I thought it was based on that the military didn’t want people reliant on artificial hormones (and stinkditch upkeep) in combat zones? And didn’t want to pay for treatment.
I wondered about that. If you are medicine dependent for diabetes or a transplant you aren't fit for service. But hormones are ok? Maybe it has to do with life and death medicine
Can't remember if I mentioned it earlier in this thread or a different one, but we actually got briefed on having troons in the military in like mid-2015 or 2016. Back then, I don't think they'd really thought through the long-term health consequences of hormones and mutilation; most of the brief was outlining potential policy about physical fitness standards, updating DEERS, and deployment status, that sort of thing. All provisional, but it all fell through anyway once Trump won in '16 and I got out after that so I don't know what they decided on policy in the end. We did have one troon officer on the ship, but they always use officers as Guinea pigs first, like when they decided to try out women on submarines.
Which was sort of a disaster because iirc like half of the first batch got pregnant on deployment, lol. Any woman who wants to do something to secure her place in the history books is probably not qualified to be there. But I digress.
Years of trans deep-diving down the amhole and rubbernecking in the SRS thread prove that the Way of the Stinkditch is incompatible with military readiness, but we collectively have the past decade's worth of medical disasters to get our data. I can't remember the particulars anymore, but (tentative) official policy was going to be that if you wanted the ol' hack and slash, it had to be on shore duty, not while in a deployment status. (Usually Uncle Sam gets his deployments out of you first, barring certain circumstances, with shore duty being at the tail end of your enlistment if you were in for long enough in the first place.) I get the feeling that the assumption was that the surgery was fairly minor and you'd be back at work soon enough, and healthy enough to run and pass your twice-yearly physical health assessment. I think they said that genital butchery would count as your one elective procedure that the military would pay for, and treated it the same as getting braces or a boob job.
This is obviously laughable, knowing what we know now, but we have the benefit of hindsight. I sadly can't remember what they said about ongoing hormone treatments, just that I think it came up. Trannies were such a niche thing back then that no one knew anything about them,
probably not even the military.