Braxton Taylor
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is developing an executive order that would medically discharge the estimated 15,000 transgender service members from the military, according to several international news outlets. The sudden dismissal of so many troops would prove chaotic, advocates supporting LGBTQ+ service members say, and the military services would be forced to fill gaps and compensate for a loss of experience at a time when recruiting remains a struggle.
Trump transition team spokesperson Karoline Leavitt did not deny the accuracy of the reports when emailed by Military.com, but said that “no decisions on this issue have been made.”
“These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about,” she added.
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The proposed plan, as first reported by the Times of London, would entail signing an order within days of Trump taking office to medically discharge transgender troops.
Typically, medical discharges require that service members go through rounds of hearings before medical professionals who determine whether a condition prevents them from fully serving in the military — a process that can last months. The sudden nature of the proposed discharges could mean that service members near key milestones for benefits would be booted from the military before becoming eligible. Some of those service duration-based benefits include the level of retirement pay they may receive, as well as whether they can receive help paying for college or other education benefits.
SPARTA Pride, a nonprofit organization supporting current and prior transgender service members, told Military.com in an emailed statement that there are approximately 15,000 transgender Americans serving and stationed around the world and in combat.
Additionally, SPARTA Pride detailed that many of these service members come with a wide range of experience, stating that “the average transgender service member is a senior NCO with 12 years’ experience and at least two deployments.”
The mechanics of removing that many service members at once could hamper the Defense Department as the new administration takes over, said Lucas F. Schleusener, a former Department of Defense appointee during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Schleusener, who is now the CEO of Out in National Security, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ+ service members and those involved with national security, told Military.com that, should the Trump administration’s plan come to fruition, it would be the “bureaucratic equivalent of a traffic jam.”
“That would require a lot of focus and bureaucratic commitment at a time where the incoming administration has discussed both purging the military of officers they find sufficiently disloyal and purging the civil service of people that they think do not support them,” Schleusener told Military.com. “It would be a monumental act of bureaucratic violence targeted toward people who have been serving for 5,10, 15, 20 years in the nation’s service and have done remarkable things.”
Transgender service members have faced a wildly inconsistent policy landscape over the past 8 years, going from an Obama-era decision to allow them to serve openly, to a reversal during Trump’s first term.
Trump revealed that decision by announcing the repeal of Obama’s 2016 policy over three Twitter (now called X) social media posts. The new policy became colloquially known as the “trans ban” in the halls of the Pentagon, and was aimed at keeping trans people from joining the military. It was initially blocked by four separate court rulings, but nearly two years later in 2019, the policy was ultimately allowed to go into effect.
President Joe Biden reversed it when he took office in 2021, and any change now would likely face extensive court challenges, just as Trump’s policy did in 2017.
The Trump campaign focused extensively on attacking trans people and their growing acceptance in American society, especially highlighting a handful of cases of trans teenagers competing in women’s sports and insinuating that trans Americans are inherently sexual predators in discussing the use of bathrooms, although there is no evidence that there is any systemic increase in sexual assaults when people are permitted to select a bathroom based on gender identity. However, research has indicated that students who are forced to use locker rooms based on their sex assigned at birth when it is in opposition to their gender identity face increased instances of sexual assault themselves.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” — a collection of conservative policies for the next Republican administration developed by the think tank — called for a renewal of a ban on trans troops last spring mirroring the executive order that is reportedly under consideration by Trump.
The plan called for a potential Trump administration to “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military,” arguing that “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should be ended.”
In the first five years after the Obama administration began supporting transgender service members serving openly, the military spent a total of $15 million on care related to their gender identity, according to reporting by Military.com, with $11.5 million spent on mental health care, and $3.1 million, or $620,000 per year, for surgeries. For comparison, the Defense Department spent $84 million on erectile dysfunction drugs in 2015 alone, according to data obtained by Military Times.
During the campaign, Trump sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and some of its more extreme policy suggestions, which ranged from banning pornography to eliminating the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service.
But, after winning the election, Trump has tapped several top Project 2025 staffers for key jobs in his new administration and some of its suggestions — like slashing the number of generals and admirals in the military — are now being openly discussed.
Suddenly cutting 15,000 service members would be a substantial loss to the services if such a move were to go through, Schleusener said, especially at a time where all the services have just begun to recover from several years of missing or nearly missing their recruiting goals.
“In an era of recruiting challenges, readiness, recruitment and retention should be the priority, not radical social experiments,” Schleusener said. “We can’t really afford to lose a single service member.”
— Patricia Kime contributed to this report.
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