U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis says the White House has yet to provide any guidance to the Pentagon on President Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender individuals from the military.
“We are going to study the issue,” Mattis told reporters, according to CNN.
The secretary continued:
The policy is going to address whether or not transgenders can serve under what conditions, what medical support they require, how much time would they be perhaps non-deployable leaving others to pick up their share of everything. There’s a host of issues and I’m learning more about this than I ever thought I would and it’s obviously very complex to include the privacy issues which we respect.
“I am waiting right now to get the President’s guidance in and that I expect to be very soon,” Mattis added.
The secretary explained that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford informed service members in a memo that there would be “no modifications” to the policy enacted by former President Barack Obama until he receives Trump’s guidance and releases implementation guidelines.
Breitbart News reported on July 31 that the White House had reached out to the Pentagon to begin drafting the formal guidance on the transgender ban.
“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,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said.
“What we saw was what amounts to an announcement from the commander in chief — got it,” he added. “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.”
On July 26, Trump announced via Twitter that, following consultation with his generals and other military experts, he is not allowing or accepting transgender individuals in the military. The president’s directive ended Obama’s 2016 endorsement of the transgender claim that an individual’s biological sex is legally subordinate to his or her choice of “gender”:
Last week, Trump asserted that his decision to ban transgender individuals from the military would do the armed services a favor.
“It’s been a very difficult situation and I think I’m doing a lot of people a favor by coming out and just saying it,” Trump said, explaining that the issue was “complicated” and “confusing.”
“I think I’m doing the military a great favor,” the president added.
Trump said he continued to have “great respect” for the gay community, pointing to their “great support” for him in the election.
“The military is working on it now,” he said regarding the ban.
Since Trump announced the ban, two political groups for transgender soldiers have filed a lawsuit to ask the judiciary to establish transgenderism in the military and in the Constitution.
The National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders filed the lawsuit on behalf of five anonymous soldiers who are attempting to live as members of the opposite sex.
An estimated 3,960 active duty service members are transgender, according to a 2016 Rand study.
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