‘These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about,’ the president-elect’s spokeswoman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team refuted anonymously sourced reports claiming that he would immediately discharge all transgender-identifying people from the military upon taking office.
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who was tapped by the president-elect to be his press secretary, said in a statement to The Epoch Times on Nov. 30 that such claims by several media outlets are based on speculation.
“These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about,” Leavitt said. “No policy should ever be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump or his authorized spokespeople.”
The alleged proposed plan was first reported by The Times of London, citing “defense sources” and a “source familiar with Trump’s plans,” last week and would entail Trump’s signing an order to medically discharge transgender-identifying troops from the military. The move, it claimed, would force some 15,000 individuals from the armed forces.
The report did not list any named sources and did not indicate whether any of the individuals worked on the Trump transition team.
In response to The Times of London report, the head of the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign alleged that such a ban would “make our country less safe” and is “nothing more than transphobia.”
“Our military must be able to recruit the best candidates, retain the highly trained service members who have already sacrificed so much for their country, and every qualified patriot should be able to serve openly, free of discrimination,” Kelley Robinson, Human Rights Campaign president, said in a statement last week amid the reports.
In 2017, during his first term in office, Trump announced that the military would no longer allow transgender-identifying people to serve in “any capacity,” coming after the Obama administration allowed such people to serve in the military and receive taxpayer-funded medical treatments related to identifying as transgender.
“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” Trump wrote on social media in July 2017.
