I’m trans and I’m a veteran. I get my medical care from the VA. I’ve known that I’m trans since I was a child. In high school I researched everything I could about what were then termed “sex change operations” and I sadly decided that the current medical technology could make me nothing more than an object of ridicule. Also-there was no accepting culture of transgenderism as there is today. So…I put the whole thing aside & decided I’d focus on what I could do instead of despairing about what I couldn’t. When I was 17 I joined the Army and did well. I never dwelt on things I couldn’t have and concentrated first on my Army career, then my post-Army college education, & then my IT career. I married and had a child; but my then-wife turned me in on a newer model after 13 years of marriage. 5 years ago, as a single man with a good career, a radically different culture, and much better medical options I came out as trans & generally it’s been good for me. That being said - a)even if I were 17 I would no longer have the muscle tone to be an effective soldier. Estrogen & spironolactone are killers to male athleticism. B)if I had a diagnosed mental condition on active duty the Army would be forced to accommodate me - at the expense of non-trans soldiers. There is a finite budget and for better or worse every dollar spent on making a male soldier physically weaker than he’d otherwise be is a dollar not being spent on keeping other soldiers healthy or fixing them when they’re broken. This is because C) the purpose of the Army is to kill people & break things. It’s not a social-engineering experiment and any activity that distracts from killing people & breaking things and training for said killing & breaking is a distraction that wastes resources and will lead to higher casualties and deaths. But none of those are the most important reason. I don’t think a civilian can truly grasp the trust that is required to be a soldier. There are thousands of books written on this complex subject & I can’t do it justice in this post. But suffice to say that rational armies would run away; rational soldiers would refuse to fight. Running toward gunfire is such an irrational act that it takes armies precious time & money to get young men to do such irrational things - and the biggest part of that motivation to walk into the hell of combat is trust. Soldiers have to trust that their NCOs know what they’re doing; that the officers who are sending them to fight know what they’re doing. But the trust that really matters when the shit hits the fan is that you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if you get hurt, or trapped, or even killed that the guy next to you, and hundreds or thousands of men in units who you’ll never meet - will turn over heaven & hell to pull you out…or at least recover your body to send home. The only way to build & maintain that level of trust is for every man in every unit to have successfully subsumed his individuality to the group, at every level. You have to absolutely know that if it drops in the dunny every person will have your back. Anyone who declares “I’m trans; I’m different and the Army has to cater to me even if it detracts from the mission” has exempted himself from that bond of trust, and thus needs to go elsewhere for the sake of the mission.