Congressman Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, voted no on H.Res. 124 on Thursday, a Democrat-led resolution that supports funding for gender reassignment surgery of military service members.
H.Res. 124 passed the House on a 238-185 vote.
“America’s military secures our homeland, liberty and freedom against global threats,” Brooks said. “The military is not a costly laboratory for social experimentation or a conduit for radical agendas. Anything that distracts America’s military or diverts military resources from defending America is a dangerous and potentially very deadly mistake.”
“President (Donald) Trump correctly reversed (former President Barack) Obama’s flawed and exorbitantly expensive transgender policy that forced taxpayers to pay for discretionary gender reassignment surgery,” Brooks said. “One of the best-known examples of taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery is Bradley Manning, who was convicted of leaking national security secrets to WikiLeaks. Manning’s procedure cost taxpayers as much as $50,000. Worse yet, the annual estimated taxpayer cost for hormone treatment and surgery for transgender service members ranges between $2.4 million and $8.4 million per year.”
“Secretary of Defense (Jim) Mattis’ report on transgender service members says, ‘From Oct. 1, 2015, to Oct. 3, 2017, 994 active duty service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria accounted for 30,000 mental health visits.’” Brooks added. “Further, service members who undergo gender reassignment surgery are non-deployable for at least one year, which creates a serious and dangerous readiness issue. Notably, the Trump Administration policy does not ban transgender people from military service so long as they adhere to their biological sex.”
“Secretary of Defense Mattis enlisted a panel of experts to expose transgender impacts on national security,” Brooks concluded. “The panel of experts found ‘there are substantial risks’ with Obama’s badly flawed transgender policy. I fully support President Trump’s decision to return sanity to the Department of Defense.”
According to NBC News, over 40 percent of transgenders will commit suicide eventually. The military already has a higher than average suicide rate. . Adding transgenders to the force poses risks of only increasing those sad statistics and hurting unit readiness and morale.
Daniel Payne wrote in the Federalist that mental illness “is very clearly a motivating factor in a great many suicides: the rate of successful suicide is extremely correlative with conditions of mental illness. Since transgenderism is a deleterious psychological affliction, it is wholly unsurprising to find higher rates of suicide among that class of people.”
Congressman Mo Brooks represents Alabama’s Fifth Congressional District.
