NEW POLICY: Eight months after tweeting that transgender troops will no longer be allowed to serve “in any capacity,” President Trump sent a memo Friday canceling his call for an all-out ban. The president instead gave Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the green light to implement the secretary’s own proposal detailed in a 44-page study delivered to the White House in February. Mattis’ recommendations bar many transgender people from serving, roll back much of the Obama administration’s two-year-old open service policy, and question a Rand Corp. study former Defense Secretary Ash Carter relied on as the basis. “The realities associated with service by transgender individuals are more complicated than the prior administration or Rand had assumed,” the heavily footnoted Mattis’ study concluded. “Informed by the data collected since the Carter policy took effect, the department is not convinced that these risks could be responsibly dismissed or that even negligible harms should be incurred given the department’s grave responsibility to fight and win the nation’s wars.”

WHO CAN SERVE: No transgender person diagnosed with gender dysphoria, unless symptom-free for three years, and no one who has transitioned to a new gender would be allowed to serve under Mattis’ plan. “The department recognizes that many transgender persons who desire to serve in the military experience gender dysphoria and, as a result could be disqualified under the recommended policy,” the study says. Those with dysphoria suffer from high rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse and suicide, and there is scant medical evidence that transition treatment is effective, it said. Over the past two years, nearly 1,000 active-duty service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria accounted for 30,000 mental health visits, according to the study.