Woke Waistlines? Report: Army Exempts Trannies From Physical Fitness Standards

Perhaps it’s that a fat “trans” person identifying as in shape is small potatoes compared to identifying as the opposite sex in the first place. Whatever the case, it apparently doesn’t matter if “transgender” recruits’ pectorals are invading their belly as their belly conquers their belt’s last button because, according to a report, the U.S. Army is offering such enlistees “an indefinite fitness standards exemption.” So much for equality.

Reporting on the story, Hot Air writes, “Diversity is our strength. Except, apparently, the more diversity the military seeks, the less strength it requires.”

“That seems to be the lesson of the Army’s physical fitness standards, which do not apply to people who are getting ‘gender-affirming’ [read: sex-distorting] care,” the site continues, before presenting the following tweet.

Hot Air then opines:

One of the shibboleths of the Left is the claim that increasing the acceptance of “gender-diverse” individuals into the military merely extends the same opportunities to transgender folks as those afforded to people who identify with their natal sex….

Combine this idea with the claim that “diversity is our strength,” and you are led to believe that the military will be improved by expanding opportunities to transgender applicants.

Yeah, right. Even the Army doesn’t believe that, and they are the ones saying it.

This is true to (recent) form, too. Just last month, for example, The New American reported that the Army was poised to miss its 2023 recruitment target by 25 percent and that this problem was experienced by most other military branches as well. Despite this, the armed forces are still pursuing “Biden’s G.I. Joke,” subordinating readiness and merit to politically correct agendas.

This isn’t the first time military fitness standards have been lowered, either. For instance, The Hill reported last year that “the Army has scrapped plans to use the same physical fitness test for all soldiers, choosing instead to have some reduced standards to allow women and older soldiers to pass.”

Note that greasing the skids for women was likely the real goal, with the “older soldiers” imperative thrown in to take the onus off the feminist agenda. After all, older soldiers have been a military fixture for our entire history, whereas having large numbers of women present is a relatively new phenomenon. (Moreover, if the “older soldiers” category includes both men and women, which it may, then mentioning it truly is misdirection.)

The Hill added that the “decision follows a RAND-led study that found men were more easily passing the new, more difficult Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) compared to women and older soldiers, who were ‘failing at noticeably higher rates.’” My, you don’t say? Well, the obvious solution, then, is to scrap the old test.

This isn’t just a quip, but a longstanding “principle.” Called “disparate impact theory,” it holds that if certain groups (notably, so-called “victim” ones) don’t measure up to a standard as well as other groups do, then that yardstick is by definition “discriminatory” and must be eliminated.

This legal rationalization was used for decades to dumb-down police and fire-department standards so as to make it easier for minorities and, in particular, women to enter those fields. A good example was when Barack Obama’s DOJ sued the Pennsylvania State Police in 2014 for treating female applicants equally and requiring them to pass an already very easy physical-fitness test.

As for the dispensation the Army is reportedly offering MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) individuals, journalist Jordan Schachtel provided some detail with the following tweet.

And below is the corpulent Major “Rachel” Jones, the soldier touted by the Defense Department, talking about how he treasures diversity in the Army.

Obviously, just as rules are meant to be followed, so are standards. If a requirement is obsolete or unnecessary for any reason, eliminate it on that stated basis. But if a standard is necessary in the military for readiness purposes, all recruits should have to meet it.

Some will claim that today’s high-tech warfare doesn’t require robust physicality; if this is so, however, then why hold men to higher standards of physicality? Moreover, if women and MUSS individuals don’t have to meet those same standards, why pay them the same?

The irony here is that many are still wondering about those wanting recruitment numbers, with The Wall Street Journal blaming military veterans for discouraging their family from enlisting. But as American Thinker points out, perhaps the Journal “should have questioned whether current government policies might be causing the problem instead of just repeating the government talking points.”

In reality, the tweet below helps explain why veteran-family enlistment is down.

Apropos to this wokeness, I often relate the story about how approximately 20 years ago, I met an athletic, intelligent, 20-something white man who’d recently left the armed forces because, he said, white males were being passed over for promotions in favor of affirmative-action candidates. (So perhaps the Supreme Court may want to explain, again, why it exempted military academies from its recent affirmative-action prohibitions.)

The point is that the type of people who’d traditionally been the military’s backbone — young, red-blooded, patriotic, Middle American white men — are the ones most likely to be alienated by the armed forces’ embrace of feminist, racialist, and sexual-devolutionary political correctness on steroids.

Of course, we can hope that a future adversary will apply affirmative action and give our “diversifiers” extra time to emplace heavy weaponry or carry wounded off the battlefield. Barring this, we can always deal with a catastrophic defeat by just identifying as the victor because, you know, reality is always negotiable.