Under new White House guidance to the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will have the authority to decide the service-status of active transgender military personnel.

In effect, this guidance means that the vast majority of transgender personnel will be able to remain in active service.

That’s important because some Republican members of Congress had wanted active service transgender personnel to be separated without regard for their deployability. Such an approach would have been dishonorable to those personnel, and incongruent with the military’s mission to train and deploy maximally-effective forces. Remember, aside from front combat infantry units, genitalia plays a very limited role in defining an individual’s military ability.

Yet separating transgender personnel would also have been nonsensical.