I enlisted in the United States Army in 2006 and have been an officer since 2013, serving in a variety of leadership positions. I am proud of my service and I care deeply about the Army. But this month I began the process of resigning in protest of President Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from the military.

The president issued the order in January and the Supreme Court last month allowed the administration to start enforcing it. The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.

I may not be the sort of person you would expect to oppose a ban on transgender troops. I am a conservative evangelical Christian and a Republican. Though I have deep compassion for people who feel they are in the wrong body, I do not think that transitioning — as opposed to learning to love and accept the body God gave you — is the right thing to do in that predicament. But my views are irrelevant to the issue of transgender troops.

Having served under several presidential administrations, I understand that new leadership often entails changes to military policy. Some changes, such as the repeal in 2011 of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” I have disagreed with. But I have never before concluded that I need to resign.

This situation is different. The ban on transgender troops is blatantly discriminatory. It has nothing to do with the policy’s stated justification of military readiness. The Department of Defense, when imposing the ban in February, claimed that the “medical, surgical and mental health constraints” on transgender people “are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”

This is untrue, and the department should know it. A study from 2016 conducted by the RAND Corporation for the Department of Defense found that military policies in other countries that permit transgender people to serve openly have “no significant effect on cohesion, operational effectiveness or readiness.” The American Psychological Association noted in 2018 that “substantial psychological research” demonstrates that gender dysphoria does not itself prevent people from working at a high level, “including in military service.” Indeed, since 2016, when the Pentagon announced that transgender Americans could serve openly, transgender troops have been deployed to combat zones, provided vital support to combat operations and filled critical roles in the armed forces.