Republicans in the House are reviving their push to keep the Pentagon from funding gender reassignment surgeries.A previous effort, on July 13, failed to get the votes, but through a procedural backdoor in a spending bill due for a vote on the House floor next week, they’re reintroducing an amendment that would restrict Department of Defense funds from being spent on gender reassignment treatment for transgender military personnel.Rep. Vicky Hartzler, Republican from Missouri, has been leading the push to end the Obama-era policy that allowed the Department of Defense to pay for surgeries and treatment for transgender service members at the recommendation of military doctors. To the surprise of many GOP faithful, the amendment failed to pass when it was put up to vote on July 13 — 209 voted for, and 214 against, with 24 Republicans crossing the aisle to oppose it.Hartzler and many of her colleagues were surprised that the amendment didn’t pass and spent most of a closed-door GOP conference the following day talking through how it failed, according to Politico. Six Republican representatives were either absent from the vote last week or didn’t vote, and one freshman representative, Brian Mast of Florida, said he voted against the amendment by accident.The status of transgender members of the military first came to national attention when Chelsea Manning — the whistleblower who leaked hundreds of thousands of military documents to WikiLeaks and served seven years in prison for it — came out as transgender on the day she was sentenced in 2010. Prior to 2016, people who were openly transgender were barred from serving in the military. Military regulations previously classified people who are transgender as having mental conditions that made them ineligible to serve; those who had undergone gender reassignment surgery were considered to have physical abnormalities.On the whole, transgender rights in the military face upheaval and uncertainty. Last year, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter put an end to the rule that kept transgender people from enlisting in the military. The ban was to end in stages, and current Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would have had to take action on July 1 in order for the ban to be fully lifted. But Mattis stalled, announcing at the end of June that he needs an additional six months to study the issue before making a final decision.That leaves transgender service members in limbo. If they are transgender and want to start serving, they currently can’t enlist; but if they’re already serving in the military and decide to transition, the military will pay for their surgery upon a military doctor’s recommendation.After last week’s vote, Hartzler told Time that she was “disappointed,” but the issue still remains and steps must be taken to address this misuse of our precious defense dollars.”Estimates for how much treatment for transgender military personnel indicate that, at between $2.4 and $8.4 million, the cost of the program represents a tiny sliver of the defense department’s $583 billion 2017 budget.“These transgender service members are serving our country and have signed up and agreed to risk their lives for this country, so we want to honor that commitment as well,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican from Florida, told Politico.Mattis has asked Congress not to intervene until he has finished his own internal review of the Obama-era military transgender policies.
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