WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Wednesday will remove Trump-era policies that largely prohibited transgender people from serving in the military, issuing new rules that offer them broader access to health care and assistance with gender transition, they said. defense officials to The Associated Press.

The department’s new regulations allow transgender people who meet military standards to openly enlist and serve in their self-identified gender, and will be able to obtain medically necessary transition-related care authorized by law, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity, to discuss internal decisions that have not yet been made public.

The changes come after a two-month Pentagon review aimed at developing guidelines for the new policy, which was announced by President Joe Biden just days after he took office in January.

Biden’s executive order overturned Trump’s policy and immediately barred any service member from being kicked out of the military on the basis of gender identity. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave the Pentagon two months to finalize the more detailed regulations that the military services will follow.

The new rules also prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.

Austin has also called for a re-examination of the records of service members who were discharged or denied reenrollment due to gender identity issues under the previous policy. The results of that review have not been published.

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Until a few years ago, service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed during the Obama administration. In 2016, the Pentagon announced that transgender people already in the military would be allowed to serve openly and that by July 2017 they would be allowed to enlist.

However, after Donald Trump took office, his administration delayed his enlistment date and called for additional studies. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government would not accept or allow transgender people to serve “in any capacity” in the military.

After a long and complicated legal battle and additional reviews, the Department of Defense in April 2019 approved a policy that did not lead to a total ban, but prohibited transgender troops and recruits from transitioning to the other sex and required that the majority of people served in what the administration called their “birth gender.”

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Under that policy, transgender troops currently on duty and anyone who signed an enlistment contract before the effective date could continue with hormonal treatment and gender transition plans had they been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But after that date, no one with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or who had switched to another gender was allowed to enlist. Troops already in service and diagnosed with gender dysphoria were required to serve in their assigned gender at birth and were prohibited from taking hormones or undergoing transitional surgery.

The new policies that were published this Wednesday are similar to those developed in 2016.

President Joe Biden called the law an “atrocity.”

As of 2019, an estimated 14,700 active duty and reserve soldiers identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria; As of February 1, 2019, there were 1,071 currently in service. According to the Pentagon, the department spent about $ 8 million on transgender care from 2016 to 2019. The military’s annual health care budget exceeds $ 50 billion.

All four service chiefs told Congress in 2018 that they had seen no discipline, morale, or unit readiness issues with transgender troops openly serving in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender people who were working with medical requirements and other transition issues.

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