Trump’s Order on Transgender Troops Will Likely Ban Their Service, Again

Hours after President Trump signed a darkly worded executive order targeting transgender service members, rights groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday saying that the ban violates the Constitution.

The order framed transgender service members in harsh terms, saying the military had been “afflicted with radical gender ideology” that had crippled its effectiveness.

The statement does not use the word “transgender” but appears to call for a ban on transgender people serving, saying that “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 authorizes the Defense Department to make rules that would effectively bar transgender troops by considering identifying as a gender other than the one assigned at birth as disqualifying for military service.

“It really is the nuclear option, it is really as sweeping as can be,” said Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “The only impact this will have is to exclude service members who are otherwise qualified and meeting the same standards as everyone else.”

The center, along with the GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, filed the suit challenging the ban on behalf of six active service members and two individuals who are seeking to enlist.

One of the plaintiffs, Nicolas Talbott, 31, of Akron, Ohio, said he had just completed officer candidate school in Fort Moore, Ga., and had been looking forward to returning to his reserve unit this weekend.

“My bag is all packed, I’m so excited to go and finally get to do this. And we get this memorandum and — it’s a bummer,” said Mr. Talbott, who is a second lieutenant.

The first Trump administration in 2017 banned transgender recruits from joining the military and prevented active-duty troops from beginning to transition, but allowed troops who had already started to transition in uniform before the ban to continue to serve. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. overturned the ban in January 2021.

This week’s order gives the Defense Department 30 days to shape the specifics of a new ban, and allows the military 60 days to implement them.

It is unclear what shape the new policy will take, but transgender rights advocates say the order’s strident language suggests the Trump administration may be considering a total ban, which could lead to the discharge of thousands of active-duty troops.

Many of those troops are senior personnel with years of expensive training. They are pilots, flight nurses, nuclear reactor supervisors, special operations medics, explosive ordnance disposal technicians, air-defense missile battery commanders and cyberwarfare planners — people who are hard to replace.

There is no official count of how many transgender people currently serve in the military. In response to queries from The New York Times, the Defense Department and the military branches said they considered that data to be private as it pertains to an individual’s health care and there is no centralized tracking.

The transgender service member advocacy group SPARTA Pride estimates there are 15,000 to 25,000 transgender troops serving, or slightly more than 1 percent of the force.

Mr. Trump’s order says that defending the United States “requires a singular focus on developing the requisite warrior ethos” — without defining that ethos — and that “the pursuit of military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas or other ideologies harmful to unit cohesion.”

The administration did not offer evidence that the presence of transgender troops harmed the military’s ability to carry out missions, nor did it say how they harmed unit cohesion.

Mr. Minter said the caustic language in the order may lead to its being found unconstitutional.

“This language clearly shows unconstitutional animus toward a group of people,” Mr. Minter said. “In America, we’re not allowed to make laws against people just because we don’t like them.”

When his group sued the Trump administration over the previous ban in 2017, he said, “We had to connect the dots and suggest that animus was behind the policy. Now we don’t have to connect the dots, they are right there. Frankly, I’m surprised how blunt they were. And while this is vicious and painful to read, it will really help us fight this.”

Current military policy requires all service members to coordinate any medical procedure with their chain of command to minimize disruptions. In more than a dozen interviews, trans troops who transitioned while on active duty said they often voluntarily delayed procedures so they could complete deployments or vital training. All said they were able to transition at their own pace without disruptions.

One of them, Capt. Katie Benn — an Army air defense artillery officer stationed at Fort Sill, Okla. — enlisted in 2012 as a man, unaware that she was transgender.

“It was only after serving in the Army for a while and being exposed to a broad array of people that I started to understand myself,” she said in an interview.

Captain Benn became an officer and deployed to South Korea. After nearly a decade in uniform, she realized that feelings she had experienced since growing up in a conservative part of Oklahoma meant she was transgender.

She began to transition in 2021, through counseling and hormone treatment. In 2023, Captain Benn officially changed her gender to female in the Army’s personnel system. A short time later, she deployed for 16 months to Saudi Arabia, where she commanded an air-defense missile battery.

“It was pretty seamless. I was the only female in the unit at first, but it wasn’t a topic of conversation,” Captain Benn said. “I was lucky to only be judged by the quality of my work, and I can honestly say my team saved lives.”

If she had a chance to talk to the president directly, she said, “I wish I could tell him there are transgender service members going downrange right now, going into combat zones, doing the job, and it’s really no big deal.”

Zach Montague contributed reporting from Washington, and Rachel Nostrant from New York.