As President-Elect Donald Trump prepares to assume office in January, his administration has reportedly indicated plans to implement certain policy changes that would affect transgender individuals across various sectors.

But Trump’s campaign spokesperson and to-be White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Wednesday ‘no decisions on this issue have been made,’ when asked if Trump would discharge transgender military personnel after international reports this week claimed that he would.

‘These unnamed sources are speculating and have no idea what they are actually talking about. No policy should ever be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump or his authorized spokespeople,’ Leavitt told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

SPARTA Pride, a nonprofit organization advocating for transgender military personnel, told Military.com this week there are approximately 15,000 transgender personnel stationed around the world, including in combat zones.

During Trump’s first term, he announced via Twitter in July 2017 that the U.S. would no longer allow transgender individuals to serve ‘in any capacity.’ Previously, the Obama administration allowed transgender individuals to serve openly in the military and get taxpayer-funded gender-affirming treatments while serving.

Trump cited ‘tremendous medical costs and disruption’ after announcing the roll back of the policy. After legal challenges, a revised policy was implemented in 2018 that only prohibited individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria from serving, unless they had not undergone a sex change and were ‘stable in their biological sex.’

In January 2019, as legal challenges mounted, the Supreme Court allowed the ban to stand. By the time President Joe Biden took office, he reversed the Trump-era restrictions.

Throughout Trump’s presidential campaign this election cycle, he also indicated certain changes would be made to so-called gender-affirming care for minors, too. 

In a video posted to Truth Social in February 2023, Trump said his plan ‘to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth’ would involve issuing an executive order directing all federal agencies to halt any programs that support or promote sex changes at any age.

‘I will then ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,’ Trump said in the video.

Trump’s stance on transgender issues also became front and center on the last leg of his campaign when his team aired an ad targeting biological males in womens’ sports. The ad focused on men in women’s sports and Vice President Kamala Harris’ track record of ushering in sex change procedures for incarcerated people in California.

‘Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,’ the narrator of Trump’s campaign ad said. Experts say the TV spot had a substantial influence on swing voters.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha is urging NATO leaders to invite Ukraine to join the Western military alliance during a meeting in Brussels next week, according to a letter sent to alliance leaders—reflecting the country’s frenzied push to gain membership in the alliance in the final days of Biden’s presidency. 

The letter, first reviewed by Reuters, comes as Ukraine has re-upped its request for NATO membership to help put an end to Russia’s war, including a recent uptick in attacks on its energy infrastructure. It also comes as the Biden administration has granted Ukraine new permissions to fight back against Russia in their final months in office. 

In the letter, Ukraine’s foreign minister acknowledged his country’s ongoing war with Russia prohibits Kyiv from joining NATO right now. But he argued that an invitation for membership in Brussels would be a powerful show of force—and a major symbolic blow—to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long opposed the idea of their membership in NATO.

‘We believe that the invitation should be extended at this stage,’ Sybiha said in the letter. ‘It will become the Allies’ adequate response to Russia’s constant escalation of the war it has unleashed, the latest demonstration of which is the involvement of tens of thousands of North Korean troops and the use of Ukraine as a testing ground for new weapons,’ he added.

Also on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used an interview on Sky News to up the public pressure for NATO leaders to extend his country a membership offer.

Speaking Friday to Sky News’s Stuart Ramsay, the Ukrainian president suggested that NATO could extend membership to the territory of Ukraine still under its control to help accelerate the NATO memberhsip process and wind down Russia’s war as quickly as possible.

‘If we want to stop the hot phase of the war, we need to take under the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control,’ he told Ramsay. NATO should ‘immediately’ cover parts of the country that are under Ukrainian authority, he said, stressing that it it something Ukraine needs ‘very much otherwise he will come back,’ in apparent reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine would face many hurdles in attempting to join NATO, despite assurances from the alliance that it is on an ‘irreversible path’ to membership.

That’s because Ukraine lacks two key requirements for NATO membership: territorial integrity and the absence of ongoing conflict. Currently, Russia controls roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory, Rebekah Koffler, a strategic military intelligence analyst and author of ‘Putin’s Playbook,’ told Fox News Digital in an interview Friday. 

Any country hoping to gain membership ‘cannot have ongoing conflict because of Article 5,’ Koffler said. 

For Russia,’it is a red line for Ukraine to be part of NATO,’ Koffler added, since Russian President Vladimir Putin considers Ukraine part of Russia’s strategic security perimeter.

NATO members are also split over the idea of accepting Ukraine. ‘Those who are against it are concerned about Article 5 obligations: admitting Ukraine into NATO would automatically place the United States and the entire NATO alliance at war with Russia because of the collective defense clause,’ Koffler said.

The State Department said Friday that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had spoken by phone to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Sybiha to discuss battlefield updates and incoming U.S. security assistance in wake of recent Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. On the call, officials said, Blinken ‘briefed the Foreign Minister on U.S. goals for sustainable support for Ukraine, to be discussed at upcoming diplomatic engagements with NATO and through the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.’

The press release stopped short of detailing any further overtures to Ukraine.

Still, Ukraine’s push for membership comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his administration brace for the many unknowns of a second Trump presidency. Trump has long expressed skepticism of NATO, and suggested as recently as this year that he could end the war between Russian and Ukraine ‘in a day.’  

While Ukraine’s push for NATO membership is not new, the timeline for leaders to approve their bid has taken on new urgency, as the war nears its third year and as President-elect Trump prepares to take office again.

NATO membership was included as one of the first— and most important—steps in Zelenskyy’s multi-part ‘victory plan’ to help win the war against Russia.

The outline, which his administration published in October, suggested that Ukraine could put an end to the war with Russia as early as 2025, if the country’s requests are granted for more weapons and the continued ability to carry out military operations on Russian soil. 

Any country hoping to gain membership ‘cannot have ongoing conflict because of Article 5,’ Koffler said. 

For Russia,’it is a red line for Ukraine to be part of NATO,’ Koffler added, since Russian President Vladimir Putin considers Ukraine part of Russia’s strategic security perimeter.

President Joe Biden, for his part, has used his final weeks in office to authorize new permissions for Ukraine in the ongoing war with Ukraine.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration granted Ukraine new permission to use U.S.-supplied long-range weapons to strike targets inside Russian teritory. Later, they also signed off on the transfer of anti-personnel mines to bolster Ukrainian army defenses in the east. 

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

England and Wales edged closer to legalizing assisted dying after lawmakers approved a contentious bill in the House of Commons on Friday to allow terminally ill adults to end their lives.

Lawmakers voted 330 to 275 in Britain’s lower house for the assisted dying bill, which will now be sent on to further scrutiny in Parliament before it faces a final vote by lawmakers.

The proposed bill would allow people over 18 with less than six months to live to request and be provided with help to end their lives, subject to safeguards and protections.

The vote came after hours of emotional debate that saw personal stories of loss and suffering shared. The sensitive discussion touched on issues of ethics, grief, the law, faith, crime and money and drew large crowds outside parliament as the debate went on. 

Although hugely controversial, a majority of Britons support the principle of assisted dying, according to several polls. 

Euthanasia or assisted dying has been decriminalized in European countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, Austria, and Portugal, according to Euro News. Switzerland was the first country in the world to permit any kind of assisted dying, with the practice being legal since 1941.

It’s also legal in 10 U.S. states: Washington, D.C. and the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii and Washington.

Supporters said the law would provide dignity to the dying and prevent unnecessary suffering, while ensuring there are enough safeguards to prevent those near the end of their lives from being coerced into taking their own life.

Opponents, including faith leaders, said it would put vulnerable people at risk of being coerced, directly or indirectly, to end their lives so they don’t become a burden.

Under the proposals, two doctors and a High Court judge would need to verify that the person had made the decision voluntarily. Pressuring or coercing someone into ending their life would be punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

‘Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about a choice between life or death, we are talking about giving dying people a choice about how to die,’ the bill’s main sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, said as she presented the bill to a packed chamber.

She said it could take another six months before a second vote takes place.

‘I will take evidence, written evidence, oral evidence, we’ll get a very thorough, robust bill committee there to scrutinize the bill and make it the best that it possibly can be,’ she told reporters after the vote on Friday. ‘It’ll be a long process… And then, as I said in my speech, there’s a two-year implementation period, so there’s plenty of time to get this right.’

Assessments on how assisted dying will be funded and how it will impact the U.K.’s state-funded public health service, hospice care and the legal system will also have to be considered.

Conservative lawmaker Danny Kruger said he fears that the bill has lots of loopholes and that the safeguards ‘aren’t very strong.’

‘We now have months of further debate and I am hopeful that colleagues who have expressed concerns will either succeed in strengthening the bill to make it safe or they’ll conclude they haven’t been able to do that and then we can defeat it at the later stage, at third reading,’ he said.

U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer voted in favor of the bill. He said last month that he was ‘very pleased’ that such a vote was taking place and said his government would remain neutral on the subject and that his MPs would be given a free vote, rather than having to follow a party line, per the BBC.

Others in his Cabinet, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and the Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood, voted against it. There were similar divisions across other political parties.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said he voted against the measure. 

‘I voted against the assisted dying bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because I fear that the law will widen in scope,’ Farage wrote on X. ‘If that happens, the right to die may become the obligation to die.’

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. 

– President-elect Donald Trump announced Karoline Leavitt will return to the White House next year as his press secretary, making the 27-year-old the youngest White House press secretary in U.S. history and notching another massive career benchmark. 

Leavitt has been a fierce defender of Trump throughout his hard-fought campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, which included Democrats and the Harris campaign lobbing attacks at Trump that he is a ‘fascist’ and on par with Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler, two assassination attempts and crisscrossing the nation to rally support for the former president. 

‘Karoline Leavitt did a phenomenal job as the National Press Secretary on my Historic Campaign, and I am pleased to announce she will serve as White House Press Secretary,’ Trump said in a statement announcing Leavitt as his press secretary this month. 

‘Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator. I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.’

Ahead of her appointment as the youngest press secretary in the nation’s history – unseating President Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler, who was 29 when he took the same position in 1969 – Leavitt had long been in Trump’s orbit and also made her own political mark with a congressional run in 2022. 

Leavitt served in Trump’s first administration as assistant press secretary before working as New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s communications director following the 2020 election. Leavitt launched a congressional campaign in her home state of New Hampshire during the 2022 cycle, winning her primary, but losing the election to a Democrat. 

During her time on the campaign trail for Trump this cycle, Leavitt sparred with liberal media outlets about Trump’s candidacy, fielded media inquiries about the 45th president’s policies and vision for the U.S., served as one of Trump’s top defenders amid legal battles and political landmines lobbed by both the Biden and Harris campaign, and maneuvered an unprecedented campaign cycle that saw President Biden drop out of the running in July amid heightened concerns over his mental acuity and age. 

She was among the dozens of Republican elected officials and Trump supporters who joined Trump in Manhattan court over the spring as he faced trial over 34 counts of falsifying business records, which Trump repeatedly slammed as a ‘sham’ case. She also reported that with the job as the campaign’s national press secretary, she became accustomed to Trump’s ‘sleep schedule’ – which has famously only consisted of roughly four or five hours of rest before getting to work – and joined him at rallies across the nation and at the campaign’s headquarters in Florida. 

Leavitt currently serves as the Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman ahead of Jan. 20, when Trump will be sworn in as president. 

Leavitt made national headlines in June, before Biden dropped out of the race, when CNN’s Kasie Hunt cut her microphone off as she argued on air that CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash would be politically biased against Trump while moderating a debate between Biden and the now president-elect. Biden ultimately performed terribly during the debate, which opened the floodgates to traditional Democrat allies calling on him to drop out of the presidential race and pass the torch to a younger generation. 

‘That’s why President Trump is knowingly going into a hostile environment on this very network, on CNN, with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years. And their biased coverage of him,’ Leavitt said to Hunt during the interview previewing the debate. 

‘So I‘ll just say my colleagues, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have acquitted themselves as professionals as they have covered campaigns and interviewed candidates from all sides of the aisle. I‘ll also say that if you talk to analysts of previous debates, that if you’re attacking the moderators, you’re usually losing,’ Hunt responded.

As Hunt tried to redirect the interview back to previewing the debate, Leavitt said it would take just a few minutes to pull up examples of Tapper’s anti-Trump rhetoric across the years. 

‘Ma’am, I’m going to stop this interview if you’re going to continue to attack my colleagues,’ Hunt said, before Leavitt continued that she was ‘stating facts’ about what CNN hosts had previously said about Trump. 

‘I’m sorry, guys, we’re going to come back out to the panel,’ Hunt said. ‘Karoline, thank you very much for your time. You are welcome to come back at any point. She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump will have equal time to Joe Biden when they both join us later this week in Atlanta for this debate.’

Following the mic getting cut, Leavitt told Fox News Digital at the time that, ‘CNN cutting off my microphone for bringing up a debate moderator’s history of anti-Trump lies just proves our point that President Trump will not be treated fairly in Thursday’s debate. Yet President Trump is still willing to go into this 3-1 fight to bring his winning message to the American people, and he will win.’

As Leavitt juggled the media, she also spent the first six months in her role as Trump campaign national press secretary while pregnant with her first child. Ahead of Mother’s Day this year, Leavitt touted the importance women and mothers have within the Trump orbit and celebrating that in July, she would welcome her own baby. 

‘Joe Biden can’t even define what a ‘woman’ is, and his Administration disrespectfully refers to mothers as ‘birthing people.’ Joe Biden has left working moms and families behind by creating the worst inflation crisis in decades, welcoming millions of illegal immigrants into our country to commit crimes, and allowing violent protests to erupt on college campuses,’ Leavitt exclusively told Fox News Digital in May. 

The campaign touted that it employed dozens of moms during the election cycle, including Leavitt and recently-announced White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He has also hired hundreds of working moms since 2016, including high-profile names such as Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany. RNC and Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez and Trump legal spokeswoman Alina Habba are also both mothers of young kids. 

‘We have a really welcoming environment for children at the office, the headquarters in West Palm Beach,’ Leavitt told the Conservateur in October. ‘You know, we joke that on Saturdays, it’s bring-your-kid-to-work day.’

Months following the article touting the women and moms on the campaign, Democrats came under fire in October after Harris campaign surrogate Mark Cuban said ‘you never see [Trump] around strong, intelligent women.’

‘This is extremely insulting to the thousands of women who work for President Trump, and the tens of millions of women who are voting for him,’ Leavitt shot back at Cuban. ‘These women are mothers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders, and they are, indeed, strong and intelligent, despite what Mark Cuban and Kamala Harris say.’ 

Leavitt gave birth to her son in July and had planned to take maternity leave before a would-be assassin opened fire on Trump and his supporters at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, just days ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump was injured on the side of his head, while two other rally-goers were also injured, and local dad and Trump supporter Corey Comperatore was fatally shot. 

Leavitt said the assassination attempt sparked her to jump back into the campaign just days after giving birth. 

‘I had just brought my newborn, my three-day-old baby home from the hospital. And I said, ‘I’m going to turn on the television and watch the rally today,’’ Leavitt recounted to the Conservateur of watching the tragic and shocking rally on July 13. 

‘I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work.’’

She also recounted that following the birth of her son, she received a call from Trump congratulating her before having her chat with former first lady Melania Trump.

‘It was incredibly warm and kind,’ she said of Trump’s call. ‘He wanted to check in. He asked me how I was doing.’ Trump then passed the phone to his wife, the Conservateur reported. 

‘Mrs. Trump and I talked about how wonderful it is to be a mother to a boy. They spoke about their love for Barron, and the president cracked a joke: ‘We have a little boy, but he’s not so little now!’’ she said. 

Leavitt predicted Trump would notch a win this cycle, repeatedly pointing to his message of unity and uplifting Americans of all races and creeds, his vow to secure the border and strengthen the economy following spiraling inflation under the Biden-Harris administration. 

Trump was declared the victor in the race late into the evening on Election Day, after sweeping battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. He ultimately secured 312 electoral votes and locked down the popular vote. 

Leavitt celebrated the win as the ‘Greatest political comeback in HISTORY!’ where Trump ‘defeated the big tech oligarchs who tried to silence him, the weaponized system of justice against him, and the fake news that has lied about him and his supporters for years.’

Just over a week after his win at the ballot boxes, Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary pick. 

‘Thank you, President Trump, for believing in me. I am humbled and honored,’ she posted to her X account following the announcement.  

‘Let’s MAGA!’