The Pentagon needs to prepare more than 23,000 personnel to begin accepting the Defense Department’s first transgender recruits on Jan. 1 following a court order, according to a top human resources official.
That includes “preparation, training, and communication” with recruiters and personnel at military entrance processing stations, who must have a working knowledge or in-depth medical understanding of the requirements for accepting transgender enlistees. That’s according to Lernes Hebert, the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for military personnel policy, in a Washington, D.C., district court filing.
The Trump administration has argued the military is not prepared and is seeking an emergency delay in the Jan. 1 recruiting deadline, which was imposed by a D.C. district court judge as part of a lawsuit over the president’s ban on transgender military service.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly rejected an initial request for a delay Monday and the Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling.
In the court documents, Hebert warned that transgender applicants might not get adequate screening if the Pentagon is forced into recruiting them without “sufficient guidance, resources and training” and the new troops might not be prepared to fight.
“As a result, an applicant may be accessed for military service who is not physically or psychologically equipped to engage in combat or operational service,” he said in a declaration filed with the court.
President Trump announced in July that transgender troops would no longer be allowed to serve in any capacity. But before the announcement, the Obama administration had set a July 2017 deadline to begin transgender recruiting. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis delayed the start until Jan. 1.
The judge’s ruling Monday means the Pentagon must proceed with the Obama administration plan and Mattis cannot issue another delay.
Opponents of the ban have argued that most of the preparation work for transgender recruiting was already completed before Trump announced the ban.
“This is not rocket science, this is not difficult at all, to claim that this is some mystic process that we can’t possibly understand and a year and a half to prepare for this is not enough is ridiculous,” said Aaron Belkin, executive director of the Palm Center, a group that advocates for transgender military service.
Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is among the Obama administration officials who have lent support to the legal fight against Trump’s ban. He provided a statement to the D.C. court opposing the administration’s requested delay as part of the Doe v. Trump case, which was filed against the president in August by six transgender service members, a Naval Academy midshipman, and an ROTC student.
“Based on my personal knowledge, the services had already completed almost all of the necessary preparation for lifting the accession ban when I left office almost a year ago,” Mabus told the court.
The plaintiffs in the Doe case also provided a statement to the court by George Brown, a professor of psychiatry at East Tennessee State University and an expert on transgender health in the military who helped prepare Pentagon personnel for the recruits this year.
On a single day in May, Brown said he helped train 250 medical personnel who work at the military entrance processing stations, or MEPS, which screen applicants before boot camp.
“The implementation of accessions criteria for transgender enlistees is no more complex than other accessions criteria on which MEPS personnel are knowledgeable and regularly trained,” he told the court.
The Defense Department spelled out specifics on the recruitment policy on Monday, and made clear that this is not a blanket invitation for all transgender candidates. For instance, the rules written last year under the direction of then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter bar recruits with a history of gender dysphoria unless the applicant has been “stable without clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning for 18 months.”
In addition, any applicant must have completed all medical treatment associated with gender transition, and have been “stable in the preferred gender for 18 months.”
