President Donald Trump is set to sign three executive orders on Monday involving the U.S. military, including banning transgender service members, eliminating military DEI programs, and reinstating service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
The only rationale I’ve seen consistently is that it’s expensive to care for trans people.
I was in and diagnosed with gender dysphoria within about a week of Trump’s initial tweet saying he was banning trans people. For about 2 months there it was a bit up in the air whether or not I’d get discharged or not. Ultimately was grandfathered in.
It’s not an issue of hormones being available in the field, you can be deployed with a years supply no problem. That said the way the policy worked is you can’t start HRT while deployed. (Presumably because of the increased burden of regular blood draws earlier on) If you were seeking to transition you needed the approval of your commanding officer, and that could be denied only if you were deployable and hadn’t deployed yet.
There was also the option in there for your CO to basically grant you a year to go to college or something while transitioning to generally make integration smoother, so you wouldn’t be stuck dealing with second puberty and regular military service at the same time. Though I have no idea if anyone actually got that. I know at least on person who didn’t, or didn’t take it anyway.
There’s a bunch more nuance, rules, and tricky ways people got fucked over by their commands myself included. But at the end of the day, it really caused basically no problems overall while it was an option. And frankly if you can drag a CPAP machine on deployment trans people are less of a logistical nightmare and shouldn’t make the top 10 of medical issues that actually might warrant discharge.