A Daily Wire Investigation: Are There Really 15K Trans Military Members?

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When the London Times published a late November report claiming that Donald Trump plans to “kick transgender troops out of the military,” leftist groups and media outlets clamored against the idea, warning that an estimated 15,000 transgender troops would be impacted. There’s no evidence this figure is even close to accurate.

That startlingly high figure of 15,000 trans-identifying troops has been pushed, without sourcing, by major news outlets including the London Times, Military.com, and Newsweek. Rachel Branaman, a spokeswoman for the pro-LGBTQ Modern Military Association of America, used the number to suggest that any future Trump administration action to remove these troops would imperil the country’s war-fighting ability (Trump’s team said at the time that the unnamed sources in the report had “no idea what they are actually talking about”).

“Abruptly discharging 15,000-plus service members, especially given that the military’s recruiting targets fell short by 41,000 recruits last year, adds administrative burdens to war fighting units, harms unit cohesion, and aggravates critical skill gaps,” Branaman argued. “There would be a significant financial cost, as well as a loss of experience and leadership that will take possibly 20 years and billions of dollars to replace.”

The Daily Wire asked two far-left groups who have pushed the figure, the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Transgender Equality, where it’s from. They both told The Daily Wire that it’s based on a 2014 report from the Williams Institute, which is based on data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The data that the Williams Institute study is based on is from a survey distributed beginning in fall 2008 that resulting in just 6,546 “valid responses.” It used those responses to estimate that there were “approximately 15,500 transgender individuals” serving “active duty or in the Guard or Reserve forces.” It also defined transgender “broadly,” to include “those whose gender identity or expression differs from those traditionally associated with their assigned sex at birth,” including but not limited to people who identify as “transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and cross-dressers.”

The findings don’t match up with previous Pentagon numbers. A 2016 study conducted by former President Barack Obama’s administration estimated that there were around 2,450 active-duty trans-identifying personnel and 1,510 reserve trans-identifying personnel. And as of March 2021, the DOD’s military accession policy director Stephanie Miller estimated that there were about 2,200 transgender service members within military ranks who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and are seeking “medical care.”

(Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Pentagon told Military.com in 2021 that it spent about $15 million on surgical and non-surgical “care” for 1,892 service members between January 2016 and May 2021. About $3.1 million of that figure was for surgeries, the publication reported, while $11.5 was reportedly for psychotherapy. The Pentagon also revealed to the publication that 243 transgender surgeries were performed on military personnel between 2016 and 2021, and 193 of those surgeries took place between January 2018 and December 2019, as Trump announced plans to block transgender service members from the military.

Military experts have their doubts about the claim that there are actually 15,000 transgender troops.

“There’s just no way” there are actually 15,000 transgender troops, writer Chris Bray, a former Infantry Sergeant in the United States Army, argued to The Daily Wire. Bray believes this thin statistic is being spread far and wide to suggest that the military may collapse without its transgender population. Bray argues that the 15,000 number is extremely “questionable,” given the amount of documentation required of military members and the amount of medical transitions in a typical year.

“The point of doing that is, when you catastrophize, when you make up a number and then use the invented number to create a catastrophe that doesn’t really exist, the point is that it makes debate impossible,” says Bray. “It’s a way of creating a fake barrier to debate.”

‘We Don’t Track That Information’

The Daily Wire reached out to Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force to find out how many service members in each branch identify as transgender. The Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force did not even respond to The Daily Wire’s queries.

Navy spokeswoman Hannah Smith said the “Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery does not currently quantify transgender identification as a reportable data metric,” and a separate Navy spokeswoman said that “transgender-related information is not publicly releasable data,” noting: “The Navy does not collect transgender information for reporting purposes. Current Department of Defense policy considers gender identity to be a personal and private matter.”

Army spokesman Bill Costello told The Daily Wire: “We don’t track that information. A soldier is recognized and reported as either male or female based on their current gender marker in the Defense Eligibility Enrollment Reporting System (DEERS).”

All service members are required to be registered in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), according to Bray, who describes in his Substack how DEERS includes “detailed demographic information.”

(Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

DOD’s 2021 guidance on DEERS and gender transitions specifically states: “When a cognizant military medical provider determines that a Service member’s gender transition is complete, and at a time approved by the commander in consultation with the Service member concerned, the Service member’s gender marker will be changed in DEERS and the Service member will be recognized in the self-identified gender.”

That guidance emphasizes that, “where possible,” service members should be meeting standards and serving in their birth gender until their DEERS gender has been updated. But “since every transition is unique,” the guidance says, the DOD has “flexibility” on this point.

The previously referenced DOD guidance also clarifies that a service member’s commander must “approve, in writing, the change of a service member’s gender marker in DEERS.”

Bray says it’s impossible the military isn’t tracking these figures.

“You cannot just say, in the military, I’m a girl now, and just be a girl without surgeries. There’s a paper trail, there’s a record,” Bray explained to The Daily Wire. There’s just “no way” that DOD isn’t tracking the number of service members who have received written command authorization for the change of their gender marker in a military database, he insisted.

“They know the number.”

Biden Admin Blocks Transgender Reporting

Biden’s Pentagon, however, insists it has no information to share.

“The Department does not track data on transgender service members,” DOD spokesman Joshua Wick repeatedly told The Daily Wire. Last week, he finally said that the DOD could not “verify” outside numbers, referring to the 15,000 figure.

The entire saga regarding transgender troops in the military begins with Barack Obama’s efforts to institute broader cultural changes in the military. In 2016, he ended the military’s ban on trans-identifying individuals in the military, and in 2011 ended the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, implemented under former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s to bar service members from discussing sexual orientation.

Trump reversed the policy allowing trans-identifying troops, citing concerns that these troops required “substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery.” The Supreme Court sided with Trump on the matter in January 2019.

President Joe Biden, however, repealed that ban shortly after taking office. Biden’s Pentagon has made waves with its aggressive promotion of radical gender ideology both online and within military ranks.

Trump has pledged to reverse that trend, warning ahead of the 2024 election: “There’s woke at the top…You need people that want to win. They want to win wars. That’s what their purpose is, to win wars not to be woke.”

“If you want to have a sex change or a social justice seminar, then you can do it somewhere else, but you’re not going to do it in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, Space Force, or the United States Marines,” he promised on the campaign trail in August. He’s also put forward veteran Pete Hegseth, who has been outspoken in condemning woke ideology within the military, as his choice for Secretary of Defense.

Biden, however, issued a guidance that appears to have essentially blocked the Pentagon from publicizing any data on transgender individuals in the military, which could complicate any Trump effort to draw it back.

The April 2021 guidance stated that “any questions on gender identity in DOD cross-component assessment of Service members (e.g., surveys, focus groups interviews) must be approved by the [Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness] via the Department of Defense Human Resources Activity.”

“Gender identity is a personal and private matter,” the guidance states. “DoD Components, including the Military Departments and Services, require written approval from the [Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness] to collect transgender and transgender related data or publicly release such data.”

Neither DOD nor the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness responded to requests for comment on this point.

William Thibeau, an Army Ranger veteran and director of the American Military Project with the Claremont Institute, pointed out that the Pentagon is simultaneously claiming they don’t know how many trans-identifying service members are in uniform “while insisting on the criticality of this supposedly disadvantaged group to military readiness.”

“These mental gymnastics make it clear the Department of Defense is trying to create the impression transsexual service members compose a meaningful size of the military,” he argued. “They are intent on continuing the effort to make the military a paragon of the politics and ideologies of our modern age.”

“DoD officials use convoluted reporting requirements and faux privacy concerns to prevent genuine transparency and accountability,” said Thibeau. “If the DoD is to be believed, and they are not, the number of transsexual service members quintupled in less than four years. This is absurd and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”

Taxpayer-Funded Gender Transitions?

If the widely cited 15,000 number is accurate, it means that 15,000 service members can undergo tax-payer funded gender transition surgeries that make service members un-deployable, thanks to efforts by the Biden administration.

When the Obama administration conducted its study on trans-identifying service members in 2016, following the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, it found that service members who underwent gender transition surgeries would not be able to deploy for about 238 days, or 34 weeks — keeping in mind that some individuals “experience postoperative complications that would render them unfit for duty.”

For example, the study notes, men who are trying to undergo surgery to create a fake vagina, known as a vaginoplasty, often experience complications (the study notes that six to 20 percent of vaginoplasty patients have complications).

Bray, the Army veteran, also pointed out that service members are un-deployable for a good chunk of time after undergoing surgeries like those.

“If you’ve just had surgery, you can’t deploy to a war zone,” said Bray. “If you’re a biological man and you have your junk cut off and a surgical vagina sewed in, you have to dilate it every day or it closes, because your body just interprets it as a surgical wound. So think of Black Hawk Down, right? Fighting in the streets of Mogadishu, but you have to stop and dilate your surgical neo-vagina? How does that work?”

“It does things to your body that make you…not a warrior,” he argued.

(Photo by Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

When Biden allowed transgender troops back into the military, Thomas Spoehr, the Heritage Foundation’s former Center for National Defense director, argued, “The facts show that thrusting individuals with gender dysphoria into a stressful military environment would have devastating consequences.”

Spoehr cited government statistics showing that “service members with gender dysphoria are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than service members as a whole,” noting that service members with gender dysphoria are nine times more likely to have mental health encounters than the service member population as a whole, and that these individuals with gender dysphoria experience severe anxiety, at much higher rates than individuals who aren’t experiencing gender dysphoria.

“Military service is inherently stressful, especially so in a combat environment,” he said. “Every member of the unit depends on the person next to him or her. They have trained and worked together constantly. Their relationship is one of trust—they know everyone has each other’s back. Allowing mistrust or uncertainty into the unit weakens this critical bond. It breeds resentment. It causes doubt where once was certainty.”

It’s an issue that many Americans are already up in arms about, including top Republican figures like Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son and advisor. Trump Jr. has repeatedly railed against the woke forces at work within the military and highlighted the LGBTQ ideology rampant within the Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals across the country.

“Our military brass are making our armed forces a stronger fighting force through pronoun and diversity training,” he said in response to new that Russian warships were reportedly testing a hypersonic weapon.

There’s also strong sentiment within the Republican party to put a stop to such tax-payer funded procedures for military members.

In fact, Republicans just took steps in early December to block gender transition procedures for military children in this year’s NDAA, and on Friday, the House of Representatives moved to intervene in  Doe v. Austin, a case dealing with two males who identify as transgender women, are dependents of retired service members, and are receiving transgender “health care” benefits through TRICARE, the military’s healthcare plan.

Senator-elect Jim Banks of Indiana, a Navy reserve Veteran who served in Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015 during Operations Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel, has repeatedly criticized the Defense Department over its racial and ideological quotes.

“Banning DOD from spending taxpayer funds on sex-change surgeries for minors is a step in the right direction,” Banks told The Daily Wire, “and I look forward to working with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to eliminate wokeness from our military.”



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