The top U.S. military officer says there has been no change yet to the military's policy on transgender personnel despite President Donald Trump's announcement on Twitter that they will be banned from serving "in any capacity."
"There will be no modifications to the current policy until the President's direction has been received by the Secretary of Defense [Jim Mattis] and the Secretary has issued implementation guidance," said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, in a note seen by news agencies. The reports say the note was sent to all service chiefs, commanders and enlisted military leaders.
Dunford said for now, "We will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect."
In a string of Twitter comments, Trump said Wednesday that after consulting with generals and military experts, he was ordering the armed forces to stop accepting transgender recruits.
"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.
Trump did not say what would happen to transgender people already in the U.S. military — about 4,000 personnel, according to research by the Rand Corporation.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later that Trump will "have to work together" with the Defense Department to "lawfully determine" the fate of transgender service personnel already in the military.
She rebuffed reporters' inquiries suggesting that Trump had broken an election-campaign vow to support the transgender community. The president felt his decision was "the best one for the military," Sanders said.
Previous policy
In June 2016, then Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Pentagon was ending what he said were policies that discriminated against transgender people, and would start by revoking a rule that transgender people could be involuntarily discharged from military service.
Under Carter's order, the military had planned to start allowing transgender people to enlist this year, provided they had been "stable" in their preferred gender for 18 months.
Ahead of Trump's announcement, his defense chief, Mattis, said recently the Pentagon would delay Carter's order through the remainder of 2017 in order to review the impact of the shift.
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