Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Notable

Expel servicemembers with gender dysphoria and end medical accession exceptions

Partially done

103 4. Department of Defense

“Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    With the Supreme Court's stay of the district-court injunction in Shilling v. United States, the Department's February 2025 policy took effect and separations of servicemembers with gender dysphoria proceeded — the expulsion half of the Quote, delivered. The accession-exception half did not follow: no rule, memorandum or statute on any allowlisted source removes the exceptions for other conditions predisposing an applicant to medical treatment. Searched: the Federal Register full-text API for "gender dysphoria" (14 hits, all HHS and disability rules), "medical accession" (0) since 2025-01-20; the FY2026 NDAA for "gender dysphoria", "HIV" and "medical standards" (0 each). See #176 for the full litigation sequence.

  2. Attempted

    EO 14183 declares that "expressing a false 'gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service" and directs the Secretary of Defense to update medical standards for accession, retention and separation. A directive; nobody had been separated.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Two objects. The gender dysphoria half is delivered and is the same instrument as #176 (reverse policies allowing transgender service, done), taken here with its own dates and its own reading. The other half — removing accession exceptions for people predisposed to require medical treatment, HIV-positive applicants among them — has no public instrument.

This item sits in the page 103–104 personnel cluster, whose shared instruments are EO 14151, EO 14183, the FY2026 NDAA titles V, VI and IX, and the Secretary of Defense’s 2025 personnel memoranda — nearly all of which live on Department of War pages that refuse automated reads. One search covered the whole cluster.

Action
eliminate
Object
medical accession exceptions and servicemembers with gender dysphoria
ID
168