One week into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, executive orders barring “gender ideology” were doled out, affecting policy for research, education, federal departments — and the military.
The order, entitled Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness, effectively rendered those who experience or have recently experienced gender dysphoria “unfit” to serve.
Last month, Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Defense, sent out an official memo declaring a pause on all ascensions for those with a history of gender dysphoria, as well as pausing all scheduled or unscheduled procedures associated with a gender transition for service members.
In response to the initial order, six transgender service members filed a lawsuit against Trump seeking to halt the prohibition of transgender individuals from enlisting and serving in the Armed Forces.
After almost two months in court, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration on Tuesday, halting the Department of Defense from carrying out policy directives.
The strongly worded decision, which cited the Fifth Amendment, was delivered by U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes and won’t take effect until Friday, as Reyes provided the administration with time to appeal it.
While Reyes wrote that the President does have an obligation to ensure military readiness, she said the policy that ensures so must be balanced with the right to equal protection.
“The Court’s opinion is long, but its premise is simple, Reyes said. “In the self-evident truth that ‘all people are created equal,’ all means all. Nothing more. And certainly nothing less.”
While there is a lack of recent data on how many members of the military identify as transgender or have experienced gender dysphoria, some agencies have attempted to estimate. The Department of Defense released a study in 2020 which estimated that around 8000 individuals were serving in active duty positions, which would amount to under 1% of the roughly 1.3 million people serving worldwide.
Despite the court’s decision to side with service members, some say they have already felt the effect of Trump’s orders.
For one naval officer in San Diego, who preferred to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, the pause on gender-affirming care provided through the military has brought plans of completing her transition to a screeching halt. After three years on hormones, she said her two remaining surgeries have been canceled.
“It felt like someone was pulling a rug out from underneath me and basically taking my rights away. How I commonly refer to gender care is it’s a medical diagnosis like that is gender dysphoria,” she said. “So right now, I see this as blatant discrimination, and unfortunately, at my level, I can’t do anything about it. It takes thousands of us to rally against it.”
The officer who has served in the Navy for 16 years, said she came out as a trans woman in 2021 following Biden’s repeal of Trump’s 2019 ban on transgender service members, and began the several-month-long process of getting approved by the military to medically transition.
“When I joined, it was still ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and then kind of a couple years later, there was some talk about trans sailors. And I started thinking to myself, I’ve been having this identity crisis and these emotions for most of my life. Maybe now is the right time to act on it.”
After beginning her transition, she said that the prospect of losing access to hormones and healthcare in addition to the possibility of having to abide by male grooming standards and living arrangements is something she cannot stand for. That drove her to make her own drastic choice to end her career with the U.S. Navy.
“Me, personally, I feel like I have given more to the military than they have offered me,” she said.
“And even though I’ve had 16 years of service, just last week, I submitted my voluntary separation request. The conversation I had with my chain of command was that these last four or five months have been the most stressful of my entire career; being shot at wasn’t even close to the mental struggle that a lot of us are going through right now.”
Sam Rodriquez, an active-duty naval officer in San Diego, enlisted into the military in 2015 with an openly queer identity, came out as a trans-masculine nonbinary person in 2017, and began gender-affirming care in 2018.
Not wanting to serve during “Don’t ask, Don’t tell,” Rodriquez went to college and earned two bachelor’s degrees. Five years after finishing school and four years after the policy was repealed, they decided to follow their desire and join the armed forces.
During Trump’s first term in office, Rodriquez said that they were protected under a legacy clause for the 2019 executive orders, while others weren’t so fortunate.
“I got to continue to serve, my career and my education didn’t go on hold. However, I did watch others who were forced to hide their identity or leave service earlier than they expected or not even get to come in at all,” they said.
“It was just a really harsh reminder that my service was entirely dependent on policies that could change with political ties and with executive orders, you know, the strike of a pen, anything can change, really within the military.”
The language of Trump’s most recent executive order concerning the military attributes the exclusion of transgender people to improving unit cohesion, which Rodriquez said they believe is being degraded by drastic policy changes back and forth in the past few years.
“It was constantly policy whiplash. And, you know, the military is built on trust and discipline and teamwork, but when the policies become unpredictable or become exclusionary, then it really undermines all of that value that we’re taught to have.”
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