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Trump’s plan to ban on transgender Americans from the military, explained
The administration aims to discharge transgender troops within 60 days.
Patrick Reis was the senior politics and ideas editor at Vox. He previously worked at Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Politico, National Journal, and Seattle’s Real Change News. As a reporter and editor, he has worked on coverage of campaign politics, economic policy, the federal death penalty, climate change, financial regulation, and homelessness.
Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s plan to kick transgender service members out of the US military, part of a broader administration effort to erase trans Americans from public life.
What’s the latest? A new Pentagon memo calls on the head of each military branch to identify trans people within 30 days and to begin the honorable discharge process within another 30 days.
Who’s covered in this ban? The rules apply to anyone with gender dysphoria, the feeling of psychological and emotional distress around gender identity. The memo says transgender service members can apply for waivers under very narrow circumstances.
The Washington Post reports that transgender rights advocates estimate there are up to 15,000 trans members serving in the military.
What’s the stated rationale? The memo is an offshoot of President Donald Trump’s January order barring trans people from joining the military. That order stated that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
But Mark Milley, Trump’s first-term chair of the joint chiefs, told Congress in 2018 that he had “received precisely zero reports of issues of cohesion, discipline, morale, and all those sorts of things” due to the inclusion of transgender troops.
Can Trump do this? Advocates’ lawsuit aiming to overturn the ban is in front of a federal judge and will likely go up the judicial ladder. When Trump barred transgender individuals from joining the military during his first term, the Supreme Court allowed that ban to go into effect while litigation was ongoing. That litigation was still pending when Joe Biden took office and reversed the ban.
What’s the big picture? The Trump administration has taken several steps to invalidate trans identities, arguing people should be bound by the biological sex they’re assigned at birth. In this case, that means taking people who’ve agreed to serve their country — and then disqualifying them based on their identity.
And with that, it’s time to log off …
This newsletter ends the way it does because there is good in this world — and much good we can still do in this world. My colleague Bryan Walsh is starting a newsletter devoted to that proposition. If you want a Saturday email chronicling “the positive developments that often get lost in the noise of our news cycle,” you can sign up here. I’m really excited about this and hope you’ll enjoy it as well. See you back here tomorrow.
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