Section 8 and Counting

"See you at SCOTUS."

Though he wasn’t part of the 1970 motion picture M*A*S*H, Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger was an essential character in the TV series that premiered two years later.

As I’m sure you recall, Klinger, played by Jamie Farr, was famously known for his zany cross-dressing, and his reason for doing so was that he was trying to get himself a Section 8 discharge.

At the time, that referred to Section VIII of Army Regulation 615-360.

A soldier could be discharged under Section 8 if he were found to have a mental condition that made him unable to serve effectively. That’s what Klinger was constantly angling for — by wearing women’s clothing and engaging in other outlandish behavior, he was trying to convince the Army he was nuts so they’d send him home.

The regulation was phased out in the 1950s and replaced by other discharge categories and procedures, but the term “Section 8” lived on in popular culture, largely thanks to M*A*S*H, and it became colloquial shorthand for being crazy or otherwise mentally unfit.

So, Klinger was pretending to identify as a woman in order to convince the Army that he was unfit for military service.

Right?

Now, M*A*S*H was set during the Korean War, long before anyone had become familiar with the word “trans.” “Tranny,” maybe, but that was generally meant as a sorta comical pejorative directed mostly at cross-dressers, and you don’t hear it anymore because “trans” is now a real thing.

And, remember, Klinger wasn’t really “trans” in the way we think of that word today. He was just innocently cross-dressing, but he figured that’d be enough to get him discharged for being a kook.

Prior to 1986, while there was no Pentagon-wide accession bar to trans individuals, each of the services had its own policy on the matter.

Army Regulation 40-501 classified “transvestism” under disqualifying “behavioral disorders.” In the Navy and Marine Corps, MANMED, the Manual of the Medical Department, listed “current or history of psychosexual conditions,” including “transsexualism” and “transvestism,” as exclusionary criteria. The Air Force’s AFI 48-123, Medical Examinations and Standards, likewise categorized “transsexualism and other gender identity disorders” as eligibility barriers.