Trump Order Will End Military ‘Gender Insanity,’ Ban Taxpayer-Funded Gender Transitions

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Monday banning military members from using taxpayer dollars to get gender transition surgeries, The Daily Wire has learned.

Trump will direct the Department of Defense to update its guidance on trans-identifying medical standards for military service, and to rescind the Biden administration’s guidance that is “inconsistent with military readiness,” according to a White House document on the upcoming executive order.

Trump’s order, first reported Monday by the New York Post, will prohibit males from using or sharing sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities that are designated for females. The order will also rescind Biden’s Executive Order 14004, which allowed for all sorts of accommodations of gender identity in the military, and opened wide the door for gender ideology and taxpayer-funded transgender interventions within military ranks.

The move stems from a desire to prioritize military readiness and lethality — both of which are seriously impacted by military members who seek transgender surgical procedures.

“During the Biden Administration, the Department of Defense allowed gender insanity to pervade our military organizations, family, and culture,” the White House document states. “This included not only permitting the military to increase the number of individuals not physically or mentally prepared to serve, but also ordering the Department of Defense to pay for servicemembers’ transition surgeries, as well as those of their dependent children—at a cost of millions of dollars to the American taxpayer.”

Service members who undergo so-called transition surgeries can take a minimum of 12 months to recover, often using heavy narcotics, and during this time they are not physically capable of meeting military readiness requirements, the White House document notes. They also require consistent medical care, which is not conducive to deployment or other readiness requirements.

“Fitness, health, welfare, and readiness standards must ensure that our military members are able to deploy, fight, and win,” the document states. “On the battlefield there can be no accommodation for anything less than resilience, strength, and ability to withstand extraordinary physical demands.”

“President Trump’s priority to have a ready, able, and lethal military will remain a core tenant of his second term,” the document reads.

The Biden Defense Department refused to tell The Daily Wire how many trans-identifying service members are in the military. But activist groups have maintained for years that there are upwards of 15,000 trans-identifying service members.

A Daily Wire investigation in December found that this number does not match up with recent figures from the DOD. One DOD leader said in 2021 that there were 2,200 trans-identifying military members who had gender dysphoria and sought medical care. Experts on the topic suggested that the activists were pushing the figure to suggest the military might collapse without its trans-identifying population.

William Thibeau, an Army Ranger veteran and director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, told The Daily Wire on Monday that Trump and his newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are fulfilling campaign promises with “broad support among the American people” — changes that are also “common sense for defense readiness.”

“Transvestite service members are nothing more than a political football for cultural virtue signaling that even some generals adopt to prove their compliance with the former liberal regime,” Thibeau argued. “The ban is necessary to restore Americans’ faith that the military is no longer an institution meant for politics and ideology, but lethality.”

And Jay Richards, a leading voice on gender ideology who directs the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Wire it was “encouraging to have a president who cares far more about military readiness than treating our armed forces as a laboratory for social engineering and gender ideology boosterism.”

Back in 2016, Barack Obama ended the military’s ban on trans-identifying individuals. Trump had reversed the policy allowing trans-identifying troops, citing concerns that these troops required “substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery.” The Supreme Court sided with Trump on the matter in January 2019.

Biden, however, repealed that ban shortly after taking office. Biden’s Pentagon has made waves with its aggressive promotion of radical gender ideology both online and within military ranks.

Trump has pledged to reverse that trend, warning ahead of the 2024 election: “There’s woke at the top…You need people that want to win. They want to win wars. That’s what their purpose is, to win wars not to be woke.”

Hegseth himself has thoroughly discussed the topic and its impact on military readiness, including in his book, “The War on Warriors.”

“In 2016, the Obama administration conducted a study to test whether it was a good idea … to allow transgender soldiers to openly serve in the military. That study found that post-surgery-transitioned soldiers would be nondeployable for 238 days or 34 weeks,” Hegseth wrote. “When this report was brought to then-incoming president Donald Trump’s attention, he promptly banned transgender soldiers from serving.”

Hegseth added of Biden’s policies allowing military members to get taxpayer-funded gender transitions: “This change to the standards meant that men and women could join the military for the express purpose of transitioning, be nondeployable for a year, and take life-altering hormone therapy that would mean they would be nondeployable unless the military could guarantee the supply of medication (you know, in some shithole country).”

“Yes,” he added, “your tax dollars pay for mentally unstable boys to become girls, chops off their body parts, then sit out of training for a year, pay for ongoing medical treatments, and demand everyone call them a new name. Man, I wish I had one of those super soldiers in my platoon in Iraq.”