An estimated 150,000 transgender individuals have served in the U.S armed forces, or are currently on active duty. The Supreme Court has recently granted the request from the Trump administration allowing it to ban transgender people from serving in the military. This policy goes after those who struggle with a condition known as gender dysphoria, which involves a conflict between a person’s physical identity or “biological sex” and the gender which the person identifies. It also specifies that individuals without the condition must register and serve as the gender they were assigned at birth. The same man who reportedly  “loves the military” is currently ripping away the rights of thousands of people to join the military.  Transgender people have been serving in the military for quite some time now, however, most of the time they’ve done it while remaining “in the closet.” Now we are forcing them back in the closet, and by giving them another thing to worry about while serving, we are decreasing their productivity.  If you want a productive and capable military service, you would encourage those individuals to be their true selves and find that a lot of these people would become even better at what they’re doing just by allowing them to be free and comfortable with their true selves. By allowing this ban to go into effect, you’re removing highly skilled service members from the battlefield and jeopardizing national security.  In an era of a volunteer service it really doesn’t make sense, but perhaps most importantly it undermines the military’s primary function which is the defense of the United States Constitution.  You simply can’t defend freedom if you don’t honor freedom. Despite opposition from top military officials and previous rulings against the ban, which LGBT rights groups have challenged in court, a memo from the Secretary of Defense was released stating that trans people are “disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances”.  The administration has concluded that the accession or retention of trans people “presents a considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality”. When Trump originally announced the ban on Twitter, he claimed that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption” of transgender service members, despite the fact that studies have found that the ban would have negative impacts on the military.  To focus on the bigger picture, this isn’t an attack on the military, it’s an attack on the dignity and humanity of trans people and their right to occupy space and navigate authentically. With the military budget of $716 billion and trans healthcare costs at only $9 million, this is clearly a rouse to get people to attack the legitimacy and necessity of trans healthcare. This is clearly less about choice and more about stripping away at resources and protections. Trans people will be scapegoated as burdens of society.