On Friday, President Donald Trump nominated Tennessee Republican state Sen. Mark Green for Secretary of the Army, a pick that has drawn swift criticism from LGBTQ rights groups as being incongruent with an increasingly diverse military and a danger to the rights of LGBTQ soldiers who found support during the Obama administration.
In September, Senator Green spoke to the Chattanooga Tea Party and told a questioner that he believes that being transgender is a “disease”.
If you poll the psychiatrists, they’re going to tell you that transgender is a disease. It is a part of the DSM-6, I think it is, the book of diagnostic psychological procedures or diagnoses. It’s very interesting to see what’s happening in government, or in our nation.
A few things… 1) There is no DSM-6. 2) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was amended by the American Psychiatric Association in 2012 to no longer include “gender identity disorder” as a mental disorder because it stigmatized transgender patients and didn’t accurately reflect the medical consensus on transgender health care.
Green, a West Point graduate and former Army medic, goes on to blame tolerance for the existence of the transgender community and suggests that only a collective change of heart will “fix it”.
But you ask about how we fix it ― how we get the toothpaste back in the tube. I gotta tell you ― it’s going to start with me being the salt and the light to the people around me. I mean, if you really want to bring this back to who’s at fault, we got to look a little bit inwardly. We’ve tolerated immorality. And we’re reflecting light.
These comments are painfully ignorant and boorish, but on par with what we have come to expect from President Trump’s nominees.
See Green’s comments for yourself below, they start at around 1:30:00
TransVoter 