This great adventure is off to an inauspicious beginning:

The second-highest ranking military officer in the country said Tuesday a delay in allowing transgender recruits to enlist in the military was largely due to a “disagreement on the science.”

“I am an advocate of every qualified person who can meet the physical standards to serve in our uniformed services to be able to do so,” Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva said.

“Our decision to delay the accessions of transgender individuals into the services was largely based on a disagreement on the science of how mental health care and hormone therapy for transgender individuals would help solve the medical issues that are associated with gender dysphoria.”

Selva, who was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee to be reconfirmed as vice chairman, was responding to a question from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who expressed concern that the delay would have “unintended consequences.”

The mind boggles that this is a subject that supposedly serious people are discussing.

According to the best estimates, no more than 0.6% of the US population considers itself to have the wrong junk be transgender. When you combine that with the fact that mental, moral, and physical criteria prevent 71% of American 17-24 year-olds from qualifying for enlistment, you can see that enlisting transgenders is simply horrible personnel management.

If you are ineligible to enter on active duty while wearing braces, one really has to wonder why any sane organization would accept people who are both mentally ill (gender dysphoria is an illness under the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Editon (DSM-5)) and who will require regular infusions of hormones.

When you add to that mix a couple of key points from a study by two Johns Hopkins University professors:

The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.
…
Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.

And we’re seriously proposing to give them loaded weapons?

How will all this play out in the military? My prediction is “not well.” Consider these slides being used by the Army to prepare for the influx of… words fail me. For instance:

(Note: DEERS is the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System. the Defense system that registers active duty and dependents for medical care and “gender marker” is the sex the individual imagines they are today.)

This is not the first time the military has been used by a Democrat administration as a petri dish for social experimentation. Not all of those instances were bad. Harry Truman ordering the desegregation of the Armed Forces (1948) was a good thing, even though that mission didn’t really get started until a Republican entered office in 1953 and the last segregated units were integrated in 1954. But most have been failures. The most notable was MacNamara’s Morons of Project 100,000.

Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara’s scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country’s “subterranean poor” — people who would otherwise be rejected.

Using a variety of “educational and medical techniques,” the Pentagon would “salvage” these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits — known as New Standards Men — would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to “reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”
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Depending on the task, New Standards Men required up to four times as much training time and up to six times as much prompting as did their higher-aptitude counterparts. Their skills training dropout rates — and their arrest rates — were higher, too. In short, Mr. McNamara’s enterprise, which was abandoned in 1971, did not prove especially beneficial to the military from either a skills or a manpower perspective.

But what about Project 100,000’s effects on the Category IV recruits themselves? Did they reap the promised rewards of military service? If the program had been successful, the proof would have been higher rates of employment, earnings and education for New Standards Men as compared to their fellow low-aptitude, non-veteran peers.

Yet a 1991 study comparing Project 100,000 veterans and nonveterans with similar aptitude levels revealed that the former fared no better than their civilian counterparts and, in some respects, were worse off.

For instance, non-veterans were employed at higher rates, earned more and were more likely to own their own businesses than Project 100,000 veterans. Moreover, low-aptitude non-veterans had marginally higher average levels of schooling than did New Standards Men, more than 27 percent of whom never completed high school.

It is really evident that the agenda here is not to increase the number of persons available to enlist in the Armed Forces. It is merely to hop aboard the Social Justice Warrior bandwagon and try to convince people who will never enlist that the military is not composed of knuckle-dragging troglodytic Neanderthals but, rather, sensitive and caring nurturers. To do this, the military is willing to accept people who should be medically and psychologically barred from enlisting, who have significantly higher rates of suicide and substance abuse than one would expect, and who can expect to disrupt unit cohesion. Nothing good will come from this and a lot of very bad things will happen that will result in careers destroyed and lives ruined.

One hopes that this delay over the ‘science’ is just the first inkling of common sense taking hold in the Defense Department… but I’m not holding my breath.