In 2021, Former President Joe Biden signed an executive order that allowed for transgender troops to serve more openly in the military. But within the first few months of taking office, President Donald Trump enforced a Department of Defense policy that prohibits transgender people from serving in the military on May 14.
Seven current transgender members of the military, alongside two transgender people who were interested in enlisting, traveled to the Nation’s capital to challenge this policy. The bill does not explicitly say that transgender people can’t join the military, however Trump recently issued many executive orders and policies that aimed to prohibit people that are transgender from joining the military.
Trump stated he doesn’t want transgender people in the military, so it was no surprise when he made these new executive orders and policies. At a rally in North Carolina in August of last year Trump said he wanted to make changes to the transgender military personnel policies. “If you want to have a sex change or a social justice seminar, then you can do it somewhere else, but you’re not going to do it in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, Space Force, or the United States Marines — sorry,” Trump said
Trump’s new orders label transgender as “racial gender ideology”, not directly labeling it and using broad and dismissive terminology. In 2017, during Trump’s first term in office, he posted several times on Twitter about wanting to ban any people that were transgender from joining the military. He has continuously talked about his goals to do so over the past eight years. An estimated 15,000 people in the military could be affected by these new policies. An estimated $20 million is spent on their training for each soldier, meaning if these people are discharged the money spent on training would be put to use.
The three Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court say they would have denied the government’s request to pass these new policies. Peter Hegseth has 30 days to submit a plan on how to handle the military’s losses with these new policies and until then, the details of how these new executive orders will turn out are unsettled.
