President Donald Trump signed four executive orders pertaining to the military Monday, including one barring transgender people from enlisting and serving openly and another cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the armed services.
The order pertaining to transgender military service, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” reinstates a policy from Trump’s first term and rescinds an order by then-President Joe Biden that allowed trans people to enlist and permitted already enlisted trans service members to receive coverage for transition-related medical care.
“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order states. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”
The order mandates that the Defense Department update its military medical standards within 60 days, promptly “end invented and identification-based pronoun usage” and prohibit people assigned male at birth from using women’s sleeping, changing and bathing facilities.
The order will take time to implement, so transgender service members will not be immediately ejected. It’s unclear what will happen to service members who are receiving transition-related care through Tricare, the military’s health care program. Biden signed a defense bill in December that barred coverage of gender-affirming care for trans children of service members, so that care was already prohibited.
Under the Trump administration’s 2017 trans military restriction, transgender service members fell into two categories: exempt, meaning they came out as trans prior to the restriction and were allowed to continue serving openly and received transition-related medical care, and nonexempt, meaning they came out after the restriction and had to continue serving as their assigned sex at birth and could not have any transition-related care covered by Tricare other than therapy. That policy also completely prohibited openly trans people from enlisting.
At the time, the administration maintained that the policy was not a “trans military ban,” as it was widely referred to, because it allowed service members to apply for a waiver. Though during the four years it was in effect, only one waiver was publicly reported.
“It can take a minimum of 12 months for an individual to complete treatments after so-called transition surgery, which often involves the use of heavy narcotics,” the White House document about Trump’s new trans military order states. “In this time, they are not physically capable of meeting military readiness requirements and continue to require consistent medical care. This is not conducive for deployment or other readiness requirements.”
The document alleges that Biden’s order undoing Trump’s last restriction on trans people serving in the military ordered the Department of Defense to “pay for service members’ transition surgeries, as well as those of their dependent children — at a cost of millions of dollars to the American taxpayer.”
A rally at the U.S. Capitol against the transgender military service ban on April 10, 2019.
The Department of Defense doesn’t publicly report how many trans people are serving in the military, and estimates vary widely. One 2014 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA using data from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that about 15,500 transgender people were serving in the military. A 2016 report from the Rand Corp. drawing from Department of Defense data and previous research (including the Williams Institute report) found that there were a maximum of 10,790 trans people serving in the military and the reserves, though it found that figure could also be as low as 2,150.
A report by the Congressional Research Service that was updated this month found that from 2016 to 2021, the Defense Department spent about $15 million on transition-related care (surgical and nonsurgical) to 1,892 active duty service members. Of that amount, $11.5 million went to psychotherapy and $3.1 million to surgeries, according to Military.com, citing Defense Department data provided to the outlet.
Emily Shilling, a commander in the Navy, has served in the military since 2005 and is the president of SPARTA, a trans military advocacy group. Shilling came out as a transgender woman in April 2019, shortly after Trump’s first trans military restrictions took effect, and she was required to continue serving in a way that aligned with her birth sex. When Biden lifted those restrictions in 2021, she was able to come out at work, she said.
When asked about Trump’s new order restricting trans military service, Shilling — who emphasized she was not speaking on behalf of the Navy or the Pentagon — said she and other trans service members “just want to continue serving.”
“I want to keep using the skills this nation invested in me as a fighter pilot and leader,” she added. “Since coming out as transgender in 2019, I’ve served with distinction, earning a promotion with distinction as the top officer in my community. My country has given me so much, serving it has been my life’s greatest honor.”
One of the other orders Trump signed Monday, titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” prohibits diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military, disbanding any DEI offices within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and requiring the secretaries of both departments to review United States service academies curricula to “ensure alignment” with the order.
In a post shared Sunday on X, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote, in part, “No more DEI at @DeptofDefense” and “No exceptions, name-changes, or delays.” The post included a photo of a handwritten note that said, “Those who do not comply will no longer work here.”
Restricting diversity initiatives and rolling back Biden-era transgender rights efforts have been top priorities for Trump in the first days of his second term. Hours after his inauguration, he issued dozens of executive orders, including one declaring that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and another ending DEI programs inside federal agencies. As a result of the order regarding gender, the State Department last week suspended all passport applications requesting sex-marker changes.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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