Yesterday morning President Trump announced via Twitter that he’s decided to ban transgender people from serving in the military “in any capacity.” He cited “tremendous medical costs” as a driving factor in the move that would kick the more than 10,000 active service members out of the jobs they’ve been dutifully performing—if, that is, his proclamation is ever actually put into effect. As the ACLU was quick to point out, “Military rules and regulations allow trans people to serve their country. Even the commander-in-chief cannot change those via Twitter.” And on Thursday the Pentagon has said it will still allow trans people in the military.
A few hours later The Washington Post published a story that tore right through the President’s flimsy excuse, titled “The Military Spends Five Times As Much on Viagra As It Would on Transgender Troops’ Medical Care.” The Defense Department commissioned a study last year to determine the total cost of covering medical expenses for transgender service members, which concluded a total annual cost of somewhere between $2.4 and $8.4 million. The high estimate represents a 0.13 percent increase in the military’s total current health care spending of $6.2 billion. As if those numbers weren’t enough to show that covering these necessary medical costs would not, in fact, be a “tremendous” burden on the military’s budget, The Washington Post put the expense in context by citing the Military Times’ estimate that the military spends $41.6 million per year on Viagra, about five times the high estimate for medical expenses for trans people in the military.
This revelation proved two things we already knew: That the resistance to covering the medical expenses of trans people in the military is not, and never was, about money; it’s about bigotry. And that maintaining the boners of cis men is a “medical necessity” that often takes priority over the actual medical needs of anyone else. Take, for example, the long-raging debate over whether or not employer health insurance should be required to cover the cost of birth control for female employees. (A fight that continues in the ongoing debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act.)
Employers who don’t want to cover the cost of hormonal birth control for their employees tend to cite religious and moral objections to birth control itself—including, most famously, Hobby Lobby. Opponents of providing affordable birth control buy into the myth that women who take birth control are sluts. Too many people don’t want to subsidize sex that’s purely for pleasure as opposed to procreation, or that might take place outside of marriage—and ignore mountains of evidence that, in addition to allowing women to control when and if they get pregnant, birth control is used to treat a wide range of medical conditions, from endometriosis to migraine headaches. They insist it’s about sex and responsibility. But if it is, why do they cover Viagra?
If these objections were really about religion and morality, and not, like the ban on trans people in the military, about discrimination, then these employers should have the same moral objection to Viagra—a drug that, like birth control, facilitates sex, whether for procreation or not, and whether in or out of wedlock. Shouldn’t they refuse to cover the cost of Viagra for their unmarried male employees?
Of course not, because the objections to covering the costs of birth control aren’t about moral objections; they’re about institutionalized sexism and the belief that women having control of their own bodies—and, God forbid, enjoying sex—is wrong. Just like a ban on trans people in the military would not be about medical expenses, but about transphobia and keeping trans people on the margins of society instead of embracing them.
