Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand pushed back hard against the Pentagon’s proposed transgender policy Thursday when she told Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that he needs “to do a lot more work” to inform himself on the topic.
Mattis, who was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, countered with a rare public critique of the Obama administration’s rollout of its open service policy two years ago, saying it cut out military leaders and still bars the release of information that could show transgender troops are problematic.
The defense secretary has declined to comment in recent testimony, citing four federal lawsuits that are blocking his proposed policy keeping many transgender people from serving. But this month, Gillibrand has managed to get four service chiefs to say on the record that they have no evidence of morale or unit cohesion issues with transgender troops, and she aimed pointed questions at Mattis.
“It appears this report that your department has issued is not based on the department’s data or science but rather the quote ‘potential risks’ that the authors cannot back up,” Gillibrand said, referring to Mattis’ 44-page review and policy recommendations approved by President Trump last month.
Gillibrand charged Mattis with writing a policy proposal similar to those that barred women and other minorities from service in the past, which is an argument also made by rights groups advocating for open transgender service.
“In fact, this seems to me to be the same uninformed and unfounded concerns that led to the opposition to repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, integrating women into the military, integrating African-Americans into the military, and I think you need to do a lot more work on this topic to inform yourselves,” she said.
Mattis said he regretted the way Gillibrand characterized the issue, but told her it would be “impossible” for military service chiefs to accurately answer her questions about problems with transgender troops under the current policy put in place by former Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
The top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps all separately told Gillibrand during Senate Armed Services hearings this month that they had seen no evidence or reports of morale, unit cohesion, and disciplinary issues.
“The reason is that under the Carter policy the reporting is opaque. We cannot report that problem emanated from a transgender,” Mattis said. “So, the questions you’ve asked the service chiefs and the chairman are ones that right now the Carter policy prohibited that very information from coming up because it is private information.”
Mattis also said he did not come into the defense secretary job last year with any position or agenda.
Last spring, Mattis said he learned military service chiefs made clear that the Obama administration had not answered key questions about recruiting transgender troops. Carter set a July 2017 deadline for recruiting, but Mattis delayed that.
“They were asking me questions because we were coming up on the advent of the induction of transgender, and they wanted to know how they were going to deal with certain issues, basic training, deployability,” Mattis told Gillibrand. “I said didn’t you get all of this when the policy was rolled out? … They said ‘no,’ and I said well did you have input, and they said ‘no’ they did not.”
He called the lack of consultation with service chiefs “very, very newsworthy.”
