Trump put in place the ban that would not allow transgender people to serve.
Several people familiar with the matter confirm to ABC News that President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Monday that will lift the Pentagon’s ban on transgenders serving in the army.
The controversial ban was announced by former President Donald Trump in 2017 via a tweet and reversed the Obama administration’s policy of allowing open service to trans people.
New Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will be present at the White House ceremony on Monday, where the executive order will be signed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The ban will be officially lifted tomorrow,” said one of the individuals familiar with the signing of the executive order.
Biden said during the presidential campaign that he was in favor of lifting the ban.
In May 2020, Biden said he would order the Pentagon to allow “transgender members of the military to serve openly and without discrimination in the armed forces”.
“They can shoot as direct as anyone,” he added.
At his confirmation hearing last week, Austin said he would support an effort to lift the ban.
“I support the president’s plan to lift the ban,” Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If you are fit and qualified to serve and can maintain standards, you must be allowed to serve, and you can expect me to support that all the time.”
The White House and the Pentagon declined to comment on the executive order.
It is unclear how many transgender people serve in the armed forces, although some advocacy groups have said it could reach 15,000 individuals.
In 2016, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced a policy that would allow transgender individuals to serve in the U.S. military openly.
But in July 2017, Trump issued a series of tweets that immediately banned that service.
The tweets surprised Pentagon officials, including James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary.
He soon implemented revisions that prompted the Pentagon to reinstate the ban on the transgender service opened two years later.
The new policy required the military and those who wished to join the army to follow the standards associated with their biological sex.
Service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria, defined as “a marked incongruity between someone’s experienced / expressed gender and the assigned gender … associated with clinically significant suffering and functional disability”, were no longer allowed to receive medical surgery for the gender transition, unless they were currently undergoing medical treatment.
Transsexual individuals who received hormones or medical surgery related to their transition were banned from joining the army, even though they could prove stability in their preferred gender.
ABC News’s Molly Nagle and Elizabeth McLaughlin contributed to this report.