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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Millie Weaver reporting for Infowars.com. | |
| We're here in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, where protesters are out here protesting Trump's transgender military ban. | |
| Hi ma'am, you came up and wanted to talk to us. | |
| Are you the one who organized this? | |
| Yep. | |
| So why did you organize this? | |
| I saw Donald Trump's tweet and I was angry about it. | |
| There are a lot of people in the military that are transgender and want to serve this country, and why should we take that right away from them if they're willing to put their lives on the line for us? | |
| So, what do you guys think about how, you know, Obama just in 2016, June 2016, he made it so that the military has to provide surgeries, hormone therapy. | |
| Psychological treatment to transgenders and now we have the year following the military saying now that there's going to be a ban on transgender. | |
| I think that we spend an awful lot of money on health care for every other member of the military so if we've got members that need to have health care related issues taken care of why wouldn't we cover that? | |
| Like everybody else they deserve health care and like everybody else they look for employment that provides health care. | |
| And the Pentagon studied transgender service for over two years. | |
| Trump was sitting on the shitter and made a tweet ending it. | |
| There was no study. | |
| There was no information. | |
| He was appealing to the lowest denominators on his base. | |
| What do you think about the high suicide rates amongst the transgender community, juxtaposed to the high suicide rates amongst veterans? | |
| Do you think that... | |
| You're actually, by sending transgender people into war, you're increasing their likelihood for suicide? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| I think it speaks to lack of mental health care, lack of medical care. | |
| I think it speaks to the way that veterans are treated in this country a lot of times. | |
| And the same with transgender people. | |
| There's a lot of mistreatment that leads to depression. | |
| I also know a lot of highly successful transgender people who work and serve and do their job, and they're not committing suicide. | |
| What do you guys think about, you know, that a lot of people's opinions out there are that it is a mental disorder, gender identity disorder, and therefore comes with high suicide rates? | |
| The first place I would go is not general public opinion. | |
| I would go to the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. | |
| I would ask their opinion. | |
| And those are the people the Pentagon were consulting with about transgender service. | |
| Are there medical costs? | |
| Yeah. | |
| For most transgender people, there's some hormones. | |
| It runs less than $50 a month. | |
| It's not. | |
| Some horrendous cost. | |
| Do some people need surgery? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And the military was already dealing with that issue in terms of timing and time and service and hoops that had to be jumped through to meet the ability to get surgery. | |
| As someone who's trained, this is an incredibly complex thing. | |
| Gender identity disorder, there's actually debate within the American Psychiatric Association over whether it should be a disorder or not a disorder. | |
| It's largely left in there as gender identity disorder in the DSM-5 in order to provide something for health insurance. | |
| It was previously in the DSM-4 as... | |
| I forget what it was in the DSM Corps, but it's actually gone back and forth a couple of times. | |
| Do you think that it's discriminatory to disqualify someone from the military for having asthma or diabetes? | |
| Well, I feel like the qualifications for the military a lot, because I have a lot of friends and family that are in the military, and I feel like a lot of the qualifications aren't discriminating someone for who they are. | |
| It's... | |
| Keeping them safe because if you have asthma or you're flat-footed you there are potentials of problems in the battlefield and stuff because if you're not able to move and like Have that rigorous, like, stress on your body and be able to take it, then you're going to be more of a hinder to not only yourself, but the people sitting next to you in a foxhole. | |
| So being able to stand up and physically produce what you need to do in the military, like, I understand why they have, you know, the overweight issue or, like, asthma, like you said, flat foot, all those type of things that may disqualify you. | |
| That's not only saving, like, helping you, like, because you're going to be... | |
| I think it's actually kind of interesting to talk about that because one of the reasons that people have talked about allowing transgender individuals to serve is because there is such a large percentage of the population that already can't. | |
| Transgender people, as you saw with our speakers, are very tough to stand up to people who every day want to tell you, you don't have a right to exist. | |
| That actually does require being kind of tough and looking people in the eye and say, yeah, yeah, I do. | |
| To hide being trans if you're forced to. | |
| It's not easy. | |
| That requires a degree of toughness. | |
| First of all, ADD is the ability to not be able to focus. | |
| You have to be able to focus. | |
| Being transgender doesn't mean you can't focus. | |
| I can focus clear. | |
| My mind is clear. | |
| It's society that causes transgender people to be a little more depressed than normal because society doesn't know how to love. | |
| They don't know something that's different. | |
| The fear of the unknown causes people to be... | |
| Against people who are transgender, lesbian, gay, it doesn't matter. | |
| It doesn't matter who you are, society, if society doesn't come together and start supporting each other and start realizing what this is and it's not some disease and they start loving, a lot of people, the suicide rate would go down, first of all. | |
| Second of all, you talk about medical costs and how much they spend on transgender medical costs. | |
| It's nothing compared to the $84 million they spend on Viagra so a man can get an erection. | |
| What does that matter? | |
| Well, I mean, a man's erection isn't going to do anything. | |
| I just heard that Trump's doing a cost study on the expense of tampons, and he's thinking of banning women from the military because of the high cost of tampons. | |
| That's what I heard. | |
| Anyway, and I'm really curious. | |
| Okay, well, I was going to answer. | |
| Do you broadcast this, or do you edit it to fit your agenda? | |
| No, I'm, look. | |
| I'm going to answer what he was saying regarding to the... | |
| You said that society needed to be kinder, needed to kind of be more accepting of transgenders to help lower their suicide rates, which, you know, society has kind of been trying to do that in a lot of ways, more so than it has been, and the suicide rates are still increasing with transgender people. | |
| The other thing I was going to say here is, do you actually really think that the military is going to be kinder than society? | |
| I mean, there's all kinds of horror stories about how tough and brutal the military is. | |
| So people that need special treatment, do you think that they're going to be able to survive in such a rough area? | |
| Did you serve? | |
| No, I did not serve. | |
| You don't know anything about how being in the military is. | |
| I was in the military for six years, okay? | |
| Who I was... | |
| Before that doesn't affect who I am now after being in. | |
| I went in with love. | |
| I came out with love. | |
| I mean, I came out with acceptance just as I went in. | |
| The military, yeah, you have to be mentally and physically tough at the job at hand, but it doesn't change you. | |
| You meet a variety of people. | |
| It's you. | |
| If you don't want to change, you're the one that causes society to not progress. | |
| Well, you know, I've spoken to a lot of people that have had rough times in the military, and there are horror stories with people having a hard time in the military, and you may be the exception to the rule, but should that exception be the reason to change the rule for everyone, you might be one of the people who are not likely to commit suicide or think about suicide, but what about those who are a little bit more sensitive to that? | |
| They just need to get over it. | |
| I think that being exclusive and excluding people from participating in our world would probably drive those rates even higher, and that if we work to be more inclusive and then be more supportive, that we would have an improvement over mental health altogether. | |
| Just like with our vets, we need to focus on mental health for our people, not excluding people. | |
| If you're policing their potties and keeping them out of the military, you're excluding them from our world, and that is good for no one. | |
| The transgender community... | |
| And the LGBT communities have a higher rate of suicide because you have people telling us that we don't have a right to exist. | |
| Like, why is it not, you know, when you have to hide yourself every day, is it not a surprise that maybe there are higher instances of mental health effects? | |
| Used to say the same thing about blacks. | |
| Used to say the same thing about women. | |
| A lot of them are still saying it about blacks, women, Hispanics. | |
| So I think it's not true. | |
| About them being part of a mental disorder? | |
| Yes. | |
| Inferior. | |
| Black people are inferior. | |
| I mean, it was just discussed. | |
| You know, World War II. There were separate squadrons of blacks fighting because they couldn't integrate because they were inferior. | |
| It was a belief, you know? | |
| It was a true belief then, so it must be true. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| Maybe you don't agree. | |
| Maybe you think blacks are still inferior? | |
| No, I do not think that. | |
| I do not think that. | |
| And I would say that the majority of Trump supporters out there don't think those things. | |
| And, in fact, it tends to be liberals who project those stereotypes on Trump supporters when I've actually never even met. | |
| You're a Trump supporter? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I thought you were a news person. | |
| Well, I can have an opinion as well as report the news. | |
| I mean, most newscasters do. | |
| I'm just wondering if you try and slant the news or you just report what people are saying. | |
| I'm just reporting what people are saying. | |
| I mean, you've seen me come out here. | |
| I've been, for the most part, pretty cordial to people asking questions. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| I appreciate the respect. | |
| Yeah, so what I'm getting at is there are, you know, stereotyping can go both ways. | |
| She keeps asking the same question over and over and over. | |
| Yeah, I just want to get... | |
| She doesn't actually have anything. | |
| No, I just want to ask people what their opinions are on these arguments. | |
| Yeah, so you ask them loaded questions over and over. | |
| Is it a loaded question to ask people what they think about the high suicide rates amongst the transgender community? | |
| Uh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, when you present that as a standalone. | |
| It is loaded. | |
| And when you keep asking, and you don't ask what you could do about it, and the way that you will report this, because you are Alex Jones... | |
| I'm actually Millie Weaver. | |
| I'm not Alex Jones. | |
| Yeah, you're his surrogate. | |
| You're his sock puppet. | |
| I'm not a puppet. | |
| Okay, sure. | |
| Whatever. | |
| And so when you report this, you add to the problem. | |
| You don't help solve the problem. | |
| What I learned in the Army was my first day of basic training, it doesn't matter if you're male or female. | |
| When you're in uniform, you're a soldier. | |
| And that stands. | |
| It doesn't matter if I'm transgender or if I'm not. | |
| When I put on that uniform, I'm a soldier. | |
| When I take it off, I'm still a soldier. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| Well, you know, I found it really interesting how you were talking about how you had served in the military for a while, but you did it not openly trans, not openly gay. | |
| And it didn't actually affect you, did it? | |
| Yeah, because I had to always hide. | |
| I couldn't... | |
| Do what everybody else did. | |
| We had ceremonies. | |
| I couldn't bring my girlfriend. | |
| I couldn't talk about my life like my other battle buddies did. | |
| I had to be completely closed off, but I still knew what my mission was, and that was to be a soldier. | |
| But it's even better to be able to be open and to be able to, you know, if you get deployed, to come home and kiss your girlfriend right away or your significant other. | |
| You know, when you have to hide, that sucks. | |
| And nobody should have to hide. | |
| I mean, plain and simple, would you like to hide your entire life? | |
| No. | |
| I mean, put yourself in someone else's shoes for once. | |
| It sucks having to hide because society might kick you down. | |
| Society might say something negative. | |
| Society might be shitty. | |
| But I still serve my country honorably, and that's all that matters. | |
| It can be distracting if people are, you know, getting caught up with... | |
| Gender roles, necessarily, while they're thinking about combat. | |
| It's the other people that get caught up with that. | |
| I don't get caught up with it. | |
| It's the other people. | |
| But it shouldn't have to be that way. | |
| Like, it's not... | |
| I'm not a disease. | |
| I'm not fucking... | |
| Like, duh. | |
| Well, it looks like the protest is kind of thinning out now and people are, you know, a couple people are still hanging around, but a lot of them have left. | |
| But it's been interesting talking to these people out here about why they think transgender people should be allowed to be openly in the military. |
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