Transgender service members will be discharged from military, Pentagon says

A new transgender troop policy at The Pentagon will disqualify service members or recruits from serving if they’ve ever been diagnosed with or treated for gender dysphoria – with few exceptions. 

The policy memo was included in the latest court filing in a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's executive order against transgender military service, one of many hot-button issues the president made a priority to address on his first days in office.

What does the Pentagon transgender policy do? 

Big picture view:

The memo says any service member or recruit who has been diagnosed with or treated for gender dysphoria is disqualified from serving — unless they can prove they meet a specific warfighting need and adhere to severe restrictions on their day-to-day behavior.

Like the executive order, the policy filed Wednesday suggests that the lethality and integrity of the military "is inconsistent" with what transgender personnel go through as they transition to the gender they identify with, and issues an edict that gender is "immutable, unchanging during a person's life."

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Dig deeper:

The policy provides two exceptions — if transgender personnel who seek to enlist can prove on a case-by-case basis that they directly support warfighting activities, or if an existing service member, who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, can prove they support a specific warfighting need and never transitioned to the gender they identify with and proves over 36 months they are stable in their biological sex "without clinically significant distress."

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If a waiver is issued in either case, the applicant would still face a situation where only their biological sex was recognized for bathroom facilities, sleeping quarters and even in official recognition, such as being called "Sir" or "Ma'am."

It was a policy Trump tried to overturn in his first term in office but the issue ended up mired in lawsuits until former President Joe Biden was elected and he overturned the ban.

What is gender dysphoria? 

The backstory:

Gender dysphoria occurs when a person's biological sex does not match up with their gender identity.

By the numbers:

While the number of transgender troops serving is small compared to the size of the total force, it's taken up a large amount of time and attention both at the White House and within the Pentagon. The military services due to medical privacy laws do not provide an exact count of transgender troops, but a 2018 independent study by the Palm Center, which researched LGBTQ issues, assessed there were an estimated 14,000 transgender troops among the more than 2 million troops serving.