Last year, the Pentagon lifted its long-standing ban on transgender men and women serving openly in the military. At the time, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter explained: “Our mission is to defend this country, and we don’t want barriers unrelated to a person’s qualification to serve preventing us from recruiting. … We have to have access to 100 percent of America’s population for our all-volunteer force to be able to recruit from among them the most highly qualified.”