there’s probably a movie made about one, called “Das Butt”
Q: what happens when the Navy has to take “transgendered” recruits?
Winner.
OK, I stand corrected about the radiation issue. It’s still conceivable that that’s one of the reasons, though, if one of the people making the decisions doesn’t know better.
For radiation badges, wouldn’t you want personnel to keep them on at all times, including leave on the beach and dental x-rays? It’s the cumulative exposure that’s important, not the exposure that happens to occur on the job. Radiation is nondiscriminatory that way.
What makes you think the U.S. Navy will have to take such recruits in the foreseeable future?
Personnel currently in the U.S. military with gender identity issues are subject to administrative and disciplinary proceedings and are typically discharged from the service.
Some info:
http://www.tgcrossroads.org/news/?AID=447
To continue the hijack-- I find this interesting from a slightly different perspective. What’s the objective of the badge? If it’s to detect harmful radiation at the reactor, then you shouldn’t be able to take it home, as that would skew the readings. But if it’s to detect a potentially harmful total dose of radiation to personnel, than why wouldn’t you carry it with you at all times?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that with radiation you have to worry about two things: rate of exposure and cumulative exposure. Wearing your badge at all times would track your cumulative exposure (so what if you got more rads on a plane or in a dentist’s chair than in a reactor room-- what matters most from a personal stanpoint is your total cumulative exposure).
Well, whatever the answer, nuke people are weird :-).
The real objective of the dosimeter (It’s not a badge, it’s more like a light bulb kept in a plastic case on your belt - or at least was while I was in.) is not to track the sailor’s exposure to all radiation. Cumulative dose would probably be a useful thing to track, but the Navy’s focus is on whether their reactors are safe, and how they can prove it. With a leavening of, “If something, Og forfend, were to go spectacularly wrong, we want more data than we got out of SL-1.” As someone who was being exposed - the normal operating levels I saw were so low compared to various natural and other man-made radiation sources, that a lifetime cumulative dose just wouldn’t matter.
BTW… of course we’re weird. Most of us sign up to serve on ships that sink on purpose! 
Yes, but they’re all diesel-powered.
Eh, I started getting suspicious with the picture (the woman wasn’t in uniform) and figured it out when they referred to “the US Virginia class”. The class is just called Virginia, and the top boat in the Virginia class is the U.S.S. Virginia, so there’s no such thing as a “US Virginia”.
Homosexuals of both genders are barred from entering the U.S. military, and “homosexual activity” is grounds for discharge once you’re in. It’s all on the contract you sign before you go to basic training. Of course, you run into the same problem that drug prohibition creates: you can’t tell who is and isn’t breaking the rules, because they learn to hide it, so you have no way to screen them out.
FWIW, my dear departed father, who served in the Navy for 40 years, claims that several pregnancies are conceived per ship, and that it’s been that way since women were first allowed on ships.
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Why the scare quotes?
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Since the Navy doesn’t even allow homosexuals (theoretically), I doubt this will be an issue any time soon. The U.S. military is not known for being on the forefront of understanding on identity politics.
:dubious:
Don’t stretch any harder or you’ll hurt yourself. If every J. Random Seaman on the Dope knows the radiation statistics, how do you think “the people making the decisions”–officers all, generally college-educated, most of whom probably study this very thing for a living–somehow missed the memo?
It’s not as unlikely as you are putting it. I tend to agree with Chronos: Not all the people involved in making and defining the limits for radiation exposure have the knowledge or training to understand the points I’ve made here. This sort of policy is often dictated from above, even going all the way up to “advice and consent of Congress,” AIUI.
Congress has a history of imposing decisions upon the military made against the wishes of the supposedly better educated professionals there. And the reasoning involved can be pretty abstruse.
Likewise, don’t ignore the fact that those officers are just as likely to use any argument to support their positions that may work, whether it is valid, or not. If Congress were to actually take a stand, “don’t ask; don’t tell” would be gone, as it deserves to be. Similarly, the restrictions on women serving on combatant vessels would have gone long before they did.
Nuke school cracked us. 
Ah… memories.
I remember back in… oh… 00 or 01, the command made some big hullabaloo about having the first all female watch team on the Enterprise, which was kinda cool, but man, they pushed a few of those girls too fast. The watch supervisor was, well, she was very book smart, as nukes tend to be, but she had a lot to learn about actual operations. The rest of them needed more experience as well, I don’t think anyone had more than 2, perhaps 3 years of experience.
I can’t possibly imagine them pushing out a submarine filled to the brim with nubs, man or woman. An entire crew with only a couple years experience would be a very painful learning experience, and chances are good there would be casualties. At least when they did their little PR stunt on the enterprise there were any number of E-5/6/7s with years of experience on call to go down there and help.
No, the first sub will have to be mixed, as there is no other way to insure enough training, and enough experienced hands. And i likely think it will go so far as to have combined berthings/heads with the space limitations on those ships. Its not like a carrier where there are enough berthings to pick one that wastes the least amount of space(plus there are usually hundreds of spare beds on a carrier).
Also… We were expressly forbidden from wearing our TLD off the ship unless we were in the shipyard… We definitely couldn’t wear it home. Odd.
Isn’t that subism.com website a submarine related website? Shouldn’t they have known better?
Well, Subsim seems to be focused on games, rather than actual technical sub stuff. They’re dedicated, though, so, yeah, you’d figure. But a typo could slip in anywhere–the difference is that the New York Times is likely to be a bit more scrupulous about its fact-checking.
Where did you store your TLD when you left the ship? How do you keep sailors from losing them or mixing them up with somebody else’s?* Also, if the TLD is left on board the ship, and the sailor is off the ship, how is this an accurate representation of the sailor’s exposure?
In addition, I seem to recall that they were more concerned with people losing their TLDs than anything else, because you had to fill out a ton of paperwork to determine the sailor’s estimated dose for the time period in question.
I’m positive that I wore it home, and everyone else did too, because you could always identify a sailor attached to a boat (as opposed to a schoolboy) by the TLD on their belt (and the grease on their uniform). It was burned into my brain to have my TLD on my uniform belt at all times.
However, I haven’t worn a TLD in over ten years, so policies may have changed.
*I guess sailors could take their TLD off and store it in their rack pan, but it still seems like sailors would be likely to lose them or forget to put them on before heading into the engineering spaces.
Sweet Og, yes! Dose estimates were hellish. You had to scour the watches for the past month, find out what watches the bozo who lost his TLD had stood, then find someone with a similar watch schedule - and do it again and again. I don’t recall exactly how many comparisons we had to establish to make the dose estimate - but it was a huge PITA.
Of course, if one were handling All-Hands Radcon, one could come up with lectures or drills to run that needed to be done, instead of helping to scour the logs…
ISTM that this represents my memories, as well: We wore our TLDs whenever we were in uniform. So in transit from private residences to the ship we were wearing the TLD. We only turned them in for leave.
We kept them in our lockers. Of course, the command was uptight about people wearing their dungarees/utilities(btw… have you seen those new godawful uniforms to replace the utilities? Blue camo BDUs?!) home, so we all had to change when we got to work anyway.
And they were worried about our exposure while on the ship, not anywhere else. I mean, they certainly didn’t make you wear it when you went to the beach on off hours or anything, did they? And you yourself said we had to turn it in on leave, so I don’t think it was total exposure they were interested in, just total exposure while on the ship.
Of course, I was just an M-div nuke, so I may be remembering some of this wrong.
Rats. I thought our country finally had a chance after the gendercide. Now it all belongs to those damn Aussies.
No, I realize that they were just concerned about exposure on board the ship. However, if the TLD is on the ship, and sailor is not, the TLD is registering exposure (presumably) that the sailor is not actually being exposed to.
Now I know in practice that sailors actually get less exposure on board than off, but imagine a hypothetical situation in which there is a strong radiation source on the ship. If sailors all leave their TLDs behind when they go home, those TLDs will all register much higher dosages than the sailors were actually exposed to.
I have a cousin and an uncle who were both in the Navy. Cousin was a corpsman and uncle was an electrician. Neither served on subs but they both told me the same thing: “A sub that goes out with 100 men comes back with 50 couples.” Is there any element of truth to this or were they just making fun of their fellow sailors?
:rolleyes: There is (virtually) no element of truth to this. They were making fun of them.
I say “virtually” because I did hear of one case of homosexual (mis)conduct on board a submarine, between a couple of male sailors in a normally closed space. They were discovered and subsequently court-martialed and discharged from the Navy.
If anything, there is less of this kind of behavior on submarines than other classes of ship because of the close quarters and lack of privacy.