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Delaware native Sarah McBride calls Trump's anti-transgender military policy unpatriotic

After President Trump took to Twitter yesterday to announce a ban on transgender individuals serving in the U.S. military, Delaware native and LGBTQ advocate Sarah McBride is speaking out.

“With a series of tweets, Donald Trump has undermined historic progress on inclusion within the U.S. military,” said Sarah McBride, who last year became the first openly transgender person to address a major party political convention at the DNC in Philly.

 

Trump’s announcement Wednesday morning comes only a year after President Obama extended military access to openly transgender individuals.

It also didn’t come with an accompanying press release, briefing or fact sheet, and comes soon after he announced a six-month freeze on allowing new transgender recruits into the military last month.

That has McBride - now National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign – outraged. She said Trump’s decision is disgraceful, unpatriotic and a dangerous action targeting people bravely serving the country.

“And it begs the questions why, and it certainly continues to reveal that Donald Trump’s assertion during the 2016 that he’s a friend of the LGBTQ community was just one more alternative fact," McBride said.

 

One of Trump’s tweets cited high medical costs and so-called  “disruptions” as the reasons behind the decision.

 

“This is the same rhetoric we’ve heard time and time again from anti-equality politicians who want to institute their extreme agenda within the U.S. military by forbidding people who they don’t approve of from serving," McBride said.

 
It’s too soon to tell how the policy will play out, and how it will affect transgender individuals currently serving, as well as veterans. It’s estimated there are between 2,000 and 15,000 transgender active duty service members, and as many as 100,000 transgender veterans nationwide.

 

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