Frann Michel discusses Trump's Trans Tweets, the role of gender in the right-wing imaginary, and the divided responses from left and liberal commenters.
Information also drawn from Political Research, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Dean Spade.
See also Katherine Cross on The Baffler.
Here's the math:
The Washington Post reports the military spends five times as much on Viagra as it would on transgender troops’ medical care. The Defense Department comissioned a Rand Corporation study that estimated healtcare costs for hormones & surgery for trans troops likely to seek them at between 2.4 and 8.4 million dollars per year, or, at the upper end, about one half of one percent of the healthcare budget for the DoD, which spends about 84 million per year just on erectile dysfunction medications (with about half of that on the Viagra brand). The Daily Dot reported that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago trips cost twice as much as all transgender military medical expenses, but that's for just the first 80 days since the inauguration, as opposed to a full year of trans military healthcare. Extrapolating from the 21. 6 million dollars Trump’s visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida are estimated to have cost taxpayers so far, in the course of the year the cost will be more like 98.5 million, or more than eleven times the upper estimate of the costs of transgender troops healthcare. The DoD’s entire fiscal year 2017 budget is $582.7 billion, and Trump has called for significant increases in the 2018 budget. So the high-end estimate of trans troops healthcare costs of eight point four million is sometimg less than two one-thousanths of one percent of the total military budget—point-zero-zero-one-four percent. Or so. At most. Pointing to information from Forbes about the ease with which the military has wasted at least three to four billion dollars each year on nonworking technology and abandoned projects, Chelsea Manning noted that this is further reason to dismantle the bloated and dangerous military / intel/ police state to fund health care for all and stop spending money on dysfunctional equipment and greedy contractors.
- KBOO