Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the immediate impact of Trump’s Monday executive order rescinding Biden’s executive actions. It clears the way for banning transgender people from military service.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday clearing the way to bar transgender people from military service by revoking a Biden-era policy that allowed trans service members. Trump did not lay out a new ban, though he is expected to do so soon as his administration moves swiftly to target transgender rights. 

Once that ban is in place, it is expected to result in one of the largest layoffs of transgender people in history and is likely to face legal challenges; the military is the largest employer in the nation, and transgender people are twice as likely to serve as their cisgender peers. It will also mark the second time that Trump has banned transgender people from military service as president. He first announced a similar ban in 2017; advocates estimated that once the ban took effect in 2019, 13,763 transgender people lost their jobs. 

President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s ban days after taking office in 2021. On Monday, Trump revoked Biden’s reversal while targeting 78 other executive actions taken under the prior administration. Without the federal protections granted under Biden, the legal precedent over the ban implemented in Trump’s first term remains: The Supreme Court in 2019 allowed him to enforce the ban after four separate courts had blocked it from taking effect.

The issue of transgender military service has been debated as part of the broader LGBTQ+ rights movement since the early 2000s. Transgender people were not allowed to serve until 2016 during a time of widespread policy gains for queer Americans. 

But Trump argued that transgender people hampered military readiness and that gender-affirming health care would cost the government too much money. The Palm Center, a now-defunct organization that studied LGBTQ+ military participation, countered that transgender health care costs were minimal, totaling around $3 million annually.

Monica Helms, a Navy veteran and longtime transgender activist, told The 19th that removing trans people from the military would weaken national security and expose trans people to mistreatment under the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

The government also loses money by firing highly trained personnel, Helms said. Transgender people in the military don’t just have desk jobs, she said — they are aircraft carrier personnel and fighter pilots, and others are stationed in the Army and the Marines. Trans people are also serving in submarines, just like she was in the 1970s. 

“It’s going to be real dangerous for our country,” she said. 

Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said that a trans military ban has deeply dangerous consequences beyond the armed forces.

“It has a huge negative impact for the federal government to brand all transgender people as definitionally unfit to serve,” Minter said. “It would have horrific spillover effect in other areas of life, other areas of employment and would condone, socially, people seeing transgender people as less than.”

It is unclear how many transgender service members will be affected by Monday’s executive order. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law totaled the number of transgender service members at 15,500, but that figure hasn’t been updated since 2014. That’s in part because the Palm Center shuttered in 2022 after Biden advanced a number of gains that allowed queer people to serve openly. Minter believes that far fewer than 15,000 transgender people will be impacted by the ban. He expects servicemembers who transitioned medically to be the first targeted.

Now, the work of challenging the ban falls to other national advocates like Minter, who said lawsuits are already in the works. 

“We have been working for months to be ready to challenge any new ban,” he said. Before they do that, however, they plan to lobby those closest to the administration for a reversal before thousands lose their jobs.

The unemployment rate for transgender Americans is five times the national average as of 2022 (18 percent), according to theU.S. Transgender Survey (USTS). The military has approximately 2.1 million service members and nearly 800,000 civilian employees. The 2015 USTS found that transgender people were twice as likely to serve in the armed forces as cisgender people. 

Minter believes that is because, other than the ban, the military historically rewards service, not gender presentation. 

“The core value of the military is that everyone is united around a common mission or purpose, and that differences really fall away,” he said. “I mean, that is the overriding consideration, and I think people really treasure that.”