The Associated Press reported on Monday that the military is in the final stages of the planning on the matter. A source told BuzzFeed News that the defense secretary spoke with President Obama about the matter last week.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter
Carolyn Kaster / AP
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is finalizing plans to end the ban on transgender military service, the Associated Press reported on Monday.
A source familiar with the Pentagon's decisionmaking on the issue told BuzzFeed News recently that the decision could be announced as soon as Tuesday. The source also told BuzzFeed News that Defense Secretary Ash Carter met with President Obama last week to discuss the issue.
Obama made a rare visit to the Pentagon on July 6, where he spoke at a press briefing about the current military campaign against ISIS.
Asked about the issue on July 8, Pentagon spokesman Nathan Christensen told BuzzFeed News, "We have nothing to announce at this time." The White House provided no comment to BuzzFeed News last week in response to an inquiry about the matter.
Christensen did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the AP report, which states that the coming announcement would include giving the service branches "six months to assess the impact of the change and work out the details."
Last month, when Carter addressed an LGBT pride month event at the Pentagon, he discussed diversity at length but made no specific mention of transgender military service.
"Embracing diversity and inclusion is critical to recruiting and retaining the force of the future. Young Americans today are more diverse, open, and tolerant than past generations," he said. "If we're going to attract the best and brightest among them to contribute to our mission of national defense, we have to ourselves be more diverse, open, and tolerant, too."
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1IW3A63
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