President Trump Monday was set to ban transgender people from serving in the military and scrap diversity and inclusion programs in the ranks.
With a stroke of a pen, Trump is set to further roll back former President Biden’s 2021 order permitting trans servicemembers to openly serve.
He also ordered an end to programs designed to assist troops who are members of racial minority groups and disadvantaged backgrounds and reinstated GIs who defied COVID vaccine mandates during the pandemic with back pay.
Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he was eager to get to work implementing the latest in a flurry of executive orders from the new president without delay.
“It’s an honor to salute smartly as I did as a junior officer and now as the Secretary of Defense to ensure these orders are complied with rapidly and quickly,” Hegseth said.
Trans advocates slammed the move as openly discriminatory and vowed to challenge it in court.
Trump also planned to sign an order proposing a new state-of-the-art missile defense system for the U.S.
Hegseth has long championed big changes in the military culture, including ending DEI practices and targeting so-called “woke” generals.
The former Fox News host had previously said women should not serve in combat roles, but soft-pedaled those statements during his Senate confirmation hearing, which saw him prevail with Vice President J.D. Vance casting a vote to break a 50-50 tie.
Trump’s most controversial Pentagon order by far is the trans ban, which could immediately affect an estimated 15,000 transgender American soldiers serving today.
Trump had already revoked Biden’s groundbreaking decision to allow openly trans people to serve and protecting them from being discharged due to their identity.
But the new order goes further by laying out controversial claims that transgender people could be inherently unfit to serve because the process of transitioning to a new gender often involves drugs that could impact readiness.
“Unit cohesion requires high levels of integrity and stability among servicemembers,” states a fact sheet for Monday’s order. “It can take a minimum of 12 months for an individual to complete treatments after transition surgery, which often involves the use of heavy narcotics.”
Doctors who treat transgender patients say such concerns are overblown at best and drugs are only used for about a month in most cases.
The order also prohibits transgender women service members from “using or sharing sleeping, changing, or bathing in facilities designated for females.”’
It directs Hegseth to bar “the use of invented and identification-based pronouns” within the Pentagon.
The order calls transgender people “trans-identifying,” an apparent effort to avoid recognizing transgender people as a real group.
Trump already signed an executive order proclaiming that all people must be categorized as either men and women, a move that could pave the way to widespread discriminatory practices against transgender and non-binary people.
