longer.blue

Dear friends, Tomorrow I will have another installment in what I am now conceiving as a larger work entitled "The Neuroscience of Resistance," but events have been moving quickly, and over the weekend we received notification that all individuals in the Reserve's 807th Theater Medical Command who identify as transgender should prepare to be honorably discharged from the United States Army. While the discharge may be honorable, the circumstances surrounding it are anything but, and having no desire to be associated with an organization that countenances this kind of discrimination, I find my military career coming to a premature close. I was looking forward to earning a retirement pension, and to pinning on the rank of Colonel (which would have tied my grandfather for the highest rank ever worn by a member of our family), but one of the central themes of my upcoming writing will be that whenever we are faced with a choice between our goals and our values, the psychological evidence says to choose our values. Below is a copy of the letter that I sent to our command. As always, if anything in my writing resonates with you, please feel free to share. "For the last eighteen years, it has been the utmost honor and privilege to serve in the United States Army Reserve Medical Corps. During that time, I have stood shoulder to shoulder with the best people that our nation has to offer. These individuals have represented multiple races, religions, birth nations, creeds, sexual orientations, and gender identities, and none of these differences have prevented them from serving with distinction. Diverse individuals, but always One Team, One Fight. Today, we received notification that any soldier who identifies as transgender should be prepared to be discharged from the armed forces. No evidence was presented that any of our transgender Brothers and Sisters in Arms, who have served with honor and distinction, were in any way a detriment to the force. No evidence was presented that a gender identity which was not concordant with the sex assigned at birth was inconsistent with an ability to live the Army Values. While the Army, and the Armed Forces as a whole, must sometimes withhold the privilege of service from those individuals who, often through no fault of their own, are unable to meet the rigorous standards that the military has set, this is an entirely different proposition from the exclusion of all individuals meeting an arbitrary criterion. It is no different from decreeing that individuals with dark skin cannot serve alongside those with white skin, or that women cannot serve alongside men. If a military career is the highest form of service that a citizen can undertake, then to withhold that privilege from an entire group is to make those individuals second class citizens. I do not wish to claim for myself any privilege which is denied unjustly to others. I had looked forward to another decade or more in uniform, and will deeply miss the camaraderie and clarity of purpose that come with the mission of defending the United States Constitution. Whatever grief I feel at stepping away before I had planned, I know it is nothing compared to the grief felt by those being told, without justification, that they are no longer welcome. I am under no illusion that my resignation will have any meaning, but to me, the THIS in "This We'll Defend" has always referred to the ideal of a nation that tries its best, despite the occasional stumble, to continue advancing towards the ideals set out in our founding documents. To simply let this injustice slide feels like giving up on that ideal, and in the process giving up on America, and that is not something that I am yet ready to do. There are other ways to defend the United States Constitution that do not involve wearing the uniform of an American soldier, and that is where I will focus my energies. I therefore tender the resignation of my commission, and humbly request that said resignation be made effective as soon as can be reasonably accomplished.