Trans service people vindicated by latest researchhttps://www.advocate.com/military/the-power-of-trans-servicepeople 🔗Christopher Wiggins (17 March 2026)
When the Trump administration moved again in January 2025 to bar transgender people from serving in the military, it returned to a familiar argument, using less than a handful of reports as evidence: that the policy is about standards, not identity; that unit cohesion would fray; that readiness would suffer; that medical costs would swell beyond reason. But the reality is quite different.
Published in the International Journal of Transgender Health, a new paper led by Kati McNamara, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, analyzed 58 empirical studies on transgender service in the U.S. military.
"I kept hearing these assertions from the government and then repeated by laypeople that trans folks were costing us too much, harming unit cohesion, not ready for deployment," she says. "So I was literally looking for that data. And I just could not find a single study that said that."
The review's conclusion is narrow but firm: There is no evidence that transgender service members are less deployable than peers recovering from knee injuries, postpartum leave, or any number of routine medical conditions.
