Trump Paves Way to Ban Transgender Service Members
Trump's order declares transgender identity, and gender-affirming care, to be incompatible with military readiness.
Donald Trump has signed an executive order paving the way for banning transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military by effectively declaring them unfit for service.
The president’s order declares that the Armed Forces have been besieged by “radical gender ideology” under the past presidential administration to “appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion.”
The order states that “longstanding Department of Defense policy provides that it is the policy of the DoD to ensure that service members are ‘[f]ree of medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization.
“As a result, many mental and physical health conditions are incompatible with active duty, from conditions that require substantial medication or medical treatment to bipolar and related disorders, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalization.”
Issued on January 27, the order declares that gender identity that differs from an individual’s assigned sex at birth is incompatible with military service due to the alleged “medical, surgical, and mental health constraints.”
“Beyond the hormonal and surgical interventions involved [with a gender transition], adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” the order states. “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
The secretary of defense has 30 days to issue guidance on how to implement the order. The secretary has 60 days to eliminate the usage of pronouns that don’t align with an individual’s assigned sex at birth; ensure military members are only using sex-segregated sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities; and update Department of Defense medical standards to “prioritize readiness and lethality,” which appears to be a veiled reference to the contention that transgender individuals who are receiving gender-affirming treatments are undeployable and therefore unfit for service.
The order is expected to affect an estimated 8,000 transgender service members. Conservatives have argued, without evidence, that the inclusion of LGBTQ soldiers and the introduction of so-called “wokeness” through pro-diversity initiatives is contributing to the military’s inability to recruit and retain service members.
The change in policy accompanies other executive orders issued by Trump to eliminate the Armed Services’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, removing military leadership who supported pro-diversity efforts, and reinstating, with back pay, service members discharged for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID, reports CNN.
It also aligns with an executive order that the president issued on his first day in office asserting that the U.S. government will only recognize two “immutable sexes.”
It remains unclear whether this new policy will contain any exceptions for already-enlisted service members or whether transgender individuals who are already out will be forcibly discharged from the military.
Transgender service members were first allowed to serve in the military in June 2016 when then-President Barack Obama lifted a ban on service, and allowed for the Department of Defense to cover the costs of gender-affirming medical care.
Trump reversed that during his first term, prohibiting most transgender individuals from serving openly, with exceptions for those who had joined prior to the ban, those who were not seeking to medically transition in the future, and those who agreed to conform to dress and grooming standards consistent with their assigned sex at birth.
President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s military ban, allowing transgender individuals to serve openly. But within hours of taking office on January 20, Trump signed an order revoking Biden’s policy, paving the way for this attempted ban.
Previous research by the now-defunct Palm Center, an independent think tank that focused on research concerning sexual minorities in the U.S. Armed Forces, found that Trump’s previous ban on transgender service actually hampered military readiness.
Other studies by the Palm Center found that the cost of covering gender-affirming treatments for transgender military personnel would be “negligible” when taken in context of the size of the military’s health care budget, and that prescribing gender-affirming treatments like hormones would not disrupt military operations or be difficult to accommodate.
SPARTA Pride, an advocacy organization for transgender service members and veterans, said that “[t]ransgender Americans have served openly and honorably in the U.S. Armed Forces for nearly a decade” in a statement.
Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign said they would be suing the Trump administration in an attempt to block any ban on transgender service members from taking effect.
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