AMA Adopts Policy on Transgender Military Service

If you have not heard, the American Medical Association (AMA) just passed a resolution stating that “there is no medically valid reason to exclude transgender individuals” from U.S. military service. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates that over 15,000 trans people are serving in the military, despite rules forbidding them to serve openly. Similar to the “don’t ask don’t tell” era where lesbian and gay people were discharged from the military if they disclosed their sexual orientation, trans people are restricted from openly serving. The Pentagon still instructs military recruiters to reject anyone with a “history of major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia including but not limited to change of sex.” The AMA resolution, which was led by GLMA, will hopefully be considered when the federal government considers revising the current rules. The resolution acknowledges that the current regulations that exclude trans people from openly serving are unsupported by modern medicine, and that trans service members be provided care according to the same medical standards that apply to non-trans personnel.

This entry was posted in Join the discussion. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.