[Svartalfiar]

“Thousands of transgender service members are currently doing the job, and doing it well, but are forced to do so in silence — forced to lie about something as fundamental as who they are in order to continue to serve,” she added.

Where did this number come from? Sounds like the author just pulled it out of his ass. Per wikipedia, there's 2.225M people in the military, both active and not. From a quick Google search: "In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association reported that "data from small countries in Europe with access to total population statistics and referrals suggest that roughly 1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females seek sex reassignment surgeries." Another mentions 1 in 18,000 for males. So if we assume 1:25,000, that gives us 89 people. And that type of person isn't really the type of person to join the military (quite the opposite, really). So I'm not sure how they get thousands from a figure of less than a hundred.

[USAF80]

Where did this number come from?

They used the same people that claimed that 16000 women are raped in the military each year and that 16000 homos were in the ranks.