President Donald Trump has issued an order supporting his push to ban most transgender troops from serving in the U.S. military except under “limited circumstances.” But the decision is expected to be the subject of an ongoing legal fight in the months ahead.
The White House announced the decision late Friday, shortly after the president arrived at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, completing a process that followed Trump’s surprise announcement on Twitter last year that he would reverse an Obama administration plan to allow transgender individuals to serve openly.
In a memo to the president, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis pointed to “substantial risks” with allowing military personnel who seek to undertake a treatment to change their gender or who question their gender identity.
Mattis also said exempting those in the military from “well-established mental health, physical health and sex-based standards” applying to all service members could hurt “military effectiveness and lethality.” But the policy includes narrow exemptions allowing some transgender members to serve.
The Pentagon has not released data on the number of transgender people serving, but a Rand Corp. study previously estimated between 1,320 and 6,630, out of 1.3 million active-duty troops.
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