The fate of the trans military ban still hangs in the balance, but on Tuesday, a federal judge pressed the Justice Department’s lawyer on the clear, discriminatory intent of President Donald Trump’s order to ban transgender troops from the military and its claims that trans people posed any threat to military readiness.
US District Judge Ana Reyes questioned Department of Justice Attorney Jason Lynch for hours, saying the order smeared thousands of trans troops as dishonest and undisciplined. Judge Reyes will rule whether to block the order after hearing more arguments today, and again on March 3.
Trump signed “Prioritizing Military Excellence And Readiness;” during his second week in office. On February 7, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent a memo to senior military leaders enacting Trump’s order. It forbid openly trans people from enlisting in the military and cancelled gender-related surgery and new hormone prescriptions for active duty service members.
“Individuals with gender dysphoria have volunteered to serve our country and will be treated with dignity and respect,” Hegseth wrote, apparently with respect.
The memo, and a later post on the Army’s X account, are steps toward Trump’s plan to rid a US military that’s “affiliated with radical gender ideology” of transgender people, which the order deemed physically, and apparently morally, incapable of military service.
“Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” the order reads.
This line is the ideological core of the argument Trump, Hegseth, and far-right think tanks like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation are making against transgender troops: A trans soldier, regardless of rank, of ability, and of importance to a military project, mission or team, is unsuitable for duty because they are trans.
Trump gave Hegseth 30 days to outline the ban, and 60 days to implement it. Neither the order, or the subsequent memo, were a surprise.
Let’s Return to Trump 1.0
Trump’s victory in November virtually guaranteed a trans military ban. His crusade began in 2017, when he tweeted he was banning trans people from the military because his generals told him to, citing the “burden” of “tremendous costs”—which came as a surprise to those generals and other military leaders at the Pentagon.
The ACLU sued and four separate courts blocked Trump’s ban. Then in 2019 the Supreme Court let it go into effect while the case proceeded. But shortly after taking office in 2021, Joe Biden signed an executive order overturning it.
Trump lied about the “tremendous cost” of trans healthcare. Between 2016 and 2021, the Defense Health Administration spent $15 million on surgery, hormones and therapy for 1,892 transgender service members. That’s an average of $3 million per year, or about $1,500 per soldier per year. The RAND Corporation put it slightly higher at $8.4 million a year. The average, in practice, is probably even lower. Not all transgender personnel would medically transition, and routine care like hormone replacement therapy is not especially expensive. (LGBTQ think tank the Palm Center estimated it closer to $656 more per soldier per year).
For those who know nothing about military spending, $3 million may sound like a lot. But the DoD budget was $820 billion in fiscal year 2023. For the math fans, $3 million is 0.000366% of $820 billion. If we take the highest yearly estimate from RAND—$8 million—that’s still just 0.001 percent of the budget. A single F-35 fighter jet costs like ten times that, but in Trump’s defense, an F-35 can go faster than a trans person can. But as conservatives love to point out, the Pentagon wastes a ton of money. Like the time the Air Force paid $4.2 million for soap dispensers in C-17 aircraft, or 80 times the price of similar commercially-available dispensers, according to a watchdog report from a Defense Department inspector general.
So cost is obviously not the reason. That leaves ideology.
Those driving the bus on the far-right (wildly, scarily, arguably constitutional crisis-ly) call trans medicine a lot of things—evil, perverse, surgical mutilation, chemical castration, yadda yadda yadda—which can be fiscally summed up as “unnecessary” in their view. Unnecessary spending is wasteful, and a “wasted” $3 million per year is less efficient than an unwasted zero million.
This is the military, people. Essentials only, like bombs for proxy wars we are “not” fighting, and boner pills, on which the DHA spent nearly $300 million between 2011 and 2015 for active personnel and retirees. This is not an original joke, but I’m not joking.
Erectile dysfunction is a real, legitimate medical condition that can lead to feelings of embarrassment, isolation, depression, and low self-worth. The treatment is a little blue pill or a little yellow one (unlike the Matrix, the same thing happens). If soldiers and veterans get their healthcare through the DoD, it’s DoD’s responsibility to provide the treatment. It would be obviously wrong for the government to deny soldiers (and their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, and nonbinary slam-pieces) pleasure and sexuality, as well as comfort with their own bodies, over an objection to an erection.
When people enter the military they trade the possibility of dying very early for the guarantee the government will provide for them and their family. Refusal to treat any medical condition is a violation of that promise. (Some guy LBJ drafted to fight in Vietnam lost some good, hard years in the jungle. Give him a boner. My grandfather’s friends did not storm the beaches of Normandy for the US government to skimp on boners).
It’s also a risk: The military wants a soldier to do his job, not to limp on a sprained ankle, or ruminate on a limp something else. His job might be pretty important. It might involve a big gun, or a missile, or guarding something we don’t even know about yet. I believe that’s “mission critical” in military jargon.
Trans people will continue to join the military even if they’re not welcome, just as gays did during (and before) the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell era. Forcing people to stay closeted while the government denies health care that improves their mental well-being is like taking a rake from the garage and stepping on it because you think the rake is really a shovel.
The suggestion that you can cut transgender people out of the military with zero consequences assumes those people don’t occupy important positions, play essential roles on their team, or that the army has not invested hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to develop them over their careers.
This argument for a “stronger” American military—that soldiers too different will not form cohesive units, harmony would turn to discord, and the nation would be at grave risk—is nearly as old as the American military itself. The targets, justifications and reasoning for excluding people have changed. The results have not: Black and white soldiers could fight together, as could men and women, even if they were gay. Trans people are trans. Cis people are cis. But trans people and cis people are both people, and all people can work together, especially if, you know, that’s an order, private.
As Judge Reyes said to DOJ attorney Lynch during yesterday’s hearing: “You and I both agree that the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them. Would you agree with that?”
Lynch “couldn’t say.” He also couldn’t say if Trump would call his order a trans ban if Reyes asked him.
“He would say, ‘Of course it is,’” Reyes said. “Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative.”
The Judge’s questions came less than a month after lawyers from GLAD Law and the National Center for Lesbian Rights sued the Trump administration on behalf of six trans people in the military, including a Major who received a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, a Captain, a Sergeant, and a Sailor of the Year Award winner in the Navy, and two more trans people who want to enlist. The lawyers argue the order violates equal protection under the 5th Amendment.
SPARTA, an advocacy group for trans people in the military, said in a statement that the thousands of fully-qualified trans people in the military should be allowed to serve.
“There's no reason to deny transgender Americans the opportunity to serve or limit access to medically necessary care that all service members are entitled to."
Army Maj. Alivia Stehlik, a transgender officer and army physical therapist, is director of holistic health and fitness for the 101st Airborne Division.
Stehlik served when Trump issued his first ban on trans troops. She served when Biden withdrew the ban. She’s serving now, and says Trump’s order and Hegseth’s memo haven’t changed her day to day one bit. In a 17-year military career, the army has deployed Stehlik around the world—to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Afghanistan, to the United Arab Emirates—because she, like every other active duty trans person in the military, meets the DoD’s standards for deployment.
Stehlik described coming out at work in 2017 like any trans person would describe coming out in any workplace: She sent an awkward email and went to work. That was it. She expected more, really, as her job as a physical therapist involves touching patients.
“I kept thinking it would be a thing,” she said. “It hasn’t ever been something that has become significant.”
If conservatives are committed to being the bad guy in a future biopic, let’s speak in the universal language of money, because their cissy military wouldn’t come cheap. Back in 2017, shortly after Trump tweeted his first master plan, LGBTQ think tank The Palm Center drafted a receipt: fully-discharging and removing roughly 12,000 trans troops would cost the government $960 million to recruit and train their replacements.
Back to the calculator, $960 million is 0.11 percent of $820 billion. Remember, gender-affirming care costs $3 million, or 0.000366 percent of $860 billion.
Let me illustrate this in type:
Neither is a big number, but notice how you can see one and not the other? Financial impact is like that. The government knows this.
How Many Trans People Does This Affect?
We don’t know for sure. The Department of Defense has never published a number.
The best guesses vary. In 2014, the Williams Institute at the Los Angeles School of Law published an analysis of data collected between 2008 and 2009 for the National Transgender Discrimination Survey that estimated about 8,800 trans active duty military and 6,700 trans National Guard and Reserve troops. An analysis from the Palm Center reached a similar estimate at 12,800, while the Rand Corporation figured lower at somewhere between 2,150 and 10,790.
While each estimate is only a small portion of the entire US military, as only between 0.6 and 1 percent of the population is trans, trans people are actually over represented in the military. Researchers at the Williams Institute estimated more than 20 percent of trans Americans had been in the military at some point, double the rate of the general population. So this ban has an explicitly outsized impact on the trans community.
However, with the data being so old, it’s unclear if that’s still true. If trans people anything like their younger cis millennial and Gen-Z peers, they’re way less likely to join than previous generations.
Even then, any generational trend wouldn’t account for the influence of the shifting legal landscape for trans people, or the destabilizing policy churn between Trump’s first ban on trans troops followed by the Biden era’s relative openness to trans people serving in the military.
If it stands that trans people are still twice as likely to join the military, the ban would be a hard hit to an already cash-strapped, resource-limited community: A few thousand people would lose health care today. Thousands more would lose out on a future job option.
Whatever your thoughts on the American military, if the government takes the right from trans people to decide whether or not to serve on their own terms, the government can justify excluding trans people from other areas of civic life.
Editor's Note: In a previous version of this story, we incorrectly stated that $960 million is 11 percent of $820 billion. It's .11 percent.
