Trump is Looking to Boot Transgender Troops from the Military. Here's Why That's Complicated

Now What?

The Pentagon has said in recent years that it is impossible to count the total number of transgender troops. The military services say there is no way to track them and that much information is limited due to medical privacy laws.

Estimates have hovered between 9,000 and 12,000. But it will be very difficult for officials to identify them, even as service members worry about the hunt to root them out.

"This casts an enormous shadow on people that are getting ready to go on a deployment for six months overseas or, you know, getting ready to go on a combat mission," said Sasha Buchert, counsel for Lambda Legal. "This is going to be extremely disruptive. And they're going to have to look over their shoulder in fear of when the next shoe will fall."

Since transgender troops have been able to serve openly for a number of years, it's possible their fellow unit members or commanders know who some of them are. That triggers worries about people identifying them in order to get them pushed out – and raises parallels to the Clinton administration's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which allowed gays to serve in the military as long as they didn't "tell."

In March 2018, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis released a memo with unprecedented details on the number of transgender forces and how many of them had sought mental health help or were planning to seek surgery.

It said, at that time, there were 8,980 service members who identified themselves as transgender, and 937 had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The report said data collected by the military health system revealed that 424 of those service members diagnosed had gotten treatment plans approved and for at least 36 of them those plans didn't include "cross sex hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery."