This month, the Pentagon had said that the US military would no longer allow transgender individuals to join and would stop performing or facilitating procedures associated with gender transition for service members.
Transgender service members will be separated from the US military unless they receive an exemption, according to a Pentagon memo filed in court on Wednesday – essentially banning them from joining or serving in the armed forces.
It added that for a waiver, troops must also be able to meet a number of criteria, including that the service member “demonstrates 36 consecutive months of stability in the service member’s sex without clinically significant distress”.
It said that the Pentagon must create a procedure to identify troops who are transgender within 30 days and then within 30 days of that, must start to separate them from the military.
Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that took aim at transgender troops in a personal way – at one point saying that a man identifying as a woman was “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member”.
