Editorials of The Times

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, perhaps the Trump administration’s most responsible national security official, may have thrown the president a political lifeline by proposing this week that transgender members of the U.S. military be allowed to continue serving.

The recommendation, reported by The Washington Post, would afford Trump, who has often spoken about how he values the advice of his generals, a chance to reverse his cruel decision against transgender enlistees and potential recruits. In the interest of fairness, justice and a military that represents American diversity, he should seize it.

It was only a year after transgender Americans secured the right to defend their nation as equals in the military that Trump, in a series of tweets in July, summarily said he would banish them from serving.

The president, who dodged the Vietnam War with five deferments, seemed to disparage the transgender enlistees as unsuited for battle by gratuitously asserting that the military “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory.” Since then, many have rallied to the defense of the transgender troops, including two senior Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona, who is a former POW, and Orrin Hatch of Utah, plus a group of 56 retired generals and admirals.

Last fall, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. of the Marines, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that transgender troops have served with honor. “I believe any individual who meets the physical and mental standards and is worldwide deployable and is currently serving should be afforded the opportunity to continue to serve,” he said.

Of course, none of that might matter in the end to Trump, whose crackdown against this minority group — there are only about 2,450 transgender troops among 1.3 million active-duty members of the military — has so far reflected obvious pandering to regressive generals and right-wing zealots, as well as knee-jerk opposition to many of the enlightened policies his predecessor put in place.

President Barack Obama made gender identity a protected category in the Pentagon’s equal opportunity policy, ended the ban on gay recruits, opened all combat roles to women and named the first openly gay Army secretary.

Trump claimed he reimposed the transgender ban “after consultation with my generals and military experts.” But Dunford told the country’s top commanders that he was not consulted and that Trump’s decision to declare transgender people no longer welcome “in any capacity” was “unexpected,” according to emails reported this week by BuzzFeed News.

The president, who has advocated treating transgender identity as a “disqualifying psychological and physical” condition, contrary to the views of scientific and human rights experts, has added immeasurably to the suffering of transgender people just yearning to be treated as human beings — including by being allowed to volunteer to serve their country, as only a small portion of Americans do.

Top defense officials responded to Trump’s ban by slow-walking it. And after lawsuits were filed challenging the move, two federal judges late last year blocked it from taking effect, with one judge calling it most likely unconstitutional. Her decision, in October, not only halted a plan to discharge all transgender troops, it also allowed current transgender troops to re-enlist and permitted transgender recruits to join the military starting in January, a process the Pentagon has begun to implement.

While these are positive signs, a lot of uncertainty remains, including what Mattis proposes to do with transgender recruits and whether Trump is capable of changing course on this issue. Now that Mattis’s recommendation has arrived at the White House, it will be up to Trump to make a final decision. It will be tragic if he clings to his prejudice, forcing transgender people out of the military and back into the shadows.

It’s hard to stomach that aid workers from Oxfam Great Britain in Haiti paid for sex parties in staff housing. Such behavior by a mission in a precarious, troubled nation, where aid organizations may have the power of life and death over desperate populations, can only be called predatory.

Oxfam International, the charity’s umbrella group, has ordered a broad range of actions to ensure that such behavior is not repeated, a move the group should have made years ago. The person in charge of that Haiti mission had been in charge of one in Chad 12 years ago when similar behavior occurred.

The moral imperative is obvious, but for organizations that subsist largely on charitable donations, it is also existential. Oxfam’s donations have taken a serious tumble.

The scandal has forced the entire humanitarian aid profession to undergo some deep soul-searching. The Guardian newspaper reported that senior officials who had worked at agencies around the globe told stories about colleagues using prostitutes or possibly exploiting vulnerable women, and about the reluctance of the organization to fully confront the problem despite warnings going back many years.

Since the Oxfam scandal became public, the international aid group Doctors Without Borders has reported 24 cases of abuse or sexual harassment over the past year.

There is no suggestion that humanitarian agencies have behaved anywhere near as foully as U.N. military peacekeepers, who have been accused for years of large-scale sexual abuse of populations they were sent to defend. Peacekeepers also brought cholera to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there.

But the Oxfam revelations have focused attention on the instinct of charities to keep quiet about episodes that might undermine their image, mission and morale. Oxfam learned of sexual abuse in Haiti in 2011 and fired those responsible, but never publicly explained why staff members were dismissed. The reason, explains Oxfam Great Britain’s current director, Mark Goldring, was to try to balance being transparent and protecting Oxfam’s work.

That’s no excuse. Major humanitarian organizations have greatly expanded in recent decades and control millions in desperately needed aid when disaster strikes. The temptations for abuse in places where the imbalance of power is extreme and law and order has collapsed are huge, and, as Oxfam has said, they require “real and deep change in the way we handle accusations and cases of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.”

Anyone who has witnessed the work done by this and other humanitarian agencies around the globe knows that the vast majority of their people work ardently and selflessly in some of the most daunting conditions imaginable. In many places, including Haiti, they are simply indispensable.

But the Oxfam scandal has sounded an alarm across the entire nongovernmental aid profession that it must heed if it is to retain the public trust on which it depends. There must be zero tolerance for misuse of power by staff members in the field and swift and transparent action against any appearance of abuse.