That seems to be the lesson of the Army's physical fitness standards, which do not apply to people who are getting "gender-affirming" care.
One of the shibboleths of the Left is the claim that increasing the acceptance of "gender-diverse" individuals into the military merely extends the same opportunities to transgender folks as those afforded to people who identify with their natal sex (man, finding the right words is impossible when discussing these issues!).
Combine this idea with the claim that "diversity is our strength," and you are led to believe that the military will be improved by expanding opportunities to transgender applicants.
Yeah, right. Even the Army doesn't believe that, and they are the ones saying it.
Notice that Maj. Rachel Jones is a bit...fat? Yeah, well, there is a reason for that.
Jones doesn't have to meet physical fitness standards that apply to everybody else in the Army. Fancy that.
Apparently, the military doesn't believe that transgender soldiers are just like everybody else, and in order to keep them on active duty they have thrown standards out the window.
"Diversity is our strength" seems the opposite of the truth, at least as the military seeks to achieve it.
One of the lies we are being told, relentlessly, is that when the military makes efforts to expand the types of people admitted into the services the standards applied will remain the same. This has been clearly false forever. This has been particularly true when it comes to sex differences. As we know, different standards of physical fitness are applied to men and women, in opposition to what we were told when recruitment opened up, and now we see that the standards have been changed even more drastically for transgender people.
On its face, the argument that being transgender would present no barrier to military service is absurd, simply because transgender soldiers require constant medical care in order to maintain their gender treatments. Regardless of any other potential issues, this alone should make policymakers leery of including transgender-identifying people in the rolls of active duty personnel.
The military, though, is a social scientist's playground. Under total control of the government, it is easy to use as a laboratory for ideological experiments.
In a sense I am sympathetic to the impulse-it is just so tempting, and in some cases, the military has been a proving ground for beneficial social change. Race integration is a great example of this.
But the impulse is dangerous; it is just too tempting, and the consequences of getting it wrong are especially high. Lives are literally at stake.
Exempting an entire class of people from physical fitness standards is the opposite of proving that "diversity is our strength," both because in this case "strength" is in this case the opposite of the truth and because it will heighten not lower resentment toward transgender people who are as usual getting a better deal than everybody else.
As you know, the military is having a recruiting problem simultaneously with the changes they have made. Any chance that the problem is related? You decide.
This is in line, though, with other claims related to transgenderism, which are all based upon the rejection of biological facts. Alphabet ideology and also critical theory is based on the idea that reality bends to our will and is infinitely flexible.
Neither is true, and that will be made abundantly clear when the bullets fly.
Comment: Russia, and China, must be terrified: