As expected, Trump wrapped up his first week in office with yet more executive orders advancing the anti-trans agenda that he campaigned on. Late on Monday, the White House released the noxiously titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” banning trans people from the military. By Tuesday afternoon, six service members who are trans filed a suit in federal district court to block the executive order, represented by GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Other suits are reportedly in process. As with Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” issued last week, the scope of the order is broad and bombastic, meant to send a message as much as it attempts to communicate actionable changes to law and policy. All the same, it is an indication that despite what some dismissed as mere campaign rhetoric, Trump’s and his fellow Republicans’ scapegoating of trans people over the past year was indeed previewing his plans. Those plans are dangerous.
Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military is one element of what appears to be a wide-reaching plan to erase the idea that trans people exist. Via saccharine appeals to honor, humility, and country, the order advances the idea that trans identity is a form of dishonesty. The rhetoric is also far more extreme than past Trump administration rhetoric about trans service members.
First, the order offers a bogeyman that is widely promoted on the right, with the mock diagnosis that “the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology.” Then it isolates trans people, stating their identity is “inconsistent” with “the honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle” that military service purportedly requires because they are, in the order’s words, “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex.” It singles out—revealingly—only trans women when making the following repulsive statement: “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.” Altogether, it’s a not-that-roundabout way for the president to decree that all transgender people are sick and selfish liars, whose presence poses a threat to the military, which in turn is a threat to all good Americans.
That particular phrase—“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”—stands out. This claim does not feature in Trump policies barring trans people from military service during his first administration. If being trans means one cannot have a “commitment” to be “truthful” in the military, in what other positions might that also apply?
“This language is dehumanizing and designed to deny the existence of transgender and intersex people,” said Sasha Buchert, director of the Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal, in an emailed statement. The organization, along with Human Rights Campaign, announced on Monday that it would soon be filing a legal challenge to this executive order; Buchert is serving as counsel. This “honorable,” “truthful,” “disciplined” language in the order, she continued, “is dripping with animus and has no basis in law or in biology, even so, it will likely be repeated and weaponized as justification for further discrimination and hate by this administration.”
What Trumpworld now wants to handwave as “gender ideology” is just people—and in this case, their jobs and the health care connected to their jobs. When the first Trump administration’s ban was allowed to go into effect, around 14,000 trans people were serving, as the Palm Center estimated in 2018; the new ban, as The 19th has reported, “is expected to result in one of the largest layoffs of transgender people in history.”
That first ban began with a characteristic Trump tweet, stating that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.” It came just weeks after a policy permitting trans people in the military went into effect. The details were left vague for weeks, and Republicans who supported the ban tended to use the same justification Trump had tweeted—“this misuse of our precious defense dollars,” as Republican Representative Vicky Hartzler lamented at the time—when pushing for a ban on gender-affirming health care in the military. Available evidence does not suggest that those supporting the bans held more progressive views than they hold today. The current moral panic about “gender ideology”—a backlash to the mass protests in 2020 and cultivated by figures on the right like Christopher Rufo—had simply not yet hit.
Attributing the brief acceptance of trans service members to the military being “afflicted” with “gender ideology,” calling trans people’s character and humanity into question: Such scapegoating has spread thanks in part to far-right media influencers. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire regularly ran stories throughout the Biden administration trying to generate controversies pegged to anodyne calls for trans inclusion in the military. Groups like the Heritage Foundation, which has an anti-LGBTQ agenda and led Project 2025, have alleged that “gender ideology’s influence on the military is pervasive.” It wasn’t, and it didn’t matter. The American Principles Project is now taking credit for such attacks on trans people—what it calls “Defeating They/Them”—and with them, for returning Trump to the White House.
This moral panic about “gender ideology” in the military has now moved from the margins to the military itself. Recently confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who shares the Christian nationalist worldview on gender now dominant on the right, goes further. In his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, he whines about what he calls “affirmative action promotions” in the military. “We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!” he sneered in the voice of some imaginary military H.R. director. “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said on a podcast in November 2024. “Men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa, are a distraction,” Hegseth mused in The War on Warriors. “Transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It’s that simple.” Hegseth isn’t an original thinker here; this rhetoric was already in the air. But when he uses it, he is also declaring himself ready, now that he’s commanding the nation’s military, to carry out the boss’s orders.
