MONDAY, OCTOBER 9 | SERVING TEXAS A&M SINCE 1893 | © 2017 STUDENT MEDIA
DENIAL OF SERVICE TWO AGGIE VETERANS WEIGH IN ON THE PROPOSED TRANSGENDER BAN
C. Morgan Engel — THE BATTALION
Christian Aguirre — THE BATTALION
A&M quarterback Kellen Mond completed 19 of his 29 passes against Alabama.
Tide triumphs in tough game Analysis: missed chances and missed cues kept A&M from beating Bama Senior Ellie Scott served in the U.S. Air Force from 2009 - 2013.
By Alex Miller @AlexMill20
By Emily Bost @EmmyBost In a series of three tweets posted July 26, President Donald Trump announced a ban that would exclude transgender Americans from serving in the U.S. military, sparking controversy over issues like military efficiency and trans-related health care coverage. The ban will make the roughly 1.4 million adults that identify as transgender in the United States ineligible to serve, according to the New York Times. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” read Trump’s tweets following his initial directive. Since Trump announced the ban, six transgender soldiers filed lawsuits with the federal court in August, arguing that the ban will affect their medical treatments and career opportunities and requesting that it never go into effect, according to the New York Daily News. The Trump administration has requested that the federal court not consider any lawsuit opposing the transgender service ban because there is not yet policy to supplement it. However, since Defense Secretary James Mattis is temporarily allowing transgender troops to serve, the plaintiffs have no legal basis to file
suits currently. For Ellie Scott, recreational parks and tourism sciences senior and transgender veteran, the military served as an opportunity for her to gain discipline and function as an adult. Scott first found out about Trump’s tweet via text from a friend and although she does not have interest in serving again, she is annoyed by Trump’s ban because of the lack of input from military
officials and the American people. “People are going to serve their country because they want to serve their country,” Scott said. “If they’re physically and mentally capable of passing all the other exams, why does it matter what they have in their pants?” Gender identity was something Scott struggled with internally and socially from a young age, she said. Scott also said she repressed her identification with the female gender until she got to A&M in 2006 for a mechanical engineering degree. Scott struggled her first semester, resulting in her withdrawal from the university to join the Air Force. According to an analysis funded by the Department of State, there are currently between 1,320 to 6,630 active-duty transgender servicemen in the U.S. military. Historically, the military has not covered gender transition surgery. If the military were to begin covering these transition-related procedures, it would
The final result was as expected – Alabama beat Texas A&M. But the Aggies did something unexpected – made it hard for the Crimson Tide to win. As 26.5–point underdogs at home, A&M was picked by many to be steam-rolled by the Tide, but as the Aggies walked off Kyle Field Saturday night, the 27-19 loss felt as if it could have been even closer. Maybe it should have been. A&M was in striking distance of getting within a score, or even going ahead on several occasions on an Alabama team who came to College Station riding on back-to-back SEC victories by a combined score of 125-3. “It is real disappointing. It came down to the wire there,” 12th Man Cullen Gillaspia said. “They’re a great ball club, but you have to take positives from it, too. They’re the number one team in the country and we just went toe-to-toe with them until the final seconds of the game.” Costly turnovers, big plays and penalties kept the Aggies from doing what seems impossible – beating Alabama. “It’s tough to know that if a couple more things would’ve went our way we would’ve had a closer shot to win the game,” wide receiver Christian Kirk said. “That’s how Alabama is. All the credit goes out to them. They’re the number one team in the country for a reason. They’re not going to give you anything.” In the fourth quarter, Alabama safety
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A sediment core showed iron particles left from the last ice age; possibly allowing for the growth of more algae which absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lowered global temperatures.
Graphic by Alex Sein— THE BATTALION
Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION
BUILD began construction on five new medical clinics on Oct. 2.
BUILD begins fifth year Texas A&M organization aids developing nations By Tyler Snell @Tyler_Snell2 Just a short drive north of campus, students have the opportunity to put their construction skills to the test and work on a project that serves various developing communities. BUILD started its fifth year of construction last week and will continue until Nov. 17. BUILD was founded in 2012 and partners with healthcare accessibility organization Medical
Bridges to construct medical clinics contained in storage containers that are then sent to developing nations in need of healthcare and supplies. This year the organization is building five medical clinics and each one will honor an Aggie veteran and their family. Last year, BUILD had roughly 1,400 student volunteers over the course of the semester and hopes to increase that number to over 2,000 this year. “We are having some side projects for when we have an influx of volunteers so everyone can be involved and everyone can be a part of the project,” Amanda BUILD ON PG. 2
Heavy metal in the high seas How ice-age iron particles may have influenced climate By Alex Sein @AlexandrSein According to Franco Marcantonio, Texas A&M geology professor, there is a chance that iron particles deposited into the Pacific Ocean during the last ice age could have affected global climates. Marcantonio’s research began when he took part in an expedition to the Galapagos Islands to retrieve a core sample — a cutout that contains eons of sedimentary layers detailing the Earth’s geological past — from the bottom of the ocean. After bringing it back to the lab, he said
he found something interesting and unusual about it. “We found eight, maybe nine intervals in the sediment core that had increased amounts of dust from the continents, and dust from the continents has iron in it, and some of that dust, it’s really fine-grained, it dissolves, and when it dissolves, it releases the iron, and iron is important because it’s an important micronutrient for plants in the ocean,” Marcantonio said. These plants, according to Marcantonio, would mostly be algae, and while there is no way to directly tell how much algae was present in the ancient ocean, a trace element called barium can indicate the presence of algae. Marilyn Wisler, a former un-
dergraduate research student under Marcantonio who performed the barium analyses said that the results indicated a correlation between the amounts of barium in the ocean and what the climate was like at the time. “With all the analyses that we had, we ended up correlating them to different climate events,” Wisler said. “The barium only occurs in the seawater, and for the fact that that could be correlated to what’s going on in the atmosphere was really interesting to me.” Marcantonio said that his current hypothesis was that algae growth spurred by increased iron levels led to the algae absorbing increased amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which in turn lowered OCEAN ON PG. 2