The Pentagon is still awaiting official orders from President Trump after he tweeted last week that transgender people will not be allowed to serve in the military. The president says the military can't afford the medical costs and disruption to unit cohesion. The transgender community is vowing to fight back.

That includes Dr. Christine McGinn, who is a transgender woman, veteran and plastic surgeon in Pennsylvania. Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd speaks with McGinn about her offer to provide free gender reassignment surgery to active-duty military members.

Interview Highlights

On why she's offering free surgery to transgender service members

"I'm just offering to help active-duty service members, because I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal. I don't think there's going to be that many people, and as long as I'm able to help out, I have no problem doing that. Because these service members deserve care. This isn't a social engineering experiment, this is evidence-based medicine, and I'm a physician and I just feel like there aren't a whole lot of people that do what I do, and I have no problem taking care of our own."

On the how much the surgery costs

"Well, there are different ways to talk about this. The RAND study has studied this issue in the military and is quoting $2.4 to $8.4 million per year, and that is in stark contrast to the $49 billion it costs for health care for all military members. When you ask me that question, one surgery in the civilian world isn't the same as the cost of a surgery in the military world, because you're performing the surgery in-house, or you could possibly perform the surgery in-house, and that's the other thing that I would be willing to do, is to train military surgeons to be able to perform this.

"So the cost is not the same as it would be on the outside, but since you asked the question, the cost of the surgery varies from where you are, what state you're in, but you're asking me the cost of the surgery. You have to remember that there are several different surgeries we're talking about, so that's a difficult question to answer, but I think what you're getting at is how much is a vaginoplasty. A vaginoplasty is $21,500 for the entire cost of it, so that includes pre-op care, post-operative care, the hospital stay, the anesthetic stay, the surgical fee, the whole six-month or so treatment of follow-up."