Admiral Bartleby Would Prefer Not To (Updated)

Here’s a look at what politicization is doing to our institutions, and what the institutional demoralization is doing to political discourse.

I wrote last week about the obviously silly news stories that say a ban on transgender military service would hollow out the armed forces, since (in one of the usual formulations) “at least 15,000” people serving in the American military are trans. Here’s a recent version of that claim from Newsmax, a conservative news website:

SPARTA Pride, a nonprofit organization supporting transgender service members and veterans, told Military.com there are approximately 15,000 transgender Americans serving and stationed around the world and in combat.

None of these stories ever explain or justify the claim: What is SPARTA Pride, where did they get these numbers, what method was applied to arrive at the estimate, and so on. The number just appears: 15,000, the end. But we know that fewer than 50 servicemembers medically transition in a typical year — see my last post for details — so the gap between 45-ish a year and 15,000 seems to be…a little questionable? Really going out on a limb here, I know.

The process by which a servicemember may serve as transgender is explicit, precise, formal, and paperwork-focused. Every servicemember is captured in DEERS, the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, with detailed demographic information, and there’s a long process that leads to the moment when a “trans” servicemember’s gender identity is changed in a heavily regulated military database. Take a moment to see this for yourself: The DOD policy titled “IN-SERVICE TRANSITION FOR TRANSGENDER SERVICE MEMBERS” is 22 pages long, with detailed procedural requirements that cannot fail to be documented. If you don’t want to dig through the whole thing, just look at pg. 12:

If you’ve spent any time in the military at all, you’re seeing the time involved, and the long line of clerks and desks, and the number of in-boxes and signatures. It all culminates in a formal decision: “The commander will approve, in writing, the change of a Service member’s gender marker in DEERS…”

There’s no way the services, and the Department of Defense, can’t count the number of servicemembers who have received written command authorization for the change of their gender marker in a military database. The process is richly documented, the approval is richly documented, and the final act leaves a digital trail. They know the number.

So why are journalists publishing estimates with murky origins?

I’ve been working on the answer for a while, and it’s not impressive.

A week ago, the public affairs office at the Department of Defense responded to my questions with an email from an unnamed duty officer who provided this answer: “The Department does not track this information and its (sic) best answered by the Services.” So the Department of Defense has a detailed policy on gender transition, but doesn’t measure the results: It does not track this information.

Do you believe that?

Since last Wednesday, I’ve been trying to get answers from the services. Only the Navy has responded, in an email message sent today that includes a bunch of names from the office but only attributes the answer to “a Navy spokesperson.” Here’s the whole answer:

Transgender-related information is not publicly releasable data. The Navy does not collect transgender information for reporting purposes. Current Department of Defense policy considers gender identity to be a personal and private matter.

Note that my entire request was for a single number: the total number of transgender sailors currently serving, with no personal information about any individual servicemember. But the Navy does not collect transgender information for reporting purposes. The information doesn’t exist as a reportable number.

Compare that final claim — “Current Department of Defense policy considers gender identity to be a personal and private matter” — to the policy I’ve shown you above that requires medical documentation and written command approval for servicemembers who want to transition. How does the Navy get a commander to approve the alteration of a sailor’s gender identity in DEERS in writing while not collecting reportable information and regarding gender identity to be personal and private? Dunno. It’s magic, or very deep physics: Schrodinger's sailor. Your commander has to approve this, and then we put it in the centralized database, but at no point can we ever know about it or record it.

So.

The armed forces are lying, as policy, and deliberately hiding a well-documented number that they have to know, while allowing political “debate” to proceed on the basis of politicized fake estimates. We “debate” a shadowpuppet on a wall, in hyperemotional terms, while real information is available but withheld on absurd premises. If we ban transgender servicemembers, airplanes will be grounded, and warships won’t sail, and artillery will sit unusable, because the enormous number of transgender servicemembers will have been suddenly purged, and hardly anyone will be left to fight our wars. Trust us, we got an unexplained estimate from a group you’ve never heard of.

Maybe we should debate real things on the basis of accurately measured facts, and expect government agencies to speak truthfully and accurately.

UPDATE:

I’ve been trying to answer this question as a budget question, and here’s what that looks like so far: “Between January 1, 2016 and May 14, 2021, DOD reportedly spent approximately $15 million to provide gender-affirming care (surgical and non-surgical care) to 1,892 servicemembers.”

So there are 15,000 transgender servicemembers, but only 1,892 over the course of five-plus years who received any form of trans-related medical care? What are the other 13,000 doing?