The View hosted two trans women military members on Wednesday in order to get their personal accounts on President Trump’s impending trans military “ban.” The segment obviously was sympathetic to the pair, felt the U.S. armed forces should cater to their gender reassignment needs, but like most View segments, it turned into another attack on the president’s shocking “textbook definition of ignorance,” that amounts to “baseless discrimination.”
Both Staff Sgt. Patricia King and Capt. Jennifer Peace had undergone transitional procedures to become females during their respective 20- and 15-year stints in the military (King was famously the first transgender woman to have undergone surgery while in active service). They were there to argue that the social experiment of introducing mentally unstable individuals into the armed forces is the same fight as blacks had in joining almost a century ago, and women a short time later.
Meghan McCain introduced the segment, casting these women’s stories in a dire light now that President Trump is set to enforce a trans military “ban.” She stated, “Just two days from now, a new policy from the Trump administration — that’s being called a ‘ban’ on transgender troops — goes into effect. “
“That will completely change their lives and the lives of any transgender recruits who want to serve their country from here on out,” McCain claimed, asking King, “What is at stake with this?” King responded that on Friday, April 12, as many as “15,000 transgender service members stand to lose their jobs.”
Nobody on The View challenged that number, but even the BBC is skeptical that we have anywhere near that many deeply confused service members. A 2016 Rand Corp. estimate commissioned by the Department of Defense guessed there were between “1,320 and 6,630 transgender individuals in the military, out of about 1.3 million personnel. On top of that, they calculated that there could be between 830 and 4,160 in the reserves.” But facts are for fascists.
King claimed that Trump’s decision will result in “systematic discrimination” of trans soldiers as they will be “evaluated differently,” resulting in things such as receiving “substandard” healthcare after the military refuses to provide transitional procedures.
“For anybody who’s looking to join the military, if you’re transgender you’re simply not welcome,” King claimed. Joy Behar jumped into the discussion bringing up Trump’s “shocking” Twitter rhetoric when making the decision. Captain Peace described the move as unexpected, that many trans soldiers who were “deployed” or at the time “going on patrols,” were wondering “‘What’s going to happen to me now?’” Peace added, “It was unfortunately a huge distraction across the military.”
Sunny Hostin then asked the soldiers why they thought Trump would institute this policy, to which Staff Sgt. King replied that she saw it as “discrimination” due to a “textbook definition of ignorance.” Behar tried to fan the anti-conservative flames, wondering if it was due to him “playing to his base,” though King didn’t want to speculate on that. She did mention though that any argument against trans people being in the armed forces was “baseless.”
Captain Peace doubled down on that narrative, arguing that in time the issue would be seen in the same light as African Americans, women, and gays fighting for military slots. “The ban on blacks serving in the military … they said it’s an unfortunate social distraction during a time of necessity. We said the same thing about women, we said the same things about gays and lesbians.” She concluded, “And we’re going to look back on this in ten or fifteen years in the same way, as baseless discrimination.”
