Military Men Twice As Likely To Be Transgender Than Civilians

Biologically male U.S. veterans were twice as likely as their civilian counterparts to identify as female, a former military psychologist told Courthouse News, discussing a soon-to-be-published study of more than 5 million service members.
No information has been released indicating whether the subjects of the study sought sex-reassignment surgery, or more generally disassociate with the sex of their birth.
The study by psychologist George Brown follows up on his 1988paper, “Transsexuals in the Military: Flight Into Hypermasculinity,” which relied on interviews with 11 service members who identify as male-to-female transgender, meaning that they were born as biological males but identify as female. Many prefer the umbrella term transgender over the more narrow descriptor transsexual, which usually implies surgical alteration.
“A striking similarity was noted in the histories of nearly all of the military gender dysphorics,” the 1988 study states. “They joined the service, in their words, ‘to become a real man.'”
“Flight into Hypermasculinity” speculated that enlistment statistics could bear out the theory that male-to-female transsexuals might enlist as a way of “purging the feminine self.”
“Current military policies, in association with the proposed hypermasculine phase of transsexual development, may actually result in a higher prevalence of transsexualism in the military than in the civilian population,” the 1988 study theorized.  Read More