When the Trump administration moved again in January 2025 to bar transgender people from serving in the military, it returned to a familiar argument, using less than a handful of reports as evidence: that the policy is about standards, not identity; that unit cohesion would fray; that readiness would suffer; that medical costs would swell beyond reason. But the reality is quite different.Published in the International Journal of Transgender Health, a new paper led by Kati McNamara, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, analyzed 58 empirical studies on transgender service in the U.S. military.“I kept hearing these assertions from the government and then repeated by laypeople that trans folks were costing us too much, harming unit cohesion, not ready for deployment,” she says. “So I was literally looking for that data. And I just could not find a single study that said that.”Consider the first and loudest claim by those supporting the ban: cost. The Pentagon spends roughly $5 million a year on care associated with transgender service members, and only about $1 million of that is for gender-affirming medical care. Those figures are a tiny percentage of a military health system budget measured in the tens of billions.The military spends vastly more on treating obesity, musculoskeletal injuries, pregnancy and childbirth, vision problems, and the ordinary ailments of a large, young population. If transgender care is disqualifying on cost grounds, McNamara says, then so is nearly everything else. “The argument just floats away,” she says. Retired Space Force Col. Bree Fram was forced out of the military under Trump’s trans military ban.Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThe readiness argument also dissolves in much the same way. Opponents of open service often invoke an image of constant surgery and recovery, a force perpetually sidelined. However, a small percentage of transgender service members undergo surgery while serving. About half of those who seek hormone therapy receive it, and many do so through civilian providers because the military system can be cumbersome. In a few studies examining deployment, service members reported scheduling procedures or treatment changes around deployment cycles. “They don’t want to be a burden,” McNamara says. “They want to deploy.”The review’s conclusion is narrow but firm: There is no evidence that transgender service members are less deployable than peers recovering from knee injuries, postpartum leave, or any number of routine medical conditions.Unit cohesion, the most emotionally charged of the administration’s claims, is also the most resistant to tidy measurement. “We can’t necessarily prove that unit cohesion is better with trans folks in the unit,” she says. What the literature does show is simpler: There is no data demonstrating that transgender service members harm cohesion. Where the research is most consistent and most sobering is on mental health. Transgender service members and veterans face higher rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidality. But when studies apply more sophisticated analyses, the predictors of those conditions are not identity. Trans troops are exposed to discrimination, harassment, sexual violence, and stigma. “That’s what predicts negative mental health outcomes,” McNamara says. Supportive leadership and affirming environments, by contrast, are associated with better outcomes.If there is a future research agenda here, McNamara hopes it turns away from the question of whether transgender people can serve and toward the conditions under which institutions reduce harm without using people as test cases.The professor is also unambiguous about what is at stake. Mischaracterizing research to serve a political end, McNamara says, is not just a technical error; it is a moral one. “We owe it to our service people to be real, to be honest about these findings,” she says.This article is part of The Advocate’s Mar-Apr 2026 print issue, which hits newsstands March 24. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.
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