President Donald Trump is expected to sign a new executive order restricting transgender troops from serving in the military on Monday.
The new order requires Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to update medical standards to ensure they “prioritize readiness and lethality” and take action to “end the use of invented and identification-based pronouns” within DOD, per a White House document reviewed by Fox News Digital.
The order also restricts sleeping, changing and bathing facilities by biological sex. It’s not an immediate ban, but a direction for the secretary of Defense to implement such policies.
It revokes former President Joe Biden’s executive order the White House argues “allowed for special circumstances to accommodate ‘gender identity’ in the military – to the detriment of military readiness and unit cohesion.”
The order builds on another directive Trump issued last week that revoked a Biden-era order allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
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On the campaign trail, Trump promised to reinstate the ban on transgender troops he imposed during his first term. In his inauguration speech, he said he would formally recognize that there are only two genders: male and female.
There are an estimated 9,000 to 14,000 transgender service members – exact figures are not publicly available.
Between Jan. 1, 2016, and May 14, 2021, the DOD reportedly spent approximately $15 million on providing gender-affirming care (surgical and nonsurgical care) to 1,892 active duty service members, according to Congressional Research Service.
The move comes as part of a campaign taken up by Trump and Hegseth to weed out any diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices across the military. And GOP lawmakers successfully included an amendment in their 2025 defense policy bill that bans irreversible transgender care for minors in the military healthcare system.
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A day-one order banning DEI policies across the federal government has already sidelined 395 bureaucrats, Fox News Digital reported.
An order requiring the federal government to only recognize two genders has prohibited the use of taxpayer money for “transgender services” following reports that some inmates were receiving transgender care funded by the government. Medicaid, in some states, currently covers such treatments.
Also, under that order, federal prisons and shelters for migrants and rape victims are to be segregated by biological sex. It would block requirements at government facilities and at workplaces that transgender people be referred to using pronouns that align with their gender. Trump’s team says those requirements violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and religion.
The order does not issue a nationwide mandate on which bathrooms transgender people can use or which sports competitions they can participate in, though many states have passed laws in those areas.
