By Suzanne Bowdey

For all the talk that America “is stronger when it’s inclusive,” the real-world consequences of Joe Biden’s transgender military policy have been deeply and painfully felt. In a force already ravaged by wokeness, overextension, and cratering recruitment, men and women on the ground are also being asked to do the impossible: function with deeply dysfunctional members — which, as one Coast Guard Chief explains, has never endangered America more.

Like most people in uniform, Rocky Rogers, a 25-year veteran of the Coast Guard, watched President Biden sign the executive order that lets trans-identifying troops back into the military and wondered how it would affect him. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. In a sobering interview with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, he set the record straight on just how disruptive and perilous it was.

As a direct supervisor to one of nine trans-identifying Coast Guardsmen in the military from 2018-2020, Rogers had a front-row seat to the decision that’s created a huge mess for unit commanders and, more broadly, national security.

“Before that member reported to my unit, my workspace,” Chief Rogers explained, “the command briefed me what was going on and just said to look out for this person.” Almost immediately, things started to unravel. “[The problems started with] an unimaginable amount of medical appointments to where this member was rarely at work for a personal choice procedure to be done. Because of these choices, my workforce was significantly hindered in what we could respond to,” he said. It was especially frustrating, Rogers pointed out, because he was “billeted six personnel, but we only had five that were able to work any given time of the day. So that was a huge, huge impact.”

From there, it just got worse. The coast guardsman started “asking for extended lunches or for nourishment, which is always acceptable, but [on top of that, this person wanted] another hour and a half for personal medical care. And I asked the member to get the command approval, because if you give it to one, you have to give it to all. And if we were to give everyone a two-hour lunch, nothing would be completed during the normal workday. So [we’re talking about] a lot of challenges.”

But, of course, when Rogers tried to get help from his own chain of command, he got nowhere. These special accommodations were made because this individual was transitioning to another body.

Chief Rogers expected — wrongly, it turned out — that his supervisors would have his back. “During my briefing with the command before this member even reported [to me], the command asked me if I ever needed any guidance [or] any support to let them know.” When that time came, “I can count three times I reached out to the command and medical administrators directly asking for advice for … challenges with, again, an unimaginable amount of medical appointments and so forth.” In emails back, he was told, “‘Chief, figure it out. Handle it appropriately.’ And that was a sign to me that no one in a leadership role wanted their hands to be tied.”

Eventually, Rogers said, this all led to a great deal of friction with his team. “There was a lot of frustration. There was just a lot of animosity, if you will, because they knew [that] this person could not be depended on to help out with our day-to-day tasks. So it wore the morale in our workspace down very quickly.”

If a single trans-identifying guardsman is this detrimental to a unit, Perkins wondered aloud, “What if you had two individuals like that in your group?”

Rogers did the math. “I’d have 65% of a crew to do 100% of the work — [that’s] what it would come down to.”

“That seems like that has an impact on military readiness,” Perkins replied.

“Absolutely, 100%,” Rogers agrees.

His story comes days after an 18-year-old military recruit broke her silence about what it was like showering with biological men as a result of Biden’s controversial policy, putting her in an “extremely uncomfortable position.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) relayed her testimony in an Armed Services Committee hearing last week without revealing the woman’s name because she’s so worried about retaliation.

She was in basic training, “where she was sleeping in open bays and showering with biological males who had not had gender reassignment surgery but were documented as females because they had begun the drug therapy process,” Rounds explained. “She could have basically resigned or stepped away. She could have started over again.” But, at the end of the day, he argued, “I think this is one of the reasons why we’re not meeting our recruitment goals now,” he said. It’s Biden’s “woke agenda that we now see coming down by executive order.”

Yet the Pentagon and entire Biden team continues to argue that introducing mentally unstable people to the American military “is in our national interest.” Rounds and others, who’ve heard nightmarish complications, could not disagree more. “Most of the focus [under the Biden administration] is on the transgender individuals, not on the individuals who are working with them.”

And that may be one reason recruitment is collapsing. “As of July 12 of this year — so six days ago,” Rogers said, “just the enlisted ranks alone, the Coast Guard is down 3,559 members. That’s just recruiting. That’s not counting the shortages within the ranks that are already there.”

It’s the fruit, Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin insisted, of the Left’s years-long march through our armed forces. “I mean, give me any logical reason that you would see the kinds of things that we’re seeing in our military today. If you really want to understand [what Barack Obama meant] when he said, ‘I’m going to fundamentally change this country.’ … And if you want to do that, you start with the military. Now we’re seeing the results of that effort.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.