Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, commanders may charge any person in the armed forces with harassment for refusing to accept a servicemember's preferred gender identity. Critics maintain that infringes on servicemembers' constitutional rights to uphold their conscience.
But as Bob Maginnis, a senior fellow for national security at the Family Research Council (FRC), points out, that does not prevent military leaders from employing more subtle forms of discipline.
"Biden's people jumped on the transgender wagon -- all of this lunacy with regard to pronouns and the like, trying to totally revamp the culture of the military to be something that is not about breaking things and killing people but about promoting the bizarre thinking of leftists and progressives with regard to transgenderism, the whole issue of wiping away any distinction between men and women," he observes.
He says anyone who supports this needs to be removed from the armed forces so they can "focus on what it's supposed to be about."
"You need to change all those regulations and so forth back to where they ought to be," Maginnis goes on to suggest. "That means that you're going to have to dig deeply within the institution and do away with lunacy that we've seen crop in and wasting money on DEI and the like. It's pretty bad."
The Daily Caller points out that none of the military's rules explicitly prohibit so-called "misgendering," but existing guidance implies that using pronouns rejected by another person violates Military Equal Opportunity (MEO) regulations against sex-based harassment and discrimination.
