President Donald Trump signed four executive orders pertaining to the military Jan. 27, 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 former 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 U.S. 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.”
