If this is true - it will not end well. Too many cans of too many different types of worms will be opened and unforeseen disaster after disaster will ensue.
This has to be a mistake. Military requirements and transgender do not mix - civilian life, sure, no problem... military readiness, mission effectiveness, deployment capable, no way.
Renae said it well above. It's difficult enough to maintain morale and discipline when males and females are in close combat situations, much less gay and lesbian given the sexual tendencies, prejudices, irrational actions, and bad decisions and choices of young men and women without the stresses of deployment and combat... but to add transgender medical support requirements, medication support requirements, mental health support requirements, and the potential for all three plus others that I don't even know about - and then there's the uniform, grooming, and facilities changes that would require adaptations. What PT standards are they going to be held to? Male or female? I can think of dozens of problems that would make the, and I hate using this term... lifestyle... incompatible with military life and the real mission of the military.
Look, if a transgender had already gone through full medical change, and was medically and hormonally stable, then maybe, if all the other items such as facility requirements and so on could be easily adapted, and potentially assignable to a non-deployable job. But, if they aren't deployable, then why be in the military?
The Department of Defense and all of the uniformed services under the DoD have civilian support jobs by the thousands. If you can't deploy, then that's where you could serve without putting yourself or others at risk or take up a deployable slot that someone will have to cover for if you can't deploy when zero hour hits.
I just don't know. In the back of my mind, the entire time I've been typing this, I keep hearing my voice saying - The military is for killing people and blowing **** up, not for establishing social justice or making social statements or performing social experiments or setting social examples for the civilian world. You need crap blown to hell and lots of people killed? Then that's what they're for. Not much else - they aren't cops, or builders of civilizations, or peace keepers, and damn sure not an experimental society petri dish.
The US military can either be the strongest, meanest, scariest, technologically advanced fighting machine in the world - or it can be the frigging Peace Corps singing songs and holding hands and letting anyone and everyone in regardless of military readiness, mission effectiveness, and deployment capabilities.
JMHO - hell, I've seen dozens of people get Article 15's and busted in rank just for getting a sun burn and not being deployable, for Christ's sake.