Trump expected to sign executive order barring transgender people from military service

President Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders Monday that aim to restrict transgender people’s military service and crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the military.

The order regarding transgender service members and potential recruits will reinstate a policy Trump issued during his first term and rescind an order issued by former President Joe Biden that allowed trans people to enlist and permitted currently enlisted trans service members to receive coverage for transition-related medical care. 

The order will update “all Department of Defense medical standards to ensure they prioritize readiness and lethality,” according to a White House document on the upcoming executive order. It will also end the use of “invented and identification-based pronouns” in the military, prohibit people assigned male at birth from using women’s sleeping, changing or bathing facilities and bar coverage of transition-related medical care for currently enlisted service members and their families.  

The order will take time to implement, and as a result, currently serving transgender service members will not be immediately ejected. It’s unclear what will happen to service members who are currently 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 non-exempt, 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.”

The document alleges that Biden’s order undoing Trump’s last restriction on trans people serving in the military ordered the Department of Defense to “pay for service members’ transition surgeries, as well as those of their dependent children—at a cost of millions of dollars to the American taxpayer.” 

The Department of Defense doesn’t publicly report how many trans people are serving in the military, and estimates vary widely. One 2014 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA using data from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that about 15,500 transgender people were serving in the military. A 2016 report from the Rand Corporation drawing from Department of Defense data and previous research (including the Williams Institute report) found that there were a maximum of 10,790 trans people serving in the military and the reserves, though it found that figure could also be as low as 2,150.

A report by the Congressional Research Service that was updated earlier this month found that between 2016 and 2021, the Department of Defense spent about $15 million to provide transition-related care (surgical and nonsurgical) to 1,892 active duty service members. Of that amount, $11.5 million went to psychotherapy and $3.1 million to surgeries, according to Military.com, citing Defense Department data provided to the outlet.

One of the other orders Trump is expected to sign Monday will prohibit diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military, disbanding any DEI offices within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and requiring the secretaries of both departments to review United States Service Academies curricula to ensure that they eliminate “radical DEI and gender ideologies.” 

In a post shared Sunday on X, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote, in part, “No more DEI at @DeptofDefense” and “No exceptions, name-changes, or delays.” The post included a photo of a handwritten note that said, “Those who do not comply will no longer work here.”

Restricting diversity initiatives, and rolling back Biden-era transgender rights efforts have been top priorities for Trump in his second term. Hours after his inauguration, he issued dozens of executive orders, including one declaring that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and another ending DEI programs inside federal agencies. As a result of the order regarding gender, the State Department last week suspended all passport applications requesting sex-marker changes.