Transgender Service Members Left in Uncertainty After Trump’s Military Ban

When Kate Cole, a 34-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant First Class and transgender woman, eventually retires from the military, she has dreams of moving from California to Colorado to work as a climbing guide. But right now, she only wants one thing: to be allowed to serve her country. 

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“I enjoy the work I do. I like working with the people I work with. The Army is my community,” says Cole, one of six trans service members who are suing the Trump Administration for its trans military ban, an Executive Order announced on January 27 that prohibits transgender troops from enlisting and serving openly in the military. “It’s my life.”

While the way the Department of Defense would implement the ban is unclear, the Executive Order would cut Cole and other trans service members from their jobs. 

The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law) filed a federal lawsuit on January 28 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Trump Administration in response to the order, saying the ban violates equal protection.  

The Executive Order is an expansion of a similar directive from President Donald Trump in 2017, which barred trans people from enlisting in the military. (Two trans people hoping to enlist are also plaintiffs in the case.) The most recent order, however, would discharge trans service members who are currently in the military. 

Both GLAD Law and the NCLR previously sued the Trump Administration for the 2017 ban.  While a judge temporarily blocked the rule for two years, in 2019, the Supreme Court allowed the Executive Order to move forward while the lower courts ruled on the case. The ban was repealed by President Joe Biden in 2021.  

Cole, who has served since she was a teenager, says she was worried that the Trump Administration would pass a similar rule to the 2017 ban, but hoped that the ban would not be re-enacted since she’s been serving openly and honorably for years. “Everyone who I know who is trans serving, we just want to continue doing our jobs how we’ve been doing. We don’t cause disruptions. Most people are very supportive of our service,” she says.  

But in his Executive Order, Trump instructed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to implement  the ban in the next 60 days, and also called to end the usage of “invented and identification-based” pronouns. The President says that transgender people, who he says possess a “false gender identity divergent from an individual’s sex,” cannot meet the standards to serve in the military, comparing it to the requirement that troops be free of “medical conditions or physical defects” in order to enroll in the military. 

“Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” Trump wrote in the Executive Order titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

“[Trump] is saying that being transgender is incompatible with military service. It’s the most basic kind of unprincipled and discriminatory policy that exists,” says Jennifer Levi, a senior director at GLAD Law. “It has no basis other than hostility towards a group.”  

Estimates about the number of trans service members in the U.S. range from an estimated 8,000, per an article in the National Institute of Health, to some 15,500, according to UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. 

Although the previous ban was temporarily allowed in the courts, Levi is more optimistic about the outcome this time around thanks to the 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, a case that centered around an employer firing an employee for being transgender or gay. The Supreme Court made a landmark decision in siding with plaintiffs, cementing the fact that workers are protected from employment discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.  “There’s clear Supreme Court precedent at this point that targeting transgender people for discrimination is sex discrimination and therefore subject to more serious scrutiny by the courts,” says Levi. That’s not to say the legal challenge against the Trump Administration is an easy sweep. In an earlier Executive Order on sex, Trump said that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock was misapplied and ordered the Attorney General to correct the application of the decision. 

Regardless of the outcome, Levi says  that the Trump Administration is making the lives of LGBTQ+ people more difficult. “People are experiencing harm, and the intensity of that has certainly grown this time around,” she says. “There is, appropriately, a tremendous amount of concern throughout the community. People are facing the prospects of losing medical care, being excluded from workplaces.” 

Cole hopes that in filing this lawsuit, she can put a face to the harms that are being done against the trans community, and as a way to attest to the merits of trans service members. “The thousands of trans soldiers right now are a testament to that. They’re out here doing their jobs every day. There’s soldiers, airmen, marines, who are deployed right now, who happen to be trans, doing their job,” says Cole. “The military has made me 100% a better person, and just every American who’s qualified and wants to serve  should have the opportunities that I’ve had.”

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