- Uncertainty looms over Trump’s order that could ban transgender people from military service.
- “This is the end of a career that I love,” a Navy officer told BI.
- The Pentagon has 60 days to implement policies related to Trump’s order.
A reckoning that transgender troops long feared arrived last week in an executive order from their new commander in chief.
For them, President Donald Trump’s executive order accusing them of “expressing a false ‘gender identity'” marks what’s likely to be a bitter closing chapter to their military careers if the Defense Department reimposes a ban.
“This is the end of a career that I love, the end of a life of service that I have chosen and committed to,” said Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan, a program officer with the Office of Naval Research who is transgender. “I have 14 years of active-duty service, including enlisted duty and officer time. I have a pretty wide scope of operational and just general military-relevant experience, and it will be very, very hard on me and very sad to let go of that.”
The Pentagon has 60 days to implement policies related to Trump’s order that could have dire implications for nearly 15,000 transgender troops.
“One of the scariest things about this is that we’re not sure exactly how it’s going to get implemented,” a staff member with Modern Military Association of America, the largest nonprofit organization in the US supporting LGBTQ+ military, told Business Insider. “That’s what’s scary about EOs, particularly these EOs, is that you put the burden on the agencies to figure out what compliance looks like.”
The Defense Department declined to answer questions about how their forthcoming policy would impact active-duty transgender personnel.
It’s still unclear what policy enforcement could look like. The executive order directs the Pentagon to update medical standards for service members, prohibit the use of pronouns other than an individual’s birth sex, and ban individuals from using facilities for sleeping, changing, and bathing that do not correspond to their sex assigned at birth.
Trump also revoked the Biden-era policy allowing all qualified Americans to serve in the military, which reversed the previous ban on transgender members from service implemented during Trump’s first term.
The order does not explicitly call for the immediate discharge of active-duty transgender troops, but it “sets the stage for potential future removals based on medical standards we’re not sure of yet,” the official said, who asked to remain anonymous due to LGBTQ-targeted harassment and doxxing campaigns.
The Trump administration has already started removing transgender troops and rejecting transgender military applicants, according to an emergency legal filing obtained by Reuters.
“There are thousands of us currently serving,” Morgan told Business Insider. “Those are trained and experienced personnel who will be removed from their jobs, and that can take years to a decade or more to replace, depending on the experience level and the specialty of the person.”
Alaina Kupec, a former US naval intelligence officer, told Business Insider that the “medical conditions or physical defects” mentioned in the executive order of being transgender is “such a tiny part of who we are. Kupec, who transitioned in 2012, said the recovery time and post-operation treatments related to a physical transition is “such an afterthought.”
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Kupec said the Trump order seeks to “spread falsehoods and to dehumanize the community because it’s not based in reality, it’s not based in medical evidence, it’s not based in the lived experience of people who are serving our country.”
Morgan said the order sends a message to US troops that “no matter who you are, no matter what demographic group you belong to, your service may not be valued as much as somebody else’s service simply because of who you are.”
“We are no different than any other service member,” she said. “We meet the same physical standards, we meet the same medical readiness standards. If you are actively serving, if you are deployed and doing your job, that means you have met those standards.”
As Morgan weighs her options for the future, she said she has met with her chain of command to discuss possible courses of action pending the Defense Department’s policies.
Critics say the order threatens military readiness
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
Transgender personnel make up a fraction of the over 1 million active-duty troops. But 73% of trans service members are senior personnel, some of whom have up to two decades of military experience.
Morgan falls into that demographic as a Ph.D. level research physiologist for the Navy — one of 15 on active duty, she said. Exiting service would leave her department with a leadership gap, she said.
“I’m at a point in my career as a field grade officer where the expectation is that I take on greater responsibility and leadership roles, so that’s going to be a gap at that command,” she said. “They’re not going to have the field grade officer in a leadership role that they were expecting.”
Kupec said the potential removal of transgender troops would hurt national security.
“They’re serving in the Red Sea, they’re serving the Asia Pacific region, and if we’re going to have to force them out of their commands, that’s going to leave a gap in readiness,” Kupec said. “Many of them are leaders, it’s going to leave a gap in command structures.”
The Modern Military official said the order could spark fears for other marginalized groups in the military.
“I’m speculating, but let’s say you’re a cis-gendered lesbian or gay person in the military, and you see your trans friend get kicked out,” the official said. “You got to be thinking, ‘Are we going back in the closet? Is ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ coming back? Am I next?’ There are a lot more scary places this could go, and it would be naive to assume it stops here.”
