrific retention issues) or they perform their duties in a diminished capacity. There's no reason to harm the fighting force's efficacy and/or retention over a treatment that has essentially zero cost and no impact on operational readiness (compared to all the other long term treatments they allow which do impact operational readiness).
Conservatives are OK with rolling everything back and hiding behind words, since right now, most people at the highest levels of power - that do the judging - are white men.
How else do you explain such "merit" based nominations like Hegseth for SecDef, Gaetz for Attorney General, etc. (Gaetz withdrew but getting nominated at all was ridiculous). And if Hegseth is qualified to lead the DoD, then so is anybody who ever served in the military at the rank of Major or higher.
You've got a lot of faith that these people aren't planning to victimize you as well.
Sincerely screw all that racist noise with extreme prejudice. In this regard, the Left did more work than anyone to get me to vote Trump.
Well, racism is fixed. Finally!
You should talk to more Americans that were involved in the corporate structure of the 1950-1990s. Old money ruled the place and white, protestant men filled every seat in the office. It was a caste system, and worst of all it was protected by the Civil Rights Act which did not demand equal opportunity when hiring. This was destructive to talented minorities, protective of untalented executives and ultimately wasteful to everyone that wasn't on "the inside" of the administrative structure. Something had to be done, these businesses weren't going to stop themselves from becoming insular and hostile boy's clubs.
Regan had the right idea; keep affirmative action, but axe or soften the numerical requirements. Trump had the wrong idea, but went with it anyways because he knows that today's neocons are hungry for some good, old-fashioned, government-sanctioned racism. You should be careful to not let your insecurities choose who you think is right, especially in pissing contests where you're liable to get wet.
Perhaps fortunately, I personally (second generation Japanese-American) was not directly affected by DEI. Maybe I should have experienced it somehow so I could give an even more damning opinion.
However, I was witness to family members (Japanese-Americans, Asians) who were discriminated against both positively and negatively citing DEI. Not to mention all those "minority owned" and "women owned" business categories that were prominent if you did any amount of officework. Just how widespread and deep this nouveau resurgence of racism and sexism were was and arguably still is both astonishing and terrifying.
I want everyone to be judged for their merit and character. I have absolutely no problem if "white protestant men" dominate a given sector if that is simply the result of judgments passed strictly on merit and character. People who can do <X> the best should be the people who get to do <X> without any regard to skin color or religion.
Giving me special treatment one way or another just because I'm Asian is fucking racist and I will neither accept nor tolerate it. I want to be seen and treated as an American like any other, it's right there in the Declaration of Independence: "All Men Are Created Equal."
Trump reiterating with a mandate that the government can not and will not judge people based on race, sex, religion, or any other DEI reasoning is something I unequivocally support and will support to my dying breath. This is equality in its most raw and sincere form: It does not and should not matter what you are born as, you will be judged for who you become.
What is most astonishing to me in all this is just how much we've reversed course on equality, considering one another as simply men among mankind, over the past two to three decades. You're literally trying to tell me that refusing to judge people based on their race is racism. Do you not understand how nonsensical that is? Do you understand how patently stupid that is from the perspective of a minority, or at least this particular Japanese-American man? What the sincere fuck.
"Diversity" in DEI is Discrimination. Equity in DEI is a violation of every man's right to pursuit of happiness. "Inclusion" is an affront to the sharing of diverse ideas and beliefs among mankind. I applaud and cheer for the resounding rejection of DEI, this is a step in the right direction both for the United States of America and for mankind. I voted for this in 2024 and I will vote likewise again Every. Single. Time.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.