‘These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about,’ the president-elect’s spokeswoman says.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team refuted anonymously sourced reports claiming that he would immediately discharge all transgender individuals from the military upon taking office.
In response to a question about several news outlets having claimed he would, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who was tapped by the president-elect to be his press secretary, said in a statement to The Epoch Times on Saturday that such claims are based on speculation.
“These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about,” Leavitt said in the statement, emailed to The Epoch Times. “No policy should ever be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump or his authorized spokespeople.”
The report did not list any named sources and did not indicate whether any of the individuals worked on the Trump transition team.
In response to the UK Times report, the head of the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign alleged that such a ban would “make our country less safe” and is “nothing more than transphobia.”
During his first term in office, in 2017, Trump announced that the military would no longer allow transgender people to serve in “any capacity,” coming after the Obama administration allowed such individuals to serve in the military and receive transgender medical treatments funded by taxpayers.
“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” Trump wrote on social media in July 2017.
The policy was revised in 2018 and only blocked people from serving in the military who had a history of gender dysphoria who were unable or unwilling to serve in their biological sex or had undergone medical transition treatment. The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled in a 5–4 decision that allowed the 2018 version of the ban to remain intact before it was reversed by President Joe Biden.
Years before, in mid-2016, then-President Barack Obama ended a longstanding ban on transgender people from serving, with Defense Secretary Ash Carter at the time saying in a press conference that the military has to “have access to 100 percent of America’s population.”
Aside from military-related policies, Trump has backed a ban on transgender medical treatments for minors.
“Look at what’s happened in swimming. Look at the records that are being broken,” he said.
An Associated Press survey of more than 120,000 people who cast ballots during the last election found that more than half of voters stated that support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far. Among Trump voters, 85 percent said such support had gone too far.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
