Pentagon’s Orwellian Policy Has Shades of The Handmaid’s Tale
Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed and at least 653 have been injured since the war with Iran began on February 28, 2026. The conflict has caused extensive physical damage to more than 20 U.S. military sites, including the destruction of at least 42 aircraft and critical infrastructure, with individual strikes causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. A single Iranian strike on the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain resulted in approximately $200 million in damages.
Obviously, we need more experts in air defense systems to stop the onslaught of Iranian missiles and drones. However, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth is more interested in personal prejudice than protecting our troops. While America is under lethal attack, his priority is purging the military of transgender service members–including those who have expertise in shooting down enemy projectiles aimed at US assets and soldiers.
Capt. Kai Proce, for instance, was an air defense officer. He was trained to shoot down incoming enemy missiles, yet he was unceremoniously purged for the “crime” of being transgender. How many casualties occurred that could have been avoided had Proce and other trans soldiers been available for the jobs they were trained for?
The abuse foisted upon patriotic transgender troops by the Trump administration is appalling and disgraceful. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order decreeing that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle” and ordering the Pentagon to prohibit all trans troops.
Hegseth was beyond thrilled to execute Trump’s order. The Defense Secretary is a primitive religious fanatic whose preacher, Douglas Wilson, doesn’t believe women should have the right to vote. Upon assuming his position at the Pentagon, Hegseth declared, “No more dudes in dresses.”
If he had his way, the Pentagon would expel all female and gay troops too–as well as demote minorities. The Guardian reported:
Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
Understanding that there was no future in the armed forces, many of the 4,000 openly transgender service members accepted a cash payout to prematurely leave. Still, others bravely soldiered on knowing their careers would likely die on the Hill of Justice.
Today, New York Times reporters Greg Jaffe and Dave Philipps published a hair-raising article, “Inside the Secretive Boards Deciding Trans Troops’ Fate.” It detailed an Orwellian kangaroo court set up to purge trans soldiers who honorably served their country. Many of these service members are far more distinguished than Hegseth–an underachieving drunkard who has spent far more time allegedly beating women than defeating America’s enemies.
The Pentagon keeps these “Sovietesque” kangaroo courts secret, because if they were made public, their disgraceful efforts would be overwhelmingly rejected by the American people. So, like sewer rats, Hegseth and his creepy cronies have blacked out the un-American proceedings. The New York Times reported:
The boards operate like court proceedings, with lawyers and a panel of three officers who decide whether to retain or remove the service member. It is the same process the military uses to determine whether it should kick out troops who abuse drugs, beat their spouses or steal.
The Pentagon has treated the trans separation hearings with levels of security and silence usually reserved for state secrets. They take place behind closed doors on military bases. There are no cameras and no transcripts; the public is not allowed to attend. In some cases, service members’ spouses and even the service members themselves are kept out.
“It’s in a lot of ways a public humiliation ritual,” Priya Rashid, a lawyer for the ousted trans troops said in an interview. “Going in, I had hoped I was paranoid, and boards’ outcomes were not predetermined. It turned out to be much worse than I thought.”
Each day, from dawn to dusk, I study Project 2025, the right wing’s plot to overthrow democracy and replace it with an authoritarian theocracy. It is difficult to get people to fully understand that the 115 organizations on Project 2025’s Advisory Board really do want to recreate America in the image of the Handmaid’s Tale.
If you still hesitate to believe me–because it’s more pleasant to live in a state of denial–consider the medieval indignations faced by transgender troops:
At least six of Ms. Rashid’s clients were barred from attending their own separation board hearings because they refused to cut their hair and appear in the uniform of their sex assigned at birth. One was a master sergeant in South Korea with 17 years of service who was allowed to testify by video, but only if she turned off her camera.
“I have gone to pretrial confinement hearings where somebody is so addicted to meth that they are throwing up on my shoes,” Ms. Rashid said. “They were allowed into their own hearing.”
Maj. Kara Corcoran, 40, led an infantry platoon in combat in Afghanistan. As the losses mounted, she was stunned to see soldiers so quickly dismiss other soldiers who, just like them, had spent years in uniform. “People need to know that this whole thing is cruelty,” Major Corcoran said in an interview. “It was intentionally designed to hurt us.”
Every single one of these monstrous proceedings should be front page news and aired on national television. If the United States government wants to wreck careers and destroy the lives of the heroes protecting our families, they should do so in broad daylight for the world to see. No more burying their bigotry in clandestine purge centers disguised as courts.
What most bothers me, however, is that the lawyers defending these transgender troops are doing so with a shoestring budget. “We just can’t turn people away. I think right now we have a budget of, like, $8,” Rashid said.
This is why liberals so often lose winnable fights. We simply aren’t as committed to saving our country as the right wing is to hijacking it. Rashid’s budget is a latte and muffin at Starbucks.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 has at least four organizations specifically committed to expunging transgender troops: Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS), Center for Military Readiness, The MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates and the Calvert Task Force.
While our defenders often struggle for basic survival, Project 2025 spends the necessary money enabling cretins like Elaine Donnelly, who leads the Center for Military Readiness. In her crusade against transgender troops, she said the Democrats were “turning the military into a transgender magnet.”
She argues that, “expensive, lifelong hormone treatments and irreversible surgeries associated with gender dysphoria” would harm “mission readiness,” and claimed open service hadn’t “resolved underlying psychological problems, including high risks of suicide” among trans troops.
Donnelly’s complaint now seems absurd in light of Hegseth’s recent peddling of testosterone testing and replacement therapy for male troops. The Secretary of Defense is bizarrely fixated on a cartoonish version of manhood. He preens with pushups and pullups, while prattling on about “warrior culture.”
However, brains have replaced brawn in military importance since, at least, World War II. I have no idea how much Alan Turing could bench press. But this brilliant British mathematician, and openly gay man, cracked the German military’s seemingly unbreakable Enigma code.
Turing gave Allied forces crucial foresight into Nazi submarine movements during the Battle of the Atlantic, effectively saving Britain’s vital maritime supply lines from devastating U-boat attacks. Some historians estimate that Turing’s breakthrough shortened the war by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives. The war in Ukraine also proves that brains trump biceps.
Perhaps the next Turing, who could have won Trump’s losing war in Iran, was instead purged because they were transgender. I guess we will never know how many lives this ridiculous policy may have cost us.
There are so many daily outrages in Trump’s America that it is difficult to keep track. But the profoundly disturbing treatment of transgender troops and the puritanical Inquisition they endure, is a warning to all of us about the oppressive world that Project 2025 is laboring mightily to create.
Trump, Hegseth and their Christian fundamentalist bootlickers invoke “freedom” in their incompetently conceived, poorly executed war against Iran. But based on their religiously motivated actions against transgender troops, they have more in common with Iran’s ayatollahs than they seem to understand.
