Obama administration to begin planning open transgender service in the military
WASHINGTON, D.C., – The Obama administration, is prepared to lay out the plan that will allow
"transgender" soldiers to serve openly the military.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter wrote in a public memo last
month that those in charge of implementing the new policy "will start with
the assumption that transgender persons can serve openly without adverse impact
on military effectiveness and readiness unless and except where objective,
practical impediments are identified[.]"
The dismantling of the transgender ban officially
began Monday,
according to USA Today, when higher-ups in
the Pentagon met to discuss how best to integrate openly transgender troops
into the U.S. armed forces.
Many practical aspects of the change remain undefined, including
what uniforms transgender soldiers will be expected to wear and to what sort of
health care they will be entitled. Carter has called for a "working
group" to sort out these issues by early next year.
The Pentagon announced last month that it would terminate the
military's ban on transgender people serving "openly" – i.e.,
dressing and behaving as members of the opposite sex.
Carter said at
the time that
"the Defense Department's current regulations regarding transgender
service members are outdated," comparing the military's emerging policy on
transgender members to its adaptation to the changing strategies of terrorists
on the battlefield.
“We must ensure that everyone who's able and willing to serve
has the full and equal opportunity to do so," he said.
Under the new military paradigm, hormone replacement therapy for
transgender soldiers is expected to be funded by the U.S. taxpayer. According
to Joycelyn Elders, a former U.S. surgeon general, it would be "inconsistent" for
the Department of Veterans Affairs to deny "medically-necessary cross-sex
hormone treatment" to transgender troops.
A UCLA study estimates that 15,500 transgender troops "have
served in the U.S. armed forces, or are currently on active duty," with an
estimated 134,000 transgender veterans and Guard and Reserve retirees.
The Pentagon's dismantling of the ban on openly transgender
soldiers has widely been compared to the 2011
repeal of
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), a Bill Clinton-era policy that
prohibited homosexual service members from openly professing their sexual
preference At the time, Richard Black, the former chief of the U.S. Army's
criminal law division, strongly
opposed repealing
the policy, foretelling increased sexual assaults in the military.
Black's warning appears to have been validated: since DADT
repeal, male-on-male sexual assault in the military has reached epidemic
proportions, with a male enlistee 10 times more likely to be sexually
abused than he would be as a member of the civilian population.
