The recent federal court order prohibiting the Pentagon from denying prospective recruits on the basis of transgenderism was an act of “judicial overreach” that ignored the legitimate questions President Trump understood when he barred transgender troops, said Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney.

Gaffney made his comments as a special guest on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, hosted by Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

“This really is the end of the United States military as we know it and as we need it to be,” said Gaffney, describing federal and appellate courts as having usurped the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the military the aforementioned court order.

The Trump administration erred in not having sought a stay from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, said Gaffney: “I was deeply disappointed that the administration chose not to seek a stay from the chief justice of the Supreme Court who I believe could have given to them on his own authority to suspend this enlistment practice.”

President Donald Trump allowed “insubordinate subordinates” to deprioritize his July-announced directive to reinstate restrictions ended by the Obama administration regarding military recruitment of transgender persons, said Gaffney.

The admission of transgender persons into the military, said Gaffney, will compromise military readiness:

The idea was, the president said, we’re not going to bring in more people who have a psychological disorder that is clinically known as gender dysphoria, and it is a problem that can create erratic behavior, I’m told. It is a problem that, at the very minimum, requires lots of medical treatment; that treatment can make people unable to do things like deploy for months and months and months on end, to say nothing of the costs that the Pentagon will have to cover for these medical procedures. So, for all these reasons, the president was right to say we’re not going to do that. And yet several federal district court judges and two appellate court panels have decided that actually judges are now the commanders-in-chief of the United States military and they can tell the president to get stuffed on things they don’t agree with.

Judicial usurpation of presidential powers over the military, said Gaffey, would expand beyond obstructing the president’s directives regarding the composition of military personnel. He predicted future attempts by courts to issue injunctions against military operations.

Trump was “elected on a platform of ending political correctness in the military, and of rebuilding the military,” said Gaffney. “The president has a duty, in my view, to resist these kinds of activities.”

Pollak pointed to the inconsistency between permitting persons afflicted with transgenderism to enlist in the military amidst a range of medical problems continuing to be considered disqualifiers for military enlistment. He relayed experiences from his wife – who serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve – regarding military “training” regarding transgenderism as illustrative of his analysis. Partial transcript below:

POLLAK: Frank, I have to give you a little bit of a report on the ground. It comes via my wife, who’s in the Navy Reserve, and she was telling me what happened in their training; they had training on transgender soldiers, or sailors, or airmen since she’s in aviation, and at the start of the training they give you the official – this is under the Obama administration, I think – they gave her and everyone else the official definition of transgender identity or transgenderism, and it’s identified, scientifically, as a medical condition. They’re not saying “disorder,” or “problem,” or “abnormality,” they’re just saying it’s a medical condition, and the reason they have to say that is partly because the military is paying for the reassignment surgery. So, if the military is going to pay for a surgery, they have to say this is a medical condition. And whereupon all the sailors, she said, looked at each other in total disbelief because if you have any medical condition you can’t join the armed forced. There are many able-bodied strong motivated people turned away at recruitment centers every year because they have a minor problem — an allergy, something in their back, the smallest medical condition will get you banned from or discharged from the military they discover it. MANSOUR: A heart murmur, for God’s sake. You’re overweight. All of this stuff, you can’t join the military. GAFFNEY: Your eyesight isn’t up to par. POLLAK: So that just didn’t pass the smell test for those sailors saying to each other, “Well, wait a minute, if you have a medical condition, why do you want to join the military, at all?”

A September-published Breitbart News report details the Department of Defense’s funding of “sex-assignment surgeries” for transgender service-persons. Transgender persons desiring such surgeries, predicted Gaffney, would exploit the aforementioned judicial order and policies to procure taxpayer funding towards their own ends.

Transgenderism was listed as a mental disorder within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) under the name “gender identity disorder” until being renamed “gender dysphoria” in its latest iteration; the DSM V of 2013. The focus for treatment also changed, whereas the American Psychiatric Association previously prioritized repairing the disorder. It now emphasizes reducing distress yielded by the patient’s misperceptions of his or her sex.

Democrats and the broader left regularly use the term “gender” in place of “sex” while framing both as social constructs, in so doing rejecting sexual dimorphism as a feature of the human species.

Breitbart News Tonight airs weeknights on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).



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