President Donald Trump is expected to sign a new executive order restricting transgender troops from serving in the military on Monday.
The new order requires Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to update medical standards to ensure they “prioritize readiness and lethality” and take action to “end the use of invented and identification-based pronouns” within DOD, per a White House document reviewed by Fox News Digital.
The order also restricts sleeping, changing and bathing facilities by biological sex. It’s not an immediate ban, but a direction for the secretary of Defense to implement such policies.
It revokes former President Joe Biden’s executive order the White House argues “allowed for special circumstances to accommodate ‘gender identity’ in the military – to the detriment of military readiness and unit cohesion.”
The order builds on another directive Trump issued last week that revoked a Biden-era order allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH SAYS ‘NO MORE DEI AT DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’: ‘NO EXCEPTIONS’
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to reinstate the ban on transgender troops he imposed during his first term. In his inauguration speech, he said he would formally recognize that there are only two genders: male and female.
Trump’s new order requires Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to update medical standards to ensure they “prioritize readiness and lethality” and take action to “end the use of invented and identification-based pronouns.” (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
There are an estimated 9,000 to 14,000 transgender service members – exact figures are not publicly available.
Between Jan. 1, 2016, and May 14, 2021, the DOD reportedly spent approximately $15 million on providing gender-affirming care (surgical and nonsurgical care) to 1,892 active duty service members, according to Congressional Research Service.
The move comes as part of a campaign taken up by Trump and Hegseth to weed out any…
