They are able and willing. Good soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines.

But President Donald Trump won’t let them serve “in any capacity.”

Transgender people: All but banned by the U.S. military, as of April, under a vile, discriminatory policy cooked up in the Oval Office and put into effect by the Pentagon. Cop to their gender identity preference or outed by others and they’re gone.

During his three-day visit to the United Kingdom this week, part of a whirlwind trip commemorating the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of World War II, Trump gave an hour-long interview to Good Morning Britain, hosted by fellow narcissist Piers Morgan.

In that conversation, the president pivoted from his original objection — allowing transgender soldiers to serve prevented “too great a risk to military effectiveness” (never actually explained) — to bogus claims about the “massive cost” of drugs for individuals undergoing hormone therapy and sex realignment surgery.

“They take massive amounts of drugs, they have to, and you’re not allowed to take drugs. I’m proud of them, but you have to have a standard and you have to stick by that standard, and we have a great military and I want to keep it that way.”

The policy prohibits anyone who has transitioned or who is openly transgender from enlisting and those who come out afterwards can be discharged.

Trump’s ongoing idiocy, the social and political upheaval he’s wrought, was largely upstaged whilst overseas, en famille, feted by the Queen no less (but she’s hosted such obnoxious world figures in the past as Robert Mugabe, Bashar Assad and Nicolae Ceausescu). Trump is not merely a punchline and fodder for comedians. He’s a monumentally dangerous man.

Also, of course, truth-challenged.

Because there is no Pentagon forbiddance of most prescription drugs, including hormone treatment, required by members of the military. The navy actually recently changed its rules, now allowing those on medication for depression and anxiety to serve as pilots. Further, according to a study by the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon has spent just $8 million (U.S.) on transgender health care since 2016, a tiny percentage of the military’s annual health care budget of more than $50 billion.

Transgender people aren’t busting the health care bill. Many don’t opt for surgery at all, many don’t take hormone drugs to alter physical gender characteristics.

So, unsurprisingly, Trump has got his facts wrong.

It’s an imprecise nose-count, the number of transgender people currently serving, with estimates ranging to about 15,000, including reservists. But a report commissioned by the Department of Defense pegs the figure at a maximum of 10,790, out of about 1.3 million personnel.

President Barack Obama began allowing transgender people to serve openly in 2016 — three years without any significant issues arising. Top military officials of every U.S. service branch, as well as U.S. surgeons-general, are overwhelmingly in favour of letting qualified transgender troops serve. From the Palm Centre, a public policy non-profit, following Trump’s comment on British TV: “The Commander in Chief has yet again shown that he is developing military policy without regard for the experience of medical professionals, military leaders, transgender troops — or for the truth. This interview … should send chills down the spine of every American who believes our military deserves the highest level of informed decision-making from its leaders, not prejudice masked as policy.”

Indeed, several studies have indicated that transgender individuals are more drawn to military service, proportionately, than the general population. Yet many among the uninformed think immediately of Chelsea Manning, convicted by court-martial in 2013 for violating the Espionage Act.

That’s not who transgender people are, fundamentally loyal and well-functioning under arms.

But of course Trump is no friend to the broader transgender and gay denomination, despite a recent tweet kicking off Pride Month: “As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals…’’

Asked by Morgan about that tweet while simultaneously standing by his ban on transgender service members, Trump responded: “It is what it is. And also massive amounts of people going in and then asking for the operation, and the operation is $200,000, $250,000, and they have to take large amounts of drugs for that, large amounts, and you can’t do that.”

Wrong and wrong.

In practice, what the Trump administration has done in the last two and half years is wage “a non-stop onslaught against the rights of LGBTQ people,” says the National Centre for Transgender Equality. Those initiatives include a proposed rule that would remove all recognition that federal law prohibits transgender patients from discrimination in health care; a plan to gut relations prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in homeless shelters funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; encouraging hospitals and insurance companies to deny transgender patients care, based on religious or moral beliefs; no longer recognizing gang violence or domestic violence as grounds for asylum, a legal interpretation that could lead to the rejection of most LGBT asylum-seekers; a prison policy of almost entirely confining transgender people to federal prisons that match their sex assigned at birth, rolling back existing protections; even instructing staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to not use the terms “transgender,” “diversity,” “vulnerable,” “science-based” and “fetus” in official documents.

The Census Bureau has also retracted a proposal to collect demographic information on LGBT people in the 2020 census.

The transgender military ban is being challenge in the courts. But the Supreme Court early this year voted 5-4 granting the administration request to lift injunctions blocking the policy while those challenges continue in lower courts. The four liberal judges on the Supreme Court were opposed.

In Canada, by the way, transgender individuals have been permitted to serve openly since 2014.

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Neither legal dissent nor public opinion will put the brakes on Trump, any more than outrage over a slew of racist and ham-fisted abrogation of civil rights, none of which the dithering Democrats, with their House majority, have been able to package into a coherent counterthrust. And doubtless Trump has taken heart from a CNN poll released Wednesday — CNN Trump’s favourite “fake-news” target — which found that a majority of Americans (54 per cent) believe the president will win a second term, a reversal of findings from the cable network’s December poll, and mostly attributable to the percolating economy.

Much of what Trump’s presidency — re-elected or not — leaves behind can be reversed by wiser White House occupants of the future. Transgender Americans can only hope.

With his multiple deferments to avoid the draft as a young man, Trump isn’t fit to shine their boots.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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