There are times when the LGBTQ community gain a victory, we don't wrap up loose ends. This generally puts us in a situation where we find ourselves in a new battle with the same forces we defeated before. Then we busy ourselves wondering how we can combat their techniques this time while forgetting that they were same techniques used against us in the last fight.
The recent situation regarding Biden's repeal of Trump's ban on transgender troops is a good example of what I'm talking about. Now when Trump announced the ban, he claimed that he consulted with his military leaders. But this turned out to be a lie. They too were caught by surprise.
In that same month, America learned that the ban did not come about from genuine concern about the military. It actually came from the minds of the anti-LGBTQ industry with assistance from former Vice President Mike Pence.
According to LGBTQnation:
Multiple sources are saying that Mike Pence – along with some anti-LGBTQ activists – wrote the report behind Donald Trump’s new transgender military ban. The White House released a plan on Friday night to purge transgender people from the military, which revoked the previous transgender military ban that was announced last year.Accompanying the new plan was a memo signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis and a report from the Department of Defense. Multiple sources told Slate that Mike Pence “played a leading role in the creation of this report,” along with anti-transgender activists Ryan Anderson and Tony Perkins.Anderson works at the right wing Heritage Foundation and recently wrote When Harry Became Sally, a book that claims that being transgender is a mental illness based on the narratives of “ex-transgender” people. Perkins works for the Family Research Council, an SPLC designated hate group. Another source told Think Progress that the report was a product of a “working group” led by Pence that produced a report with different conclusions from Mattis’s committee report. The source said that Pence “overruled” Mattis’s report, but did not explain exactly what that meant.
