A female National Guard recruit who was forced to sleep and shower with transgender women who still retained their male genitalia was unsure how to handle the situation in President Joe Biden’s “woke” military without negative repercussions.
Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Monday that “the girl is afraid to speak out of fear it will harm her career.”
During a July 11 committee hearing, Rounds told Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., Biden’s nominee to replace outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, “A young woman in the South Dakota National Guard experienced a situation at basic training where she was sleeping in open bays and showering with biological males who had not had gender reassignment surgery but were documented as females because they had begun the drug therapy process.” (Rounds told Fox News the woman was being forced to sleep between two physically intact men who claimed to be women.)
This is in keeping with the Biden Defense Department’s policy, which not only welcomes transgenders with open arms but mandates that they use “berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities” consistent with their “gender marker,” which need not correspond to their biological sex.
Rounds continued his remarks to Brown: “This 18-year-old girl was uncomfortable with her situation, but had limited options on how to deal with it. If she raised her hand, she feared she’d be targeted for retaliation. She could have recycled [i.e., started over] which would have delayed her freshman college start and would not have provided a guarantee of a different situation. She could request to leave the Guard for religious purposes and not be able to pursue her dream of serving our country.”
“If confirmed as the chairman, how do you propose to handle situations like this, which I truly believe may be impacting recruitment and morale by placing a disproportionate emphasis on gender-related ideology?” asked Rounds.
Brown offered a relatively noncommittal response, saying, “Senator, one of the things I’ve thought about in, throughout my career — as you’re being inclusive, you also don’t want to make other individuals uncomfortable. And so … as we look at our policies and approaches and get feedback like this, we have to take a look to see if we can improve on how we approach situations like this. And as I’ve done as a service chief, as I’ve done throughout my career, if confirmed, I will continue to do so.”
Rounds told Fox News that he learned about the female recruit’s situation from the attorney general of the South Dakota National Guard.
“He had contacted our office very concerned about the information he had received from the recruit,” Rounds said. “The respect that this young recruit should have received and the privacy that she should have had, she was being deprived of.”
The Pentagon — the same agency that has imposed these conditions on service members — told Fox News in a statement, “[Department of Defense] policy is that all Service members must be treated with dignity and respect. We would encourage any troop who’s feeling uncomfortable or has concerns about privacy in shared spaces to work through their chain of command. Commanders may employ reasonable accommodations to respect the privacy interests of Service members.”
Rounds, however, suggested that the Biden administration is only concerned about the privacy of its favored service members.
“This seems to be a direct correlation between when the President of the United States issued the executive order making these changes and directing the Department of Defense to integrate … individuals who were transgender and how they should be perceived within the military,” he told Fox News. “Most of the focus is on the transgender individuals, not on the individuals who are working with them.”
Rounds further stated that he believes the military’s “recruitment crisis” is caused in part by Biden’s “woke agenda that we now see coming down by executive order.”
Indeed, when National Security Council spokesman John Kirby tells reporters that “transgender individuals” deserve the military’s support and that the Biden administration’s policy of paying for female service members to travel to states where they can obtain abortions is not just necessary for military readiness but also “the right, darned thing to do,” it communicates “nothing but contempt for the historical base of America’s fighting force,” observed the American Conservative’s Harry Scherer.
Men who were raised by generations of combat veterans, who would have previously thought of military service as a matter of course after high school or college, now come across recruiting videos that claim “gender doesn’t matter,” executive orders that proclaim the military must be a “model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” and John Kirby talking about the right, darned thing to do.
Those men used to see military service as the right thing to do. But now they only see a corrupted man in a suit and tie talking about reproductive rights and think, “There must be something else worth dying for.”
Perhaps there is hope for a reversal of some of these policies. Rounds told Fox News he received a telephone call from Brown asking for “more information” on the young woman’s case.
“I will take that call this next week from him,” Rounds said, “and we’ll see which direction he is recommending should he be confirmed as the chief of staff for the Department of Defense.”
