President Donald Trump signed four executive orders related to the military on Monday, including one that prohibits transgender people from enlisting and serving openly and another for the initiatives of diversity, equity and inclusion in armed services.
The order related to transgender military service, entitled “Prioritize military excellence and preparation”, restores a policy of Trump’s first mandate and terminates an order from the then President Joe Biden that allowed trans people to enlist and allow members of the trans service already receiving coverage. For medical care related to the transition.
The order will update “all medical standards of the Department of Defense to ensure that they prioritize preparation and lethality,” according to a White House document related to the order. The use of “invented and identified pronouns” in the Army will also end; prohibit people assigned to men at birth to use facilities to sleep, change or bathe women; and coverage of medical care bars related to the transition for the members of the service currently enlisted and their families.
The order will take time to be implemented, so the members of the transgender service will not be expelled immediately. It is not clear what will happen to the members of the service that receive care related to the transition through Tricare, the Military Medical Care Program. Biden signed a defense bill in December that prohibited the coverage of the attention affirmed by gender for trans children of members of the service, so the attention was already prohibited.
According to transmarine military restriction of the Trump administration, the members of the Transgender Service fell into two categories: exempt, which means that they came out as trans before the restriction and were allowed to continue serving openly and received medical care related to the transition, And not exempt, which means they came. It was after the restriction and had to continue serving as its sex assigned to birth and could not have any attention related to the transition covered by Tricare that is not the therapy. That policy also completely prohibited trans people openly enlisting.
At that time, the Administration said that politics was not a “trans prohibition”, as mentioned widely, because it allowed the members of the service to request an exemption. Although during the four years it was in force, only an exemption was publicly reported.
“A person can take a minimum of 12 months to complete the treatments after the so -called transition surgery, which often implies the use of heavy narcotics,” says the White House document on Trump’s new trans trans order. “At this time, they are not physically able to meet military preparation requirements and continue to require constant medical attention. This is not conducive to implementation or other preparation requirements. “
The document alleges that the Biden order that undoes Trump’s last restriction to the trans people served in the Army ordered the Department of Defense to pay the transition surgeries of the service members, as well as those of their dependent children, At a cost of millions of dollars to the dollars to the US taxpayer. ”
The Defense Department does not publicly inform how many trans people serve in the Army, and estimates vary widely. A 2014 report from the Williams Institute in UCLA using data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey of 2011 found that around 15,500 transgender people were serving in the Army. A 2016 Report of the Rand Corp. Builts of the Department of Defense of the previous data and investigations (including the Williams Institute report) found that there were a maximum of 10,790 trans people that served in the army and reservations, although it discovered that the figure It could also be as low as 2,150.
A report of the Congress Research Service that was updated this month found that from 2016 to 2021, the Defense Department spent about $ 15 million in care related to the transition (surgical and non -surgical) to 1,892 members of the active service service . Of that amount, $ 11.5 million were for psychotherapy and $ 3.1 million to surgeries, according to Military.com, citing the data of the Department of Defense provided to the output.
Emily Shilling, a Navy commander, has served in the army since 2005 and is Sparta president, a trans defense group. Shilling came out as a transgender woman in April 2019, shortly after Trump’s first trans military restrictions entered into force, and was required to continue serving in a way that was aligned with his birth sex. When Biden raised those restrictions in 2021, he was able to go to work, he said. When asked about Trump’s new order that restricts Trans Military Service, Chelines, who emphasized that he was not speaking in the name of the Navy or the Pentagon, said she and other members of the trans service “just want to continue serving.”
“I want to continue using the skills that this nation invested in me as a pilot and combat leader,” he added. “Since I went out as a transgender in 2019, I have served with distinction, winning a promotion with distinction as the best officer of my community. My country has given me a lot, serving it has been the greatest honor of my life. “
One of the other orders that Trump signed on Monday, entitled “Restoring the United States Fight Force”, prohibits programs for diversity, equity and inclusion in the army, dissolving Dei’s offices within the Departments of Defense and National Security and demand the secretary of both United United departments. Curricula of states’ service academies to ensure that they eliminate the “radical ideologies of dei e gender”.
In a publication shared on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote, in part, “no more from @Deptofdefense” and “There are no exceptions, name changes or delays.” The publication included a photo of a handwritten note that said: “Those who do not meet will not work here anymore.”
Restricting diversity initiatives and reversing the efforts of the transgender rights of the Biden era have been the main priorities for Trump in the first days of his second mandate. Hours after its inauguration, he issued dozens of executive orders, including a declaring that the United States government will recognize only two sexes, men and women, and other Final Dei programs within federal agencies. As a result of the order with respect to the gender, the State Department suspended last week all passport requests that request changes of sex marker.
