Editor's note: President Trump announced on July 26, 2017, he has decided to bar transgender individuals from serving “in any capacity” in the U.S. armed forces through his Twitter account.
In 2016, the Pentagon had lifted the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. Transgender people have long served at rates disproportionate to their representation in the general population, as The Times explored in this September 2015 article.
As a young psychiatry resident at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1980s, Dr. George Brown was surprised the first time he saw a transgender patient.
Estimates at the time were that for every 100,000 biological males in the general population, no more than three were transgender.
Brown figured the rate had to be even lower in the all-volunteer military. It made little sense to him that a transgender person would choose to join an institution that by its nature had no tolerance for deviance.
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