The Claim

Stopped taxpayer funds from being used for sex-change surgeries among military personnel.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

That the administration ended the use of taxpayer money to fund gender-affirming surgeries for military service members. The claim asserts a discrete policy action with a clear fiscal beneficiary — the taxpayer.

What is being implied but not asserted?

The framing implies that taxpayer funds were flowing in meaningful quantities toward “sex-change surgeries” — that this was a significant expenditure worth highlighting as a standalone accomplishment. The term “sex-change surgeries” is itself a rhetorical choice: the clinical and military terminology is “gender-affirming surgical care” or “gender transition-related surgery.” The older, blunter phrasing is designed to maximize cultural reaction rather than describe the medical reality. By listing this as a separate item from the transgender military ban (item 198), the claim inflates the accomplishment count — this is the same executive order, the same policy, described from a different angle.

What is conspicuously absent?

The actual dollar amounts. How much was spent, in total, on gender-affirming surgical care for military personnel? How does that figure compare to the military health system’s total budget? The claim presents no numbers because the numbers would undermine the implied narrative. Also absent: the fact that TRICARE never covered gender-affirming surgery for dependents or retirees under standard benefits — only active-duty service members could receive it, and only through the Supplemental Health Care Program (SHCP). The total spent on all gender-affirming surgery from 2016 to 2021 was $3.1 million — in a health system that spends over $60 billion per year.

Padding Analysis: Repackaging the Transgender Ban as a Fiscal Win

This claim describes a subset of the policy action already covered in item 198 (the transgender military ban via EO 14183). Item 198 addresses the full scope of Executive Order 14183, which bars transgender individuals from service entirely. The halt on gender-affirming medical care — including surgery, hormone therapy, and mental health services — is an implementation detail of that same ban, directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s February 7, 2025 memo. Listing “stopped taxpayer funds for sex-change surgeries” as a separate win from “barred transgender individuals from the military” is counting the same executive order twice, reframed from an identity angle (198) and a fiscal angle (200). The fiscal framing is particularly misleading given the trivial sums involved.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

The administration did halt gender-affirming surgical care for military personnel through the same executive order that banned transgender service. ¹ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s February 7, 2025 memo, implementing Executive Order 14183, stated: “Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused, and all unscheduled, scheduled, or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for Service members are paused.” A footnote specified that banned treatments include gender-affirming surgeries and “newly initiated” hormone therapy. On May 9, 2025, the Defense Health Agency issued “Additional Guidance on Treatment of Gender Dysphoria,” which cancelled DHA Procedural Instruction 6025.21, cancelled all scheduled or planned gender-transition surgeries, and cancelled all previously approved Supplemental Health Care Program (SHCP) waivers for surgical care.

The total amount spent on gender-affirming surgery in the military was negligible relative to the defense health budget. ² Between January 1, 2016 and May 14, 2021, the Pentagon performed 243 gender-transition surgeries at a cost of $3.1 million for active-duty service members. These surgeries — performed in military treatment facilities — included removal of breasts or testicles, hysterectomies, and labiaplasties. Over the broader period of 2015 to 2024, the Pentagon spent approximately $52 million total on all gender-affirming care — including psychotherapy ($11.6 million through 2021), hormone therapy ($340,000 for 637 service members through 2021), and surgery — for 5,773 troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Of those, roughly 1,000 received some type of surgery and about 3,200 received hormone therapy. This works out to approximately $5.2 million per year for all gender-affirming care combined.

The Military Health System budget dwarfs gender-affirming care spending by a factor of more than 10,000 to 1. ³ The FY2025 Military Health System budget request totaled $61.4 billion (7.2% of total DoD discretionary spending), serving 9.6 million beneficiaries. The Defense Health Program account alone is $40.3 billion, of which $20.6 billion is for purchased care via TRICARE. During the Talbott v. Trump proceedings, Judge Ana Reyes noted that the DoD spends approximately $42 million annually on erectile dysfunction medication alone — eight times the $5.2 million annual cost of all gender-affirming care combined. Judge Reyes asked the DoD attorney: “It’s not even a rounding error, right?” The total ten-year surgical spending of $3.1 million represents approximately 0.005% of a single year’s military health budget.

TRICARE never covered gender-affirming surgery for dependents or retirees — only active-duty members could receive it through a separate program. ⁴ A 1976 federal statute excluded coverage for surgeries “justified solely on psychiatric needs including… sex gender changes.” When the Obama administration lifted the transgender service ban in 2016, it enabled TRICARE to cover nonsurgical treatments (psychotherapy and hormone therapy) but could not change the statutory surgical exclusion for dependents. Active-duty service members could receive surgery only through the Supplemental Health Care Program (SHCP), which provides an avenue to cover otherwise non-covered services when they enable return to full duty or worldwide deployable status. The FY2025 NDAA (Section 708) added a further prohibition on TRICARE coverage of “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for beneficiaries under 18. A November 2024 federal court ruling had found the TRICARE surgical exclusion for dependents unconstitutional, but this was overtaken by the EO 14183 policy changes.

The DoD-commissioned RAND study found transgender healthcare costs to be negligible. ⁵ RAND estimated transition-related healthcare would cost the military between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually — a 0.04% to 0.13% increase in total DoD healthcare expenditures. RAND estimated 1,320 to 6,630 transgender individuals in the active component (mid-range: approximately 2,450), with only a subset seeking transition-related treatment in any given year. The study found the impact on readiness would be less than 0.0015% of total available labor-years. Actual spending data from 2015 to 2024 ($5.2 million annually) fell squarely within RAND’s projected range, confirming the study’s accuracy.

Strong Inferences

The fiscal framing of this claim is designed to obscure the actual scale of spending involved. ⁶ By saying “stopped taxpayer funds from being used for sex-change surgeries” without providing any dollar figures, the claim implies a significant expenditure was curtailed. The actual amount — $3.1 million in surgeries over five years, or roughly $620,000 per year — is less than what the Pentagon spent on lobster in a single month ($6.9 million). It is one-eighth of what the military spends annually on erectile dysfunction medication ($42 million). It is approximately the cost of assembling 28 separation boards to discharge the transgender troops being expelled ($22,000 each). The claim works precisely because it never mentions a number.

This item exists to count a single executive order as multiple wins. ⁷ Executive Order 14183 barred transgender service (item 198), which necessarily ended gender-affirming medical care for service members, which necessarily ended gender-affirming surgery specifically. Items 198, 199 (grooming/physical standards), and 200 (surgery funding) form a cluster where a single policy action is disaggregated into multiple claimed victories. This is a textbook example of the padding pattern identified across the “365 wins” list.

What the Evidence Shows

The factual core of the claim is accurate in the most literal sense: the administration did halt gender-affirming surgical care for military personnel. To that extent, it describes something that happened. The steel-man case is straightforward — the Commander-in-Chief has broad authority over military medical policy, and some may reasonably object to the use of any public funds for gender-transition procedures regardless of the amount involved.

But the claim’s framing is doing almost all the work. “Stopped taxpayer funds from being used for sex-change surgeries” is engineered to evoke the image of substantial public money being diverted to elective cosmetic procedures. The reality: 243 surgeries were performed over five years at a total cost of $3.1 million, in a health system that spends $61.4 billion annually. The annual surgical cost — roughly $620,000 — is less than the salary of a single senior Pentagon official. The broader cost of all gender-affirming care, including therapy and hormones, averaged $5.2 million per year, which Judge Reyes characterized as “not even a rounding error” in the context of $42 million spent annually on erectile dysfunction medication alone.

The fiscal framing is further undermined by the costs of implementing the ban itself. Each separation board costs approximately $22,000 to assemble. The training investment in thousands of experienced service members being discharged — combat veterans, intelligence specialists, pilots, linguists — represents millions in institutional knowledge being discarded. The claim saves a fraction of a cent per taxpayer while spending orders of magnitude more on the enforcement machinery.

Most fundamentally, this is not a distinct accomplishment. It is item 198 described from a different angle. The transgender military ban banned transgender service, which ended transgender medical care, which ended transgender surgery. That is one action with cascading consequences, not three separate wins. The disaggregation exists to inflate the count.

The Bottom Line

The claim is technically accurate — the administration halted gender-affirming surgery for military personnel. As a matter of executive authority, this was an action within the administration’s power to take. The strongest version of the argument is that some taxpayers object on principle to funding gender-transition procedures, regardless of cost, and the Commander-in-Chief acted on that preference.

But as a standalone item on a list of “365 wins,” this is padding. The policy action is Executive Order 14183, already claimed as item 198. The fiscal savings are negligible — $620,000 per year in surgery costs, $5.2 million for all gender-affirming care, against a $61.4 billion health system. The term “sex-change surgeries” is chosen for cultural impact, not descriptive accuracy — the vast majority of transgender healthcare spending was on psychotherapy and hormone therapy, not surgery. And the claim works only by omitting every relevant number: how much was actually spent (almost nothing), how many surgeries were performed (243 over five years), and what the military health system actually costs ($61.4 billion per year). When you add the numbers the White House deliberately left out, the claim deflates from a fiscal win into a cultural signal repackaged as budgetary discipline.

Footnotes

1. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Memo to Senior Pentagon Leadership, February 7, 2025. Military.com, “Transgender Recruits and Gender-Affirming Health Care Restricted by Hegseth Memo,” February 10, 2025. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/10/transgender-recruits-and-gender-affirming-health-care-restricted-hegseth-memo.html ; Task and Purpose, “Pentagon orders immediate hold on gender-affirming care for transgender troops.” https://taskandpurpose.com/news/hegseth-memo-transgender-care/ ; DHA, “Additional Guidance on Treatment of Gender Dysphoria,” May 9, 2025. https://health.mil/Reference-Center/Policies/2025/05/09/Additional-Guidance-on-Treatment-of-Gender-Dysphoria ↩

2. Military.com, “Here’s How Much the Pentagon Has Spent So Far to Treat Transgender Troops,” June 18, 2021. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/18/heres-how-much-pentagon-has-spent-so-far-treat-transgender-troops.html ; PBS NewsHour, “Transgender care cost military less than 1 percent of its health budget since 2016.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/military-spent-about-8-million-on-transgender-care-since-2016 ↩

3. Congressional Research Service, “FY2025 Budget Request for the Military Health System” (IF12660). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12660 ; Newsweek, “US Military Spends Eight Times More on Viagra Than Gender-Affirming Care,” March 13, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-spending-viagra-gender-affirming-care-2044114 ↩

4. Congressional Research Service, “FY2025 NDAA: TRICARE Coverage of Gender-Affirming Care” (IN12401). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12401 ; TRICARE, “Gender Dysphoria Services.” https://www.tricare.mil/CoveredServices/IsItCovered/GenderDysphoriaServices ↩

5. RAND Corporation, “Assessing the Implications of Allowing Transgender Personnel to Serve Openly” (RR-1530), 2016. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1530.html ↩

6. Newsweek, “US Military Spends Eight Times More on Viagra Than Gender-Affirming Care,” March 13, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-spending-viagra-gender-affirming-care-2044114 ; Military.com, “Here’s How Much the Pentagon Has Spent So Far to Treat Transgender Troops,” June 18, 2021. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/18/heres-how-much-pentagon-has-spent-so-far-treat-transgender-troops.html ↩

7. Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” January 27, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prioritizing-military-excellence-and-readiness/ ↩