Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center of Military Readiness (CMR), notes that during his State of the Union speech last week, President Joe Biden didn't address pressing national defense issues – including his administration's response* to Beijing's recent incursion into American airspace by a high-altitude balloon, which Biden himself labeled "not a major breach."
Instead of conveying the clear message that America will not tolerate Chinese surveillance and various threats that could flow from it, Donnelly says the Department of Defense seems to be concentrating on "misplaced priorities and woke social mandates." She argues that the "sole focus" of the DoD appears to be "diversity, inclusion, LGBT causes – everything that's woke."
"And of course, the officials deny that anything like that is going on – but of course it is," she adds.
According to Donnelly, transgenderism in the military is being pushed to new extremes.
"They said that you can get involved in 'cross-dressing' and other 'transitioning behaviors' – on base as well as off base," she describes – adding that if costly treatments do not resolve "gender dysphoria," Biden policy will allow the government to cover the cost of "de-transitioning" procedures.
"But what isn't changed is that if you say that you're confused about gender identity, you go to see doctors and experts and they steer you only in one direction – and that direction is to proceed with transitioning to the opposite sex," she laments. "In other words, you don't get a second opinion … not an independent second opinion anyway."
The 118th Congress, Donnelly concludes, should consider mandating that all DoD agencies and educational institutions return to recognizing scientific realities of biological sex – not "self-identified gender." That term, according to a CMR policy analysis, suggests that if a person "self-identifies" as a person of the opposite sex, they must be treated as such – even though changes in appearance cannot change biological sex.
* Editor's note: The Pentagon announced on Friday afternoon it had shot down an unknown object flying in U.S. airspace off the coast of Alaska after the White House deemed the object a "reasonable threat" to the safety of civilian flights. And on Sunday, on orders from President Biden, a U.S. fighter jet downed another "unidentified object," this one over Lake Huron.
