The “gender deniers” are back in power — those who promote the meaningless slogan “Believe the Science” and then deny the chromosomal distinction between male and female. Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing Donald Trump’s recruitment policy prohibiting waivers for so-called “transgender” hormone treatment for those who are gender confused.

The Department of Defense has long barred any potential recruits with a diagnosed mental illness or those receiving hormone therapy of any kind as either mentally or physically unfit for service. In 2016, however, the Obama administration established a politically motivated waiver express lane for self-proclaimed “transgenders.” Trump removed most but not all of these unfair and unequal exemptions in 2018 only to have Biden bring them back in 2021.

It should be self-evident why mental illness and hormone treatment are general disqualifiers for military service. The mental stress, physical demands, and austere living conditions characteristic of combat make soldiers with these disqualifiers a liability to themselves and their squad or teammates. Recruits that have already received sexual reassignment surgery are at significant risk in the unsanitary conditions typical of field maneuvers. Recruits suffering from or previously treated for gender dysphoria are at significant risk for suicide from both the long-term effects of that dysphoria and the immediate stress of the civilian-to-soldier transformation.

The most comprehensive study ever conducted on suicide by those attempting to transform their gender was a 30-year Swedish study that concluded those doing so were 20 times more likely to commit suicide and 2.8 times more likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness. It should be noted that Sweden is also one of the most “trans-friendly” cultures in the world, making these numbers even more alarming. Being subjected to the stress of military life can only exacerbate gender dysphoria and the effects of hormone treatment, not improve them.

Allowing soldiers to pursue this medically dubious process while in the military is also the equivalent of sanctioned malingering. Reassignment requires at least one year, sometimes two, of mental health evaluation and hormone therapy before surgery and then several months to a year of recovery. During this entire process soldiers are non-deployable (read: unable to do their job). A typical initial enlistment is only between two and four years long, which includes six months to a year of initial training, and less than 40% of enlisted recruits serve beyond four years. This means your typical gender-confused recruit would join the military, request and receive taxpayer-funded reassignment surgery, enjoy an exemption from the military’s most critical duties, and then leave with an honorable discharge to cash in on full veteran’s benefits. To say this is unfair to both troops and their commanders is an outrageous and shocking understatement.

The Biden administration’s war on the 23rd chromosome ignores the negative effects it might have for the health and welfare of both troops and recruits and aims to make the military health system and the Department of Veteran Affairs a gender-reassignment welfare state. Leftists running the Department of Defense are also determined to unleash the Thinkpol on any dissenters to their ideology, regardless of reality or any inconvenient facts.

One of those caught in the crosshairs of the Rainbow Mafia’s lynch mob inside DOD is an Army Chaplain named Major Andrew Calvert. Major Calvert is under investigation by the Security Force Assistance Command for a post on Facebook in which he asked, “How is rejecting biology not evidence that a person is mentally unfit and thus making that person unqualified to serve?” Good question, Chaplain! The chaplain’s logic was literally enshrined in Pentagon policy prior to 2016 and reinstated in 2018, but that didn’t stop a horde of social media minions from questioning his ability to care for soldiers. They apparently missed the point that as a chaplain he also has to shepherd soldiers who actually hold firm religious views and who believe both in the biological reality of gender and the sanctity of the human form as God designed.

Two things are certain, however. Allowing self-proclaimed “transgender” recruits to join the military is bad for both recruits and military unit cohesion, and persecuting those in the Army Chaplain Corps that may disagree is the antithesis of religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment.

(Lee Miller is a West Point graduate and combat veteran.)