I wrote earlier today about the president’s latest standards for military readiness and why transgenderism and military service are fundamentally incompatible. In the hours following that piece’s publication, a sailor reached out who had been stationed at one of the first commands to receive an “out” transgender shipmate, an event that occurred in the closing months of the Obama administration and on through the early days of the first Trump admin. I verified the details and feel confident enough in the witness’s testimony to share this account while extending reasonable anonymity to those involved.

The sailor explained that the entire command was one day ordered to the mess decks:

Over the next hour, we were given a briefing/training (one way conversation) by our female CMC — as a crew, we were going to have the first transgender service member at a sea command and it was actually one of our current sailors: *cue everyone looking around at each other like it was the person next to them.

During the brief we were never explicitly told who it was, but the CMC was very selective with her choice of words and pronoun usage so it was immediately apparent to most of us. We were told that “SHE” would be onboard the following week, SHE will reside in female berthing, etc. No questions or discernable facial expressions from any of the men present; but the females had a lot to say and several didn’t feel comfortable with that arrangement. After a few females spoke up, CMC shut it all down: It wasn’t up for discussion, and this was going to happen. The whole time this exchange was going on with the females — the CO and XO (males) were silent; didn’t say a word.

So a week later, 10 minutes before morning muster, Petty Officer First Class (PO1) is spotted pierside walking up to the ship, and already the crew starts buzzing about it — mostly negative and relatively unreceptive. Over the course of the next few weeks with PO1 back in the swing of things, we all started to see the actual transition occur: Showing up to work with a female wig (bun-style), makeup applied, earrings, visible ‘breasts’ within her uniform, etc. It made a lot of us uncomfortable, to say the least.

As a watchstander who took the job semi-seriously, I was an OOD (officer of the deck) in my duty section as an E-5. PO1 was an OOD in our sister duty section, so I’d see “her” occasionally in collapsed duty sections. At the time: It disappointed me [not only] personally, but professionally — we were having contractors and people walk onboard all day/every day. The first person they will see across the quarterdeck is this disheveled looking, obviously male, OOD. Makeup applied with a five o’ clock shadow — it was completely embarrassing.

Over time, the crew comes to find out that the whole transition for PO1 was months in the planning; she was going through months of pre-transition therapy, meds/surgery, and finally her re-integration to the ship would be “RLE” — Real Life Experience, as a component of her transition program/structure.

What made her re-integration so detestable for the crew, was that she wasn’t a great all-around sailor to begin with — he would skip out of crew-wide activities like berthing sweepers, fresh water wash-down, RAS evolutions, etc. He was a slob, and didn’t show care for his appearance/uniforms. Once this transition had officially occurred, it was the same old sailor doing the same old shit — but now as a female! Personally, it bugged me to watch this PO1 immediately start walking around like she owned the joint — she knew she was untouchable by anyone in the command, and she made it apparent through her actions and communications. To me, the sad thing is that this individual will go on to tell her family that she was a trailblazer; a pioneer throughout the social constructs of this country.

Some claim that transgenderism in the ranks is either no big deal or even a positive thing — that is delusional. Even small alterations in a deployed crew’s conditions (e.g., food, tobacco, watch rotations, and internet) can have a tremendous effect on morale and order; now imagine having to sleep, bathe, and work next to an unwell man pretending to be a woman: a man who knows that he is more or less untouchable because the higher-ups feel the need to satisfy the political goals of activists within and without the DOD in order to advance. While the above example is especially odious, the realities of life at sea would make even the least offensive, hardest-working transgender sailor a liability to a ship’s crew.

A sailor needs to stand his watch, do his maintenance, answer the alarms if there’s a fire or flooding, and then tidy his station for the next hundred days of the same. Sailors who are too addled, weak, medication-dependent, or self-absorbed to accomplish these tasks should be nowhere near a ship, uniform, or taxpayer-provided firearm.