Transgender people and military service
Not all armed forces have policies explicitly permitting LGBT personnel. Generally speaking, Western European militaries show a greater tendency toward inclusion of LGBT individuals.
On 18 July 1980, Sweden became the first country to permit legally recognized transgender individuals—those who had completed transition and obtained legal gender status under the 1972 gender-recognition law—to be medically classified as fit for duty and serve openly in their affirmed gender within the armed forces.
As of 2025, eight North Atlantic Treaty Organization members — Italy, Albania, Poland, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, the United States, and Slovakia — have prohibited transgender people from serving in their armed forces.
Debate about inclusion of transgender people in the military
Arguments against inclusion
There are arguments against the inclusion of transgender people in military service. One argument is based on the view that being transgender is a mental illness, and as such transgender individuals are unfit for service. This argument follows a high incidence of depression and suicide manifest in transgender individuals. This is especially pertinent in individuals who have had sex-reassignment surgery and are unsatisfied with the results; in such cases severe depression is prevalent. Hormone therapy can affect mood and a sense of well-being, a factor that counts against inclusion of transgender people and its effect on service capability. Besides the well-being argument of hormone treatment, complications may arise due to hormone treatments. Possible complications arising from estrogen and testosterone therapies include an increased risk of thromboembolic disease, myocardial infarction, breast cancer, fertility problems, stroke, abnormal liver function, renal disease, endometrial cancer, and osteoporosis. Any of these could cause significant issues to effective military service, especially when deployed in remote areas or in field training settings. Another concern is the cost to treat transgender members in the military. A small portion of transgender soldiers seek medical intervention, yearly 30 to 140 pursue hormone treatment and 25 to 100 have surgical reassignment surgery. It is estimated that a male-to-female transition can cost between US$7,000 and $24,000; female-to-male transition can exceed US$50,000. The Defense Department's yearly budget for healthcare is $6 billion, the numbers found in the study show the cost to treat service members with Gender dysphoria would fall between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, that is.04 to.14 percent of the military's annual healthcare budget.A further argument is that in order to have an effective, smooth-running military, there must be cohesion within the unit. It is argued that transgender individuals would have a negative impact on unit cohesion. "The bonds of trust among individual service members" are vital. There is a fear that if transgender personnel be allowed to serve openly, morale will be detrimentally affected. But this argument neglects to deal with the question of what kinds of structural accommodations might be needed to maintain morale and unit cohesion in such situations. Military service forces members into very intimate living quarters. Requiring members to live in situations that make them feel disconcerted and uncomfortable may result in their performance being undermined.
Arguments for inclusion
By excluding a demographic from equal service, militaries are overtly intensifying the stigma of that group's civic inferiority. This is supported by the notion that all citizens are obligated to serve their nations if the need arises. Allowing transgender military personnel to serve openly without fear of exclusion would be a huge step toward equality. It has been recognized by some academics that the inclusion of all LGBT personnel in the military is more than a mere human rights issue, it is argued that for militaries to survive in the twenty-first century diversity is critical.With advancements in the current understanding of human experience, sexual identity is now better understood. Where being transgender was once considered a paraphilic disorder, the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders places being transgender in a separate chapter, terming the condition gender dysphoria. It is argued that militaries that exclude transgender people on grounds of mental illness, whose policies pathologize gender dysphoria, are at odds with the current medical understanding. This argument requires that transgender personnel be treated by the same level of medical care as all other personnel, in accordance with established medical practice.
Experts argue that there is no empirical evidence that supports the argument that transgender people are unfit for service. Often cited are factors such as a supposed predisposition of transgender individuals to problems such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts; this is countered by the prevalence of these same issues in the LGBT community, yet in many countries their service is not excluded. By creating a more accepting environment, distress that transgender personnel feel might be mitigated if they may serve openly with full support.
Whilst militaries often cite the high medical cost of transgender people, they fail to reconcile this argument with current standards with other service members. For example, militaries often allow hormone treatments for an array of reasons and conditions, besides gender dysphoria; a common hormone treatment being contraceptive. Furthermore, the often cited risks of cross hormone treatment are rare, and not likely to cause any significant issues to the military. Whilst the cost of gender reassignment surgery is high, it is suggested that fewer than 2% of transgender members per year will choose to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Perhaps one of the most supporting arguments is based on the experiences of the 18 countries that currently allow transgender service. Research on the impacts of allowing LGBT to serve openly in the Israeli Defense Forces, British Armed Forces, and Canadian Armed Forces found no necessary negative impacts on performance, unit cohesion or morality. The idea of unit cohesion can also be demonstrated by a social study conducted less than one year prior to the repeal of the ban preventing transgender personnel from serving openly in the United States military. Morten G. Ender, David E. Rohall, and Michael D. Matthews presented the American military academy, Reserve Officers Training Corps, and civilian undergraduates with a survey to assess the general attitude on the prospect of the transgender community serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. After statistical analysis, 50.8% of individuals disagreed with the ban. In regards to productivity, 72.6% of subjects say that transgender inclusion would have no impact on their ability to do their job. Finally, on the subject of visibility, 21.8% of those interviewed said they would want transgender individuals to tell them their gender preferences, 56.1% said no preference. Overall, based on this study one year prior to the ban, the majority of the people that participated in the survey showed overwhelming support towards the inclusion of the transgender community in the United States military.
In October 2017, ruling that a renewed ban within the US military should not go into force, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly stated that the evidence presented up to that time showed that "all of the reasons proffered... for excluding transgender individuals from the military in this case were not merely unsupported, but were actually contradicted by the studies, conclusions and judgment of the military itself".
Status of transgender people in the military by country
Albania
Albania has never maintained a published policy expressly allowing transgender people to serve in their affirmed gender. From independence on 4 December 1912 through the communist period and into the modern republic, the state has not created a general legal procedure for legal gender recognition. The contemporary civil-status framework—Law no. 10129 of 2009 on Civil Status—organises the population register and identity data but provides no routine path to change the sex marker beyond limited error-correction; international and regional monitors therefore classify Albania as having no functioning LGR procedure.At the same time, Albania adopted a comprehensive anti-discrimination statute in 2010. Law no. 10221/2010 “On Protection from Discrimination” explicitly includes gender identity among protected characteristics and applies across employment, including the public sector. NGOs and the equality body have treated the statute as covering public employment broadly, though it does not itself establish LGR or override civil-registry data.
Because military personnel records, uniforms, housing assignments and identity checks ordinarily rely on civil-registry data, the absence of LGR has the practical effect that a transgender person may only be recorded and serve under their sex as registered at birth; service in an affirmed gender is therefore not available “on paper” absent a prior court-recognised change. Human-rights reporting and sectoral overviews thus describe a de facto bar on affirmed-gender service, even though Albanian defence law contains no published, categorical ban on transgender enlistment as such.
Public commentary on LGBT service in Albania has historically focused on sexual orientation rather than gender identity. After the 2010 anti-discrimination law, local advocates noted that there was no legal impediment to the enrolment of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the armed forces; however, these statements did not address transgender recognition in military records.
In summary, from 1912 to the present Albania has not operated a legal pathway for changing the sex marker in the civil registry; anti-discrimination norms protect gender identity in employment, but—absent LGR—transgender people cannot be recorded or serve in the armed forces in their affirmed gender, and there is no evidence of a distinct, formal military policy that authorises such recognition.