“Fear and loathing of transgender Americans.”

Coming up on today’s show:

• President Donald Trump announced a ban on transgender service members on Wednesday. Dan Lamothe, a national security reporter for The Washington Post, has covered the military’s transgender policy for several years and he joins The Takeaway to discuss the president’s announcement along with Staff Sergeant Patricia King, the first infantryman to reveal she is transgender and Charles Clymer, a genderqueer writer, social equality advocate, and U.S. Army veteran.

• Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, has returned to the spotlight this week after being called to meet privately with the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Takeaway looks back at Manafort’s past, and how he came to serve the Trump team, with Chad Day, a reporter on the Washington investigative team for the Associated Press.

• Senate Republicans made a major step forward in their effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday. What happens next? Jeffrey Young, a senior reporter at HuffPost, looks ahead. 

• A three-decade-old exemption allows the Department of Defense to burn contaminated waste in open-air pits, which has been endangering citizens and the environment, according to a new report from Abrahm Lustgarten, a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. Devawn Bledsoe, a local activist in Radford, Virginia, who has a thyroid condition, believes that her ill health was directly caused by the pollutants from the Pentagon’s Radford Army Ammunition Plant.

• Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to issue new sanctions against Russia and any companies that have Russian gas interests, something that has the European Union Commission worried. Kristine Berzina,a senior fellow based in Brussels with The German Marshall Fund, explains. 

• Mohamad Alrefai, a Damascus-based Syrian actor, is the star of a new play that debuted in New York City last week, called “While I Was Waiting.” It’s about a family struggling to come to terms with loss as they face a brutal war that drags on. Alrefai talks to us about what it means to bring this show to the United States, and his hope for Syria’s future.

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich.