If the military brass needs to cast the surgery kings and queens out to protect transgender military service for the healthy elements of our community, then I’m all for it.

As I was reading an opinion article that theorized about returning to a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for transgender troops, I began to wonder if that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. You’re no doubt wondering how someone like me—not only a relatively highly decorated military veteran, but also a staunch advocate for open transgender military service—could have such a blasphemous mindset.

The answer is simple: not all elements of transgenderism are good and healthy. I’m very specifically talking about the nutty elements of transgenderism that insist on cutting off healthy body parts, claiming they’re “confirming their genders” and that this is lifesaving. It’s not. It merely enriches the people doing the cutting

The Los Angeles Times reported, for example, “For the last four years, Drs. Gil and Zol Kryger have averaged 100 ‘top surgeries’ a year, each costing $6,000 to $9,000. ‘Bottom surgery,’ constructing genitalia, is comparatively rare and far more expensive, running $75,000 to $100,000.” Even worse, sex-change surgery continues to lead more and more people down this hideous pathway. Here’s GQ:

Jennifer was set to have her procedure done in Thailand when, at the last minute, a Los Angeles-based surgeon offered her a discount if she would agree to be featured in a documentary on her surgery. Even so, she says, ‘Paying for it took everything I had.’ But a host of complications and nearly a dozen emergency surgeries had her in and out of the hospital for ten months, and the no-frills insurance policy she bought before her transition, like all policies, had its limits.

Media handlers who write about me often cast me as being the hero who broke the gender binary. The part about me being the first to break the gender binary is true, I did that, and I did it for an important reason: to help stop the sterilization and mutilation of transgender children. They need realistic and healthier options.

I Know the Dark Side Because I’ve Been There

But nobody in the media to date has been willing to say that I broke the gender binary after desisting from living as a transgender female. They’ll write that I was formerly a transgender female, but none will dare write that I “desisted.” I did. And I desisted from living as and being classified as a female not only because I saw how toxic and monstrous the medical end of transgenderism is, but also because I saw the harm I was doing to women who were born women by being allowed to adopt the same legal identity as them.

The oft-hated Transgender Wiki website belongs to me. I say hated, because some of my fellow transgender activists have made multiple attempts to shut it down, to include filing malicious Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints against it, because they fear the truths about our existence that I expose on that website.

But it’s interesting to note that in operating that big trans history website, I have a real lack of people who identify as cross-dressers to add to my history archives. The media doesn’t speak of them and they’re loathe to be publicly identified because transgender women are known to attack them, claiming their existence discredits them. When I became a trans woman, part of my indoctrination into the community was to help attack the drag queens, because they discredited us also. I’m really ashamed of having engaged in that behavior for a short period.

But the sad truth is the cross-dressers are probably the most physically and mentally healthy elements of all within the transgender umbrella. If anyone should be allowed to serve it should be them. But yet they’re constantly cast as the villains of transgenderism by the unhealthiest members of our community.

If You Want To Cut Your Body You Aren’t Fit to Serve

Carl Jung believed that every man has an inner feminine part of himself, and that every woman has an inner masculine part of herself. He felt that these were distinct “splinter personalities,” and saw them as so important that he named them “anima” and “animus”—Latin words for soul. This is healthy stuff. Insisting that you were born in the wrong body and cutting off your breasts or your penis as a fix is clearly deep into mental illness territory. I’m sorry, but I don’t consider you as fit to serve if you require such drastic medical actions.

Here’s what transgender activists were saying in 2009: “One misconception is that transitioning requires surgery. It doesn’t. As Mara Keisling, the Executive Director for the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) told me, ‘Most transsexuals don’t get surgery. This is about gender identity, not about genitals.’”

It’s a really fair question to ask how we went from in 2009 when stating that transgenderism is about “gender identity,” to instead claiming that genital surgeries are “lifesaving” in 2017. They’re not. And these surgeries are now threatening the ability of everyone in the transgender community to serve in the military. But here’s the answer to that question. Where’s the world history of these surgeries to back up the claims that these procedures are either lifesaving or necessary?

Conservative critics of transgender military service level the allegations that the military isn’t a jobs program or social experiment, which I don’t agree with. But if these same critics allege that the military also isn’t a trans surgery clinic for the most unhealthy elements of our community, I can’t dispute that. And apparently our foray into these surgeries isn’t even off to a good start since one service member has already died at a military medical facility while getting a lobotomy to the body.

An interesting topic yet to be discussed is: should people be paid disability from the Veterans Administration if they get maimed or disabled by a transgender surgery while on active duty? Our fiercest critics haven’t even began the battle on that political front yet. Here’s another:

Critics of tax-funded ‘sex-change’ surgery note that battle-readiness is diminished after the surgeries, which RAND explained require 21 days of medical leave plus at least 90 days of medical disability. Even more recovery time is needed for men to undergo the sex change to a woman, making a soldier non-deployable for at least 135 days. RAND also acknowledged that in some cases complications from elective genital surgery might make a soldier unfit for duty permanently, as up to 20 percent of men undergoing ‘vaginoplasty’ have serious complications.

So if the military brass needs to cast the surgery kings and queens out of their temples to right the ship and protect transgender military service for the healthy elements of our community, then I’m all for it.

Besides, the surgery kings and queens don’t have any more love for what I do and advocate than I do for what they do and advocate. I stand for healthy gender expression and the right to safely express it. And I refuse to allow this unhealthy minority element of our community to take the rest of us down.