The U.S. Senate on Wednesday cleared a national defense authorization bill celebrated for troop pay raises but condemned by Democrats for targeting transgender children in military families, sending the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Senators voted 83-12, with five not voting, to approve the $884.9 billion National Defense Authorization Act that received bipartisan praise for the pay bump, upgrades to military housing and investments in artificial intelligence and other advanced technology.
But the annual legislation drew ire this year from Democrats for a provision banning the military’s health program from covering certain treatments for youth experiencing gender dysphoria, defined by doctors as the mismatch between a person’s sex assigned at birth and the gender they experience in everyday life.
All Democrats present for the Dec. 11 U.S. House vote opposed the defense package, which passed along party lines under the Republican majority.
The White House has not released its position on the bill, as it generally does with legislation ready for the president’s signature.
In your age group, a lot live quiet sad lives never coming out because they don’t want to disrupt what they do have. Or they transitioned and disappeared from everyone they once knew - that was incredibly common and the encouraged thing to do for trans people in your generation (if they were allowed to transition, the gatekeepers had to judge you able to pass and conventionally attractive to be allowed to transition). Back then you told no one, there’s stories of trans women who transitioned, moved, and got married, and never told their husbands about their medical history beyond their infertility (although that was, presumably, unusual), other than very immediate family trans people fully disappeared. This was the way things were up until the 90s. And that’s assuming they ever found the language to describe what was going on - a lot of trans people in your generation killed themselves without ever knowing why things were awful.
Of the people I knew before I came out as trans (in 2012, which was, as far as awareness and acceptance goes was a long time ago), there’s at least a half dozen trans people. Obviously I’ve met a lot more since transitioning, and even not being out anymore I have had so many people come out to me as one of, if not the, first people they came out to. Also, non-binary folks are relatively new in the public consciousness (of course, they’ve always existed - certain forms of two spirit identities for example, or Public Universal Friend who found their own thing) and many of them would have simply been uncomfortable and gender non-conforming in generations past.
For a myriad of different reasons, “hetero and masculine” guys generally don’t seem safe to come out to, especially ones in their 50s, so you only know about the trans people who have to be out to you (and not passing is one way of being forced out). If I met you IRL, I would never tell you I was trans, and you would never know. And I’m more willing to be out than trans people your age.