Donald Trump signed an executive order rescinding a Biden administration policy that allows transgender individuals to serve openly in the U.S. military.
The order paves the way for Trump to revive the ban on transgender service members he instituted during his first term as president.
The reversal of Biden’s 2021 executive order was included in a list of various reforms and policies adopted by the Biden administration covering topics ranging from immigration and energy policy to health care and workplace safety. Trump claimed these needed to be rescinded to “repair our institutions and our economy.”
As reported by The 19th, an online news outlet focusing on news affecting women and LGBTQ people, Trump is expected to reinstitute a ban on transgender military service in the coming months.
Reviving the ban would constitute one of the largest layoffs of transgender people in history, with several thousand people being forcibly discharged.
In 2014, the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law focusing on LGBTQ-specific issues, estimated the number of transgender individuals in the U.S. military to be around 15,500. However, that figure hasn’t been updated in over a decade.
Findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey revealed that transgender people are more than twice as likely to serve in the Armed Forces as their cisgender counterparts.
Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights told The 19th that the higher rates of participation by transgender individuals are likely because the military historically rewards service and merit, with an emphasis on unit cohesion by focusing on a common mission or purpose.
Minter worries that a new ban would have far-reaching ramifications.
“It has a huge negative impact for the federal government to brand all transgender people as definitionally unfit to serve,” she told the news outlet. “It would have horrific spillover effect in other areas of life, other areas of employment and would condone, socially, people seeing transgender people as less than.”
Under Trump’s previous ban, transgender individuals could only continue serving in the military if they remained closeted, conformed to dress and personal grooming standards based on their assigned sex at birth, and did not pursue medical transition.
There were exceptions for those service members who had already transitioned or those who had already been diagnosed with gender dysphoria but were still adhering to gender-specific grooming standards and were not seeking out gender-affirming medical care.
To justify his previous ban, Trump falsely claimed that transgender people have to take “massive amounts” of drugs to transition and that the cost of surgical interventions and recovery would take an inordinate amount of time away from when they were expected to be deployed overseas.
In fact, medical experts said at the time, the medications taken by transgender people to assist in transitioning are not prohibited by the military, nor would they make a transgender service member unfit for deployment, since hormone medication could be as easily filled as any other prescription.
The Palm Center, a now-defunct organization that studied LGBTQ military participation, released an analysis showing that the cost of providing health treatments to transgender troops would “amount to little more than a rounding error” in the military’s then-$47.8 billion healthcare budget.
It’s unclear whether Trump will face resistance to a new ban from Congress, with Republicans now controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Nonetheless, U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), who represents San Diego, which has a significant military presence and veteran community, has introduced a bill seeking to block Trump from enforcing a future ban on transgender service members.
“The key is that Republicans are currently focusing on culture wars instead of actually focusing on our national security,” Jacobs told HuffPost. “To me it makes no sense in a recruitment- and retention-challenging environment to be letting almost 15,000 service members go. We’ve invested a lot of time and money in training.”
The legal organization GLBT Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD Law) is one of several LGBTQ-focused organizations that have threatened legal action against a future transgender military ban.
“The administration is trying to create fear and sow chaos by its statements and orders, but no executive action can change the fundamental truth that transgender people are vital members of our families and communities,” GLAD Law Executive Director Ricardo Martinez said in a statement. “We will defend the fundamental principle that equal protection under the law is guaranteed — without exception.”
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, denounced not only the proposed military ban but several other executive orders issued by Trump, including attacks on DEI, rescinding federal agency interpretations of pro-LGBTQ legal decisions, and an order that effectively prohibits the federal government from recognizing transgender identity as real or valid.
“Although the executive order does not impose a new ban, the Trump administration is expected to continue attacking the ability of trans people in the military to do their jobs,” Heng-Lehtinen said in a statement.
LPAC, an organization working to elect LGBTQ women and nonbinary individuals to public office, also slammed the potential ban.
“The overlooked tragedy of Trump’s effort to ban trans people from the military is that, if successful, it will weaken our national security,” Charlotte Clymer, an LPAC Board member, author, and veteran, said in a statement. “It will erase billions in personnel development and expertise, it will significantly harm our military’s recruitment and retention efforts, and it will ultimately make our country less prepared against credible threats. It will make our nation far less safe.”
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