Following the Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service, the Naval Academy has decided that it will no longer admit trans students. The Naval Academy, which serves college students looking to join the navy, will begin the ban with its 2020 class. The school currently accepts trans students and students who transition during their time at the academy.
The change comes after courts allowed a ban on transgender service members to be implemented while it makes its way through a series of lawsuits challenging the law’s constitutionality. The ban bars service member applicants with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Someone can only serve if they can show “stability” in their sex assigned at birth for at least three years prior. Once in the armed forces, troops can only continue to serve as the sex they were assigned at birth.
“The policy turns off access to some of our best and brightest, and that’s not what our country needs to win future wars,” B Fram, communications director for Service Members, Partners, and Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPARTA) told Bloomberg News.
A current Naval Academy student is one of the plaintiffs challenging the ban on transgender military members. “It’s an arbitrary, discriminatory exclusion that will deprive the military of talented, skilled, dedicated, idealistic young people who want to dedicate their lives to serving our country,” Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told the Washington Post. Minter represents the student plaintiff in the lawsuit.
It is expected that the other military schools that train students for military service will implement similar bans on trans students or those with diagnoses of gender dysphoria in order to comply with the directives issued by the Pentagon regarding military service by trans people.
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