Klinger tapped to lead transgender military

[longknife]

IMHO the absolutely best nomination Obumbler could ever make! Read about this milestone in American military history @ Klinger tapped to lead transgender military

 

[Obiwan]

When will they get their new equipment???

 

[waltky]

Transgenders in the military...

Why Do Transgender People Join the Military in Such High Numbers?
Sep 14, 2015 | As a young psychiatry resident at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1980s, Dr. George Brown was surprised the first time he saw a transgender patient.

Estimates at the time were that for every 100,000 biological males in the general population, no more than three were transgender. Brown figured the rate had to be even lower in the all-volunteer military. It made little sense to him that a transgender person would choose to join an institution that by its nature had no tolerance for deviance. Yet over the next three years, Brown saw 10 more transgender patients -- all of them seeking hormone therapy and male-to-female gender reassignment surgery. He began to suspect that the military, despite its ban on allowing transgender people to serve, was somehow attracting them at a disproportionately high rate.

The Pentagon is now weighing whether to lift its ban on transgender service members and is expected to do so next year. As the policy is reviewed, researchers are citing evidence that bears out Brown's hunch of three decades go. Transgender people are present in the armed services at a higher rate than in the general population. The latest analysis, published last year by UCLA researchers, estimated that nearly 150,000 transgender people have served in the military, or about 21 percent of all transgender adults in the U.S. By comparison, 10 percent of the general population has served.

Jennifer Long served as Edward Long.

The findings have pumped new life into a theory that Brown developed to explain what he had witnessed. In a 1988 paper, he coined it "flight into hypermasculinity." His transgender patients told him that they had signed up for service when they were still in denial about their true selves and were trying to prove they were "real men." "I just kept hearing the same story over and over again," said Brown, 58, now a professor at East Tennessee State University and a specialist in gender identity issues at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn.

Some patients had deliberately chosen the military's most dangerous jobs. In one case described in the paper, a 37-year-old patient with a long history of cross-dressing had been a laboratory technician on a base in Germany but gave that up to become a combat helicopter pilot at the height of the Vietnam War, a job with a high death rate. Colene Simmons, 60, says she is one of Brown's longtime patients. She started life in rural Georgia as O'Day Simmons. A 185-pound champion wrestler in high school, Simmons protected other students from bullies and had no problem getting girlfriends. But the tough exterior belied inner fantasies.

MORE