[Slantwire]

AFChic, ma'am, I'll start by saying I completely respect you and your opinions. I simply disagree in this conversation.

To my mind, this thread has coalesced into two separate issues: physical abilities (Army restrictions on combat arms such as infantry), and living conditions (Navy submarines / AF missileers).

I'm going to say something about living conditions first. As you've pointed out, professionalism and leadership are not gender-specific. But not everyone meets the high standards necessary to avoid complications. (If they did, we would have no sailors drunk on shore leave, no need to screen for STDs, and no pregnancies canceling deployments.) Ground truth is that mixed genders in close proximity for extended periods DOES cause additional complications. A service has to set up its systems to deal with the "least common denominator" of professionalism.

Will the Navy miss out on some potentially superb female submariners by their policy? Probably. Heck, they probably already have. Would the gain of those personnel outweigh the loss of dealing with the complications? The long-standing consensus has been "No." I don't see anything to change that answer.

(Mixed genders, close proximity, and extended times all separately create distractions to different degrees. The distractions become more severe as the factors combine. Close quarters in a silo for a day or two, is significantly different than an underwater phone booth for months on end. The Air Force has obviously decided that its gain in the silos DOES outweigh the problems, and in my opinion it's probably right. With such a short cloister time, the downside is less severe than what the Navy has to contemplate. It's reasonable to expect the "least common denominator" of professionalism to handle distractions for a couple days in the silo. Same for support roles in garrison. But that's not true in all situations.)

Needs of the service are more important than any desire to be "fair" or "equal," however noble those ideals are.

As for physical abilities, biology doesn't care about human notions of equality. Katie Hnida, Anika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have already been mentioned or referenced in this thread. I'll toss in another few names.

There was a great deal of outcry over South African sprinter Caster Semenya's apparent masculinity when she won gold in the 800m at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics. In seeming refutation of your assertion that "women wouldn't mind," many of the athletes she beat said that she should not have been competing in the women's event - and she's never been proven to be anything but female. (Incidentally, she had the fastest official women's time of 2009, yet was fully 10 seconds slower than the male winner at those same Championships.)

Golfer Mianne Bagger had a sex change before competing on the women's circuit, and there were complaints that her "genetically male" knees would handle more torque than her "genetically female" competitors, allowing her a more powerful swing.

Your own experiences with rugby, and your opinion that women and men should be allowed to compete in the same leagues, surprise me when taken together. Would you and your teammates have been satisfied in a league where you came away from every game feeling like you'd "been hit by a Mack truck," and gotten your "butts kicked?"

If we can agree that there ARE fundamental physical differences, enforced by biology, then any accommodations for the differences feed back into the gain-vs-cost question. Not an issue when pushing buttons, but definitely an issue when carrying an infantryman. Again, needs of the service rule.