HARTFORD -- President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he plans to try and reinstate a ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military forces.
Trump made the announcement via Twitter.
In response to Trump’s tweets, Governor Dannel Malloy signed an executive order reinforcing Connecticut’s current nondiscrimination policies in the military.
The order directed the Connecticut National Guard, Air National Guard and other armed forces in the state to take no action that would discriminate against any individual looking to enlist or currently service on the basis of gender identity or expression, unless superseded by federal law or a formal directive from the U.S. Department of Defense.
“I never thought I’d even have to sign an executive order answering a tweet,” Malloy said. He added, “I wanted to send a very clear message at how wrong minded this is, why would we dishonor anyone’s service what the heck is going on in America right now?”
Malloy also fired at the President arguing official orders aren’t made over social media.
“It’s the strangest way to send an order I’ve ever heard of and obviously has no legal effect in the form that it’s been sent,” Malloy said. He added he thinks the tweets were a form of distraction tactic.
“It’s just ridiculous, it’s just an excuse and quite frankly I think to get people’s attention away from all of his other failures,” Malloy said.
Trump defended his intent to ban transgender service members by stating that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
A recent study commissioned by the Defense Department shows allowing transgender people into the military would come with a roughly 0.13 percent increase to those health care costs, calling the impact “minimal.”
“It’s not a burden because there’s not that many trans people in the military we only make up about half a percent of the population so there can’t be that many in the military and the procedures that we go through mainly the cost is up front once we transition there’s no more cost,” Diana Lombardi, Executive Director of the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition explained.
She added the transgender community is disheartened by the President’s words on the matter.
“For us, we’ve been working for equality for a long time and this is part of it, we should be able to serve in the military, you know we have all the rights here in CT, but around the country now we’re losing more and more under this administration,” Lombardi said.
Transgender service members have been allowed to be a part of the military for the last year, after former Defense Secretary Ash Carter ended the ban on transgender individuals. There are currently roughly 1.3 million members in the U.S. armed forces.
Recent studies show that of that total, there are somewhere between 7,000 to 25,000 transgender service members on active duty and another 1,500 to 4,000 in the reserves.
FOX61 reached out to the CT National Guard for comment on the matter, they deferred to the U.S. Department of Defense, who in turn deferred to the White House. FOX61 reached out to the White House for comment and have not yet heard back.