Salutes Lifting of Transgender Ban in Military

The New York City Bar Association salutes President Biden and his administration for lifting the previous administration’s ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the military. As we noted in 2017, transgender people have served in the U.S. military since the nation’s inception, and transgender people are more likely than the U.S. population as a whole to have served in the armed forces. Following the American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 removal of “Gender Identity Disorder” from the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the American Medical Association’s 2015 conclusion that there is no medical basis to exclude transgender individuals from military service, and a 2016 RAND study concluding that allowing transgender people to serve openly would have a “minimal impact” on readiness and health care costs, the Department of Defense (DOD) was right to change its policy. We believe implementation of the policy, at long last, will strengthen the military by increasing its diversity, and will bring the DOD in line with constitutional and civil legal standards for sex discrimination.