Outserve-SLDN On Trump Trans Ban: "What The President Has Begun With A Tweet We Will End In Court"

Peter Perkowski, legal director for OutServe-SLDN, pens a thoughtful, fact-based op-ed for The Advocate explaining the reasons why Donald Trump's proposed ban on transgender military servicemembers has no rational basis.

As you may know, back in July Trump tweeted, “Please be advised that United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.”

Perkowski knocks down Trump's justifications with sane and deliberate consideration.

Here's an excerpt:

The president now wishes to discard a workable, nondiscriminatory policy in favor of a factually and legally indefensible one that violates basic civil rights.

The president’s justifications? Baseless. One of them, readiness and unit cohesion, is contradicted by the Pentagon’s own studies. In fact, Adm. Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that excluding trans people undermines readiness — the opposite of what the president claims.

Another justification was “tremendous medical costs,” but we know this too is untrue. The Pentagon considered the cost associated with providing medical care to trans service members. Including gender-affirming surgery (if desired), such costs ranged between $2.4 and $8.4 million per year. At the high end of these estimates, the cost is still less than one one-thousandth of one percent of the proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2018. By contrast, the military spends $84 million — or 10 times as much — on medication for erectile dysfunction, something hardly essential to the national defense.

Medical care offered to transgender service members is also qualitatively indistinguishable from the care provided to cisgender troops. The surgeon general of the Navy, C. Forrest Faison III, told the Navy Times in December that most of the medical care for trans service members is offered to cisgender men with low testosterone or cisgender women needing hormone replacement due to menopause.