The White House has reached out to the Pentagon to begin drafting formal guidance on President Donald Trump’s transgender ban announcement last week, the Pentagon said Monday.
Asked by Breitbart News whether anyone from the White House has reached out to the Pentagon to begin working to draft that guidance, Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said “Yes.”
“We have conversations back and forth all the time with the White House in a variety of channels, and those conversations are starting to happen on the issue,” he said.
Last Thursday, Trump tweeted that he would not allow transgender individuals to serve in the military in “any capacity.” It is not yet clear whether it refers to new recruits, those already serving, or both. He cited its effect on military decisiveness and the “tremendous costs and disruption” it would entail.
The Pentagon last week said it would continue to execute the current policy until it received formal guidance from the White House, since the president’s announcement on Twitter was not formal policy guidance, but an announcement.
Current policy is to allow currently serving transgender troops to serve openly, but to delay a decision to allow new transgender recruits until December.
“What we saw was what amounts to an announcement from the commander in chief — got it. We are now in the process of waiting for that to be formally articulated to us in a policy memo and we’ll be standing by to make that happen. In the meantime, we don’t have anything on it,” Davis said.
There are an estimated 3,960 active duty service members who are transgender, according to a 2016 Rand study.
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