5 takeaways on Trump’s order on transgender military service
President Trump on Monday signed an executive order effectively barring transgender people from serving openly in the military, renewing a policy he first began implementing in 2017 during his first term.
The order, which does not immediately ban transgender troops, is an extension of recent efforts to unravel transgender rights and diversity initiatives instituted by former President Biden that Trump and Republicans have said went too far.
Here are five takeaways from Trump’s order on transgender military service.
It fulfills a Trump campaign promise
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to once again prevent transgender people from serving openly in the military if he were to retake the White House in 2024.
He told an audience in New Hampshire in August 2023 that he would both restore the original policy and bar the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from covering the cost of gender-affirming care for transgender veterans as president.
“Those precious taxpayer dollars should be going to care for our veterans in need, not to refund radical gender experiments for the communist left,” Trump said at the time. The VA covers nearly all transition-related care for veterans, except for surgery.
At a Turning Point USA gathering in December, Trump said he would “get transgender out of the military” with “the stroke of my pen” on his first day in office. He also pledged to put a stop to what he and his administration have called “transgender lunacy” by signing separate executive orders to ban gender-affirming care for minors and bar transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
Another executive order, he said, would “get transgender ... out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high school,” and another would recognize only two genders, male and female. He signed the latter order on Jan. 20, during his first hours in office.
It’s part of broader military revamp under Trump
Trump’s transgender order is one of multiple executive orders signed Monday with the potential to reshape the military over the next four years.
Trump on Monday evening also signed executive orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the armed forces and reinstate service members discharged for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
A fourth order signed by Trump aboard Air Force One on Monday greenlights the development of an “American Iron Dome,” a missile defense system similar to Israel’s anti-projectile apparatus meant to protect against ballistic missiles and other advanced aerial weapons.
It does not use the word 'transgender'
Much like Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order on gender, Monday’s order, despite its explicit and direct impact on transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, does not use the word “transgender.” The omission reflects a broader rightward shift in how Trump and his new administration are approaching his second term.
“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding [Department of Defense] policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” Monday’s executive order states.
“Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, 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. 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.”
Trump’s 2017 directive to prevent transgender people from serving in the military used the term half a dozen times, including in its title.
It argues transgender service members undermine 'unit cohesion'
Trump’s executive order states that allowing transgender people to serve in the military erodes “unit cohesion,” an argument that has long been used to prevent marginalized communities, including Black and gay Americans and women, from serving.
Proponents of military segregation once argued that integration would threaten unit cohesion and effectiveness before former President Truman issued a 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces.
Later, in a 1993 directive, former Defense Secretary Les Aspin used the same justification to bar gays and lesbians from military service. “The Department of Defense has long held that, as a general rule, homosexuality is incompatible with military service because it interferes with the factors critical to combat effectiveness, including unit morale, unit cohesion and individual privacy,” he wrote.
A 1994 policy preventing openly LGBTQ people from serving in the military was later repealed under former President Obama.
Threats to unit cohesion have also been used to justify keeping women out of some combat positions. A study published by the RAND Corporation in 2015 found that there was “strong, deep-seated, and intensely felt opposition” to a military directive that year that opened 4,100 special operations positions to women.
Many special operations forces (SOF) personnel, the study found, “were concerned that integrating women into SOF units would erode unit cohesion.”
It is already being challenged in court
Less than 24 hours after Trump signed the executive order, two LGBTQ civil rights groups, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, filed a federal lawsuit challenging it on behalf of six active service members and two individuals seeking enlistment.
The plaintiffs serve across all military branches and include a major, a captain, a sergeant and a navy pilot.
Two other organizations — the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, and Lambda Legal — also intend to sue the administration over the policy.
LGBTQ rights organizations filed several lawsuits against Trump’s original 2017 directive, which courts unanimously blocked before the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect in 2019 while lower courts heard additional arguments. Former President Biden reversed the policy in a 2021 executive order.
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