Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' new policy on transgender troops expected by Wednesday

Tom Vanden Brook | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Student takes Trump's transgender military ban to court Dylan Kohere is an 18-year-old college student and member of the U.S. Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. If President Trump's military transgender ban is allowed to stand, Kohere would lose tens of thousands of ROTC scholarship dollars.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is likely to announce its new policy on transgender troops this week after six months of legal battles that started with President Trump's tweets calling for a ban on their service.

Several federal court rulings prevented the Pentagon from implementing the ban, including a probation on accepting new recruits. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced in September that a panel of experts would develop a new policy on transgender service members by Feb. 21.

Mattis is scheduled to have lunch with Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House on Tuesday.

The new policy will replace rules adopted during the Obama administration that allowed transgender troops to serve openly for the first time. Those rules set up procedures that gave transgender troops access to medical treatment and policies for recruiters to accept applications from transgender volunteers for military service.

Trump’s announcement by Twitter in July caught military officials by surprise. They scrambled to issue guidance to ensure transgender troops that they would not be drummed from the service and that their medical care would continue. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, issued a statement that the Pentagon would not change its policy until officially notified by the White House.

In September, Mattis issued interim guidance that prevented transgender troops from being booted from service, allowed for their medical treatment and established the panel to develop the policy. After losing several court challenges, the Pentagon allowed recruiting to begin Jan. 1. USA TODAY reported that dozens of transgender applicants filled out paperwork with recruiters, including at least eight with the Air Force.

Mattis has indicated several times since taking charge of the Pentagon that readiness to fight is his top priority. The new policy on transgender troops must be “consistent with military effectiveness and lethality,” he wrote in a memo in September.

Last week, Mattis emphasized a new policy that would drum from the services any member unable to deploy for one year with few exceptions, including pregnancy.

“This is a deployable military,” Mattis said in Europe last week. “It's a lethal military that aligns with our allies and partners. If you can't go overseas in your combat load — carry a combat load, then obviously, someone else has got to go. I want this spread fairly and equitably across the force.”

The study of transgender service that Mattis ordered in 2017 follows one commissioned by the Pentagon in 2016. The previous study by the non-partisan RAND Corp. found negligible impact on readiness of the several thousand transgender troops in the service.

Brad Carson, who helped design the policy that rolled back the ban on transgender troops, said it would be a stretch to exclude transgender troops under the new policy on deployments.

“The RAND study showed that the impacts on deployability are minimal and in no cases should last more than a year," Carson said Monday. “The argument that hormone therapy is incompatible with deployment is belied by the fact that numerous transgender service members have already done so, sometimes in the most remote of outposts.”

More: Transgender military academy grads could join ranks quickly, expert says



