Trump extends transgender ban for armed forces

President Trump followed through Friday on his promise to remove transgender Americans from military service, issuing an order for an outright ban to take effect in seven months — but appearing to leave room for military leaders to talk him out of it.

In a directive to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the still-unnamed secretary of Homeland Security, Trump said the armed forces will “return to the long-standing policy and practice” of transgender exclusion as of March 23. On the same day, he said, the military must halt all spending on sex-reassignment surgeries.

Those orders would reinstate policies that President Barack Obama had repealed in June

2016.

Trump also ordered continuation of a policy prohibiting enlistment of transgender troops, which had been scheduled to expire in January.

The president said, however, that no one would be removed from service until Mattis determined “how to address transgender individuals currently serving,” a determination that must be “consistent with military effectiveness and lethality, budgetary constraints, and applicable law.” Trump also said Mattis could “advise me at any time, in writing, that a change to this (exclusion) policy is warranted.”

Military officials have been unenthusiastic about the new policy Trump announced July 26 in a series of tweets. “After consultation with my Generals and military experts,” whom he did not identify, “the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military,” he wrote.

The Pentagon, which Mattis heads, said at the time it would not interpret Trump’s tweets as an order. The Coast Guard’s commanding officer said he would support service members regardless of gender identity. A group of current and retired professors at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey estimated the cost of discharging all transgender service members, and recruiting and training their replacements, at $960 million — more than 100 times the cost of health care for transgender service members that Trump warned of in his tweets.

Out of 1.3 million current service members, a Rand Corp. study commissioned by the Obama administration has estimated transgender members at somewhere between 1,320 and 6,630. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School has put the figure at up to 15,000.

Five unidentified transgender service members filed suit in federal court after Trump’s earlier announcement, arguing that their exclusion would violate their constitutional right of equality and would also punish them illegally for coming forward in reliance on Obama’s change of policy.

Lawyers in the case will now ask for a nationwide injunction to prevent Trump’s order from taking effect, said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco. He called the order “a senseless and unprecedented attack on dedicated service members” and said any appearance that it would leave Mattis with decision-making authority was illusory.

Trump is actually directing Mattis to “get rid of as many of them as he can, as quickly as he can,” Minter said. He said the policy was already being carried out: Transgender service members have told his organization that they are being prevented from re-enlisting or from being commissioned as officers, and that scheduled health care treatments are being canceled.

Minter noted that Obama had announced his policy change, allowing transgender people to serve openly in the armed forces, after the Rand Corp. study concluded that they would cause no disruption to the military mission and only minimal costs in health care.

However, Trump, who said in last month’s tweets that the military should not be “burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption” of transgender service, stuck to that position in Friday’s order.

“In my judgment, the previous administration failed to find a sufficient basis to conclude that terminating the (government’s) long-standing policy and practice would not hinder military effectiveness and lethality, disrupt unit cohesion, or tax military resources,” he said.