Why Do Transgender People Join the Military in Such High Numbers?

2015-09-15T20:03:45-04:00

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.
Yet over the next three years, Brown saw 10 more transgender patients -- all of them seeking hormone therapy and male-to-female gender reassignment surgery. He began to suspect that the military, despite its ban on allowing transgender people to serve, was somehow attracting them at a disproportionately high rate.
The Pentagon is now weighing whether to lift its ban on transgender service members and is expected to do so next year. As the policy is reviewed, researchers are citing evidence that bears out Brown's hunch of three decades go.
Transgender people are present in the armed services at a higher rate than in the general population.
The latest analysis, published last year by UCLA researchers, estimated that nearly 150,000 transgender people have served in the military, or about 21 percent of all transgender adults in the U.S. By comparison, 10 percent of the general population has served.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/09/14/why-do-transgender-people-join-the-military-in-such-high-numbers.html?ESRC=army.nl

An estimated 150,000 transgender people have served in the military, or about 21 percent of all transgender adults in the U.S.