Biden orders Pentagon to identify how many troops were affected by transgender ban
Transgender forces who were banned from serving by former President Donald Trump saw the policy reversed on Monday, as attorneys said thousands of service members may have been prevented from enlisting in the military during the last four years.
When Trump tweeted in July 2017 he was reinstating the ban, it put in limbo thousands of military personnel who had already come out publicly as transgender under the Defense Department’s previous policy which had allowed them to serve openly.
President Joe Biden rescinded the ban by executive order on Monday. “What I am doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform,” he said in the Oval Office as he signed the order.
Under the Biden order, the Defense Department is required to identify any transgender service member who was separated from military duty as a result of the ban and provide them the opportunity “to rejoin the military should they wish to do so and meet the current entry standards.”
“I am really exhaling today for the first time,” said Spc. Blaire McIntyre, a transgender Michigan National Guard service member who was in the middle of her own lawsuit seeking to stay in the military.
“It is a tremendous relief to know that I will now be able to go to work every day and give my all without worrying that I could be discharged just because of who I am,” McIntyre said in a statement through her attorneys at GLAD, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
The former ban may have kept thousands of transgender individuals from serving in the military, according to a November 2020 report by three surgeons general of the United States for the Palm Center, a research institute that studies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in the military.
Navy Vice Adm. Donald Arthur, Army Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock and U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Alan Steinman estimated in the report that Trump’s ban may have prevented as many as 1,235 transgender men and women a year from joining the military.
Trump’s policy grandfathered some transgender troops already serving as long as they had not undergone surgery to change their gender and they agreed to serve according to their biological gender, not as the gender they identified with, and also blocked new transgender recruits.
“The result was personal devastation for the individuals denied entry, and a military deprived of talent that it now must pay more money to secure, if it can secure it at all,” the surgeons general found.
The surgeons general based that finding on 2018 Defense Department data showing 8,980 transgender forces then serving on active duty and 5,727 in the National Guard and Reserve, and the number of recruitment-age eligible transgender men and women in the United States.
Five federal lawsuits were underway to challenge the ban. National Center for Lesbian Rights legal director Shannon Minter, an attorney representing one of those legal challenges, Doe v. Trump, said their next step is to make sure the Defense Department fully implements Biden’s executive order.
“Then all the lawsuits can be dismissed,” Minter said.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a statement, said the department would “expeditiously” work to implement the order and expected to have changes in place within the next 60 days.
The Defense Department will also again cover medical costs needed for transition, Austin said, “and will re-examine all cases of transgender Service members that may be in some form of adverse administrative proceedings.”
Minter said it is his hope that the last four years have not had a long-term impact on transgender people serving in the military.
“I hope and believe we really have turned a corner,” Minter said. “I think people are already seeing the past four years as an aberration of who we are and who we aspire to be as a country.”
This story was originally published January 25, 2021 at 12:10 PM with the headline "Biden orders Pentagon to identify how many troops were affected by transgender ban."
