Donald Trump Announces Ban on Transgender Troops Including 15,000 Actively Serving
SHAMEFUL. This harms military readiness and puts lives at risk. There are more than 15,000 active serving transgender troops. Threatening 15,000 currently serving troops who put their lives at risk is unpatriotic and dangerous.
This is an outrageous and desperate action. The thousands of transgender service members serving on the front lines for this country deserve better than a commander-in-chief who rejects their basic humanity.
Let us be clear. This has been studied extensively, and the consensus is clear: There are no cost or military readiness drawbacks associated with allowing trans people to fight for their country. The president is trying to score cheap political points on the backs of military personnel who have put their lives on the line for their country.
There is no basis for turning trans people away from our military and the ACLU is examining all of our options on how to fight this. For any trans service member affected by today’s announcement: Please get in touch with us, because we want to hear from you. [x]
if you want to support trans people serving in the military, please consider donating to the ACLU. as mentioned in their official statement, their examining all options on how to fight this ban.
also, to all the people on tumblr today that responded to this blatantly transphobic ban with some snarky edgy response about how denying trans people entry to the military is a ‘good thing’, because ‘the military is bad anyways’: fuck you
He is a disgusting, despicable person.
Boosting for the ACLU’s message, as I know peeps who are serving and deserve better.
Trump can’t stop lashing out with ignorant tweets. He knows nothing of diplomacy, government, politics, history, terrorism, current affairs, world cultures, or geo-politics. He is a complete and total amateur with no knowledge and no common sense. Complex matters can’t be resolved with angry tweets. He destroys everything he sticks his orange nose into.
It’s because Sadiq Khan is a Muslim, and a Muslim in a position of power doing a tremendously good job, and the small-minded orange racist just cannot stand it.
Interestingly, part of the reason that, until now, Trump has been supported in Russia is due to translation. If you read the Russian language papers like I do, you’ll notice that the Russian translators don’t verbatim copy what Trump says. Instead, they’ll translate what he’s saying into short, professional, statesman-like statements, instead of what he really says. So instead of “I think nuclear weapons should be way down, and reduced, that’s part of it.”, the Russian audience gets a statement that translates back into English as “I think we’ll start with a substantial decrease in nuclear weapons stockpiles.” When Trump calls something “dumb” or “sad”, the Russian press will have him call it “damned”. “Bad hombres” becomes “armed bandits” and so on.
The Russian support for Trump becomes a lot easier to understand when you realize they’re literally not listening to the same person we are.
It’s really weird to see translation add nuance to a politician’s talk rather than take it away, but this makes so much sense.
But some interpreters, like Tsuruta, are concerned that translating the U.S. president too accurately might reflect badly on them. Alina Cincan, a Romanian interpreter and translator, tells Newsweek: “He’s not known for his eloquence nor his diplomacy. Either you translate exactly what he says which means it’ll be repetitive and sometimes gibberish—you’ll be saying ‘tremendous’, ‘very’ or ‘great’ a lot, or you try to make some sense out of it and ‘beautify’ it. If you choose the former, some may judge your interpreting abilities as poor, whereas if you choose the latter, you’ll make him sound better.”
‘Make America big again’? The headache of translating Trump into foreign languages.
“Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going,” Viennot said. “It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”
She is left with a dilemma: either translate Trump exactly as he speaks — and let French readers struggle with the content — or keep the content, but smooth out the style, “so that it is a little bit more intelligible, leading non-English speakers to believe that Trump is an ordinary politician who speaks properly.”
For bonus context, the actual quote they’re citing for this protest comes from Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016), who flew in Apollo 14 and was the sixth person to walk on the Moon.
The full quotation, referring to the experience of observing Earth from the Moon surface, is thus:
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’
