On January 27, 2025, President Trump signed the Executive Order called “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness. The order overturned former President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14004 that allowed transgender service in the US military. Trump’s order led to SECDEF Hegseth’s directive in early May for military transgender servicemembers to begin voluntary separation or face involuntary separation.

An obvious question emerges: exactly how many transgender personnel are in the US military? As of early May 2025, approximately 1,000 had self-identified. However, the exact numbers are not known but are likely much higher. AP News reported that:

“Defense officials have said that 4,240 troops currently serving in active duty, the National Guard and Reserve have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria And they contend that, as of late last year, about 3,200 service members had received gender-affirming hormone therapy from 2015 to 2024, and about 1,000 received gender-affirming surgery.

Previously, however, estimates of transgender troops have hovered between 9,000 and 12,000. And they could range from people who haven’t been officially diagnosed or aren’t taking medication to those who are taking medication, have undergone surgery or are in the process of transitioning to their preferred gender.

In March 2018, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis released a memo with unprecedented details on the data. It said, at that time, there were 8,980 service members who identified themselves as transgender and 937 had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.”¹

10,000 is a number somewhere in the range of estimated members. It is an important one. Recall that DoD forced out over 8,000 military members who refused the COVID vaccine, many of whom were experienced combat veterans. This was done to ‘save the US military from a debilitating pandemic’ that DoD claimed could decimate the US military when in reality, of over 2 million military members, fewer than 100 died of COVID. At the same time, the COVID vaccine debacle and the DoD’s controversial social policies contributed heavily to a drop in enlistment. The shortfall caused DoD to lower standards and reduce readiness.

10,000 is approximately half the strength of a US Army division.

A leaked memo from Womack Army medical Center in 2023 stated that transgender soldiers could be exempted from deployment for up to 300 days.²

The shortest enlistment option for the Army is 2 years on active duty. This includes months of basic training and advanced skill training before reporting to a unit and the time required to separate from the military at the end of the term. This mean that for a transgender soldier with exemption from deployment for 300 days or nearly a year during treatment, they have around 6 months of usable time in a unit. And…that is if they are fit for duty and deployment. This is the punchline.

As a physician, I encounter many transgender patients, all very nice people. However, almost all are on psychiatric medications for mood disorders and most are on many different medications at the same time. Also, due to a myriad of issues in the medical community, the evidence on suicidality rate of transgender people is unclear despite claims by many in the medical community that transitioning reduces suicide rates. The data seems to be as unclear as it politicized even in the medical community. Military members must be safe and able to deploy when the military is directed into harm’s way. The lack of publicly available military data on exact numbers of transgenders in the military, the percent who are or have been suicidal, and the average number of psychiatric medications per transgender soldier is likely no accident. Combat zones are not airconditioned, calm environments. They are most often austere, harsh, and stressful zones.

It would be intuitive that with the social agenda pushed on the military by President Biden and then SECDEF Austin, shining examples of openly transgender servicemembers who have transitioned serving on patrol in warzones would be spread widely online and in the media to prove their point. I am not aware of any such statistics or even anecdotal stories. There are many stories of people who deployed and THEN transitioned but not the other way around. The difference is important.

Instead, news stories highlighted transgender service in safe billets away from hazardous duty. One of the most prominent was the story of Major Rachel Jones in 2023.³ She was serving safely stateside in Rhode Island, likely a nondeployable billet, with teddy bears and obnoxious pronoun signs on her desk.

War is not the theoretical, it is the actual. As a doctor and therefore to a degree a scientist, I believe in objective data and real case reports to prove the efficacy of medicine or a health policy. The absence of such data and case reports makes it clear that there likely is no proven safety in deployment of transgender personnel after they transition chemically and/or physically.

This likely means most were never destined to deploy into combat. This is problematic, because this means there are 10,000 billets that therefore must be filled by service members that actually can deploy. Further, it means during periods of high numbers of deployments, as often occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, that servicemembers that are not transgender are unfairly made to deploy while transgender soldiers stay home.

The military is not a jobs program. It is admirable that transgender Americans wish to serve. However, desire does not equal actuality or practicality. There are many other ways to serve, but the military from a medical and readiness standpoint should not be a social experiment.

If our generals really cared about readiness, they would have protested that the 2021 policy effectively meant half of an American division was nondeployable, a significant chunk of combat power. US generals seemed to be as silent on this reality as they were as they enforced the COVID mandate that wrecked the careers of nearly as many who actually could (and did) deploy.

10,000 soldiers is a large number. Apparently, it means nothing to our current US military senior leadership which seems content to just keep quiet and get by to avoid being spotlighted. Attention likely means non-promotion and non-promotion means closure of the lucrative revolving door to the military industrial complex for generals when they retire.

My position on this is not based on religious or moral grounds. It is based on a the experiences of a physician who deployed five times to combat zones and was responsible for screening thousands of soldiers for readiness, dealing with the effects of soldiers with chronic non-deployable conditions that had problems on deployment, and the cumulative physical and psychological effects of nonstop deployments for soldiers deploying every other year. Recall the dark times of Iraq when reservists, national guard, and even IRR were being called up because there weren’t enough bodies to send downrange. Then, there was stoploss and the infamous event when the brigade from Alaska put soldiers back on planes to return to Iraq after they had returned home from 12 months in combat to serve another 6 months. This was all because there were not enough deployable soldiers for a more equitable rotation. Many times things brief well but turn sour when the war and hazardous duty becomes an actual real event.

The Army has widely published its core values:

Loyalty

Duty

Respect

Selfless Service

Honor

Integrity

Personal Courage

Apparently these values don’t apply to the generals. Fortunately the SECDEF is working to restore these virtues.

1. https://apnews.com/article/transgender-troop-ban-hegseth-pentagon-45c8eeec86c3148eadf63ff8d709f00b
2. https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/07/21/dod_memo_says_transgender_soldiers_can_skip_deployments_967779.html
3. https://www.newsweek.com/who-major-rachel-jones-transgender-soldier-backlash-1810496