Leading up to President Donald Trump’s issuance of an executive order on Monday instructing the Pentagon to explore banning transgender service members from the U.S. armed forces, the Washington Blade spoke with five sources who, according to the new administration, lack the “readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity” required to serve.

Together, they boast a combined 77 years of experience in four branches, where they had either enlisted or joined as commissioned officers. Three are currently serving, while two have retired. Several have seen combat in overseas deployments.

While the details of how the Pentagon plans to exclude trans service members are not yet fully clear, Sue Fulton, who served as assistant secretary of veterans affairs for public and intergovernmental affairs, noted that “you’re talking about undertaking administrative processes that are going to require people and paperwork and meetings and working groups and the promulgation of new rules and policies — all with the intent of removing capable, lethal, proven warriors from their positions.”

“Transgender Americans have been serving honorably for decades and have been serving openly for almost 10 years,” she said. “And the acceptance level, there’s a study that [found] about the same percentage of military folks, about 70%, have no issues with transgender service members, which is the same percent as the general population.”

Fulton, who commissioned in the U.S. Army after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as a member of the first class to admit women, is not transgender, though she has served as president of SPARTA, a group comprised of trans service members and former service members. An out lesbian, Fulton has been an advocate for women serving in combat roles, and she was involved in the effort to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Her insights are buttressed by the testimony of trans service members who shared their experiences with the Blade over the past week. Interviews with Fulton, along with trans service members and veterans Logan and Laila Ireland and Alivia Stehlik, were conducted during the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference in Las Vegas.

Senior uniformed service member, O-6 rank, who spoke on the condition of anonymity

• I’ve been out in the LGBTQ+ community since I was 17. And I came into the service knowing that under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ I would have to go back in the closet. So, I served under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for 10 years, and it was kind of like you had two lives.
• It was very hard. It was very hard for years. You always had to have eyes in the back of your head, a little bit, like watching — if you go out, is somebody there seeing you? If you went out to a gay club, are people watching?
• But the missions and the work that I did in the service — it was the missions that I was just drawn to. I always think about, ‘why did I stay in?’ It was my commitment to selfless service. I have always wanted to serve this country, and I felt a sense of pride every day as I put on the uniform and did the work.
• Under the Trump 1.0 ban, that is when I was really working on figuring out that I was trans. Going back to his inauguration in 2017 and his announcement, by tweet, that he was banning trans service members, at that point I had acknowledged, to myself, ‘yeah, I know I’m trans.’
• In 2017, I just halted everything and said, ‘Okay, well, I can’t do anything for three years now. Even if I wanted to transition.’ So, I talked about it with my friends, I talked about it with my spouse at the time, and it was just something I talked about.
• Just like I knew that ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ would go away, I knew that at some point this would change. So, I kind of held it all in for those three years. And then after Biden was elected, and he rescinded Trump’s ban, the door was opened for me to then come out if I wanted to.
• At that point, I began to really think about if I wanted to transition or not. Now, at the rank that I was in, as an O-5, I was thinking about coming out, but I was in a command position. I was second in charge of a command at the time, and all eyes were on me. So, it was a big decision whether or not to come out.
• When I was able to then come out early into the Biden-Harris administration, I was also up for a promotion to become an O-6. If I didn’t make O-6, then I would retire, because if you don’t make the promotion, you kind of get forced to leave the service. And then I would have come out as trans as a civilian.
• Ultimately, of course, I was promoted and I made the decision, ‘Okay, I want to come out, I want to, publicly, start the transition. And I want to transition in the service.’ It’s very difficult to come out in that space.
• In April it will be three years. I did some of my paperwork behind the scenes prior to coming out. Then, I came out to my staff and the folks that work for me. But since then, my staff has been amazing. It’s wonderful. And my leadership has been truly amazing.
• I started changing my usage of the bathrooms fairly quickly, and changing how I dress and how — the biggest thing is how people gender me. People had no problem. There would be ‘oops’ once in a while. And they knew that it didn’t bother me, like, I could just kind of let it go. But everybody’s been amazing.
• I’ve become this leader in the service that other LGBTQ members and especially trans service members look to as a role model or mentor. I get calls all the time from folks who want help as they’re going through things or need for their confidence to be boosted so they can keep going.
• Without the trans military ban, I could imagine myself becoming the first trans member to take over a command in this service. I don’t believe a trans person has ever taken over a command service-wide. I could see myself definitely going longer and being looked at as kind of that beacon of leadership in the LGBTQ+ realm.
• I’m keeping everything on the table. I am working on things so that if I have to transition out of the military this summer via TAPS [The Transition Assistance Program] my medical record is complete and all of my administrative work is done. There’s courses you have to take, paperwork you have to do, things like that.
• I have put my retirement letter in for a specific time next year. I’m already eligible to retire now, but you have the option to always pull it back, so it’s there as kind of something that I could also work towards. So if I don’t get processed out this summer, I could leave that as a time frame that I could process out to.
• At the moment, the biggest thing I’m feeling is anxiety. I’m just anxious about the uncertainty of what the future holds. I’ve given over 24 years to this nation. Selfless service. It just feels like that’s being erased, being forgotten about. And that’s my life’s work — just thrown, thrown away. You know?
• There are not many people who want to serve anymore. We’re in a recruiting and retention crisis across the board. It doesn’t matter what service you’re going in, they’re having a hard time getting people in and they’re having a hard time keeping people. And to want to push somebody out that has given their entire adult life to an organization, but then also to the nation, it’s just really unfortunate and sad that for everything that I’ve done, the hard work that I’ve done, the work that I’ve done, for the government to just kind of say that you are no longer able to serve. We just don’t want you because you’re trans.
• What I have found in my leadership career and working with teams, because I’m so such a team-oriented person, that people coming with different ideas and different backgrounds is such a benefit.
• [Even with Navy SEALs, they try to make teams with people who have different personality traits.]
• I want somebody on my team that has gone through adversity. And it can be that somebody has been in the LGBTQ+ community, that has gone through, you know, figuring out their authentic self. But I think it’s also somebody maybe that has gone through something different that is difficult, whether it was loss of a spouse or a really nasty divorce, somebody that has gone through pain, somebody that has really gutted it out. That’s somebody I want on my team, because they have felt that rock bottom feeling, and know how to be resilient enough to come out of that.
• There are trans members that are also in positions that it’s going to take a lot of time. We’re looking at, like 15,000 across the whole military. There’s folks in the intel community in positions that take a lot of training to get to where they are, and 15,000 people pulling out, that’s an issue of national security, in my opinion, national resilience, right?
• The service will have to scramble to find my replacement. And there will be big holes in locations.

Former U.S. Army Captain Sue Fulton

• [With the trans military ban] You’re removing trained, skilled people from the force. It disrupts readiness, it disrupts unit cohesion, it disrupts morale, it disrupts the team. So the real problem with doing this is that you’re negatively impacting readiness. And I know those are buzzwords, but the impact is real.
• To my knowledge, this is unprecedented, discharging a swath of qualified, proven military members for a characteristic that isn’t uniformly tracked. Any way you do this, it’s going to be kind of a mess. Some trans folks have a gender dysphoria diagnosis; some trans folks don’t. There’s no descriptor in your records that says, you know, ‘T’ for ‘transgender.’
• Whether it’s an administrative separation or a medical separation, an individual discharge would require a board for each individual to determine their fitness for duty. Every hypothesis I’ve heard for how they might implement a ban presents problems for the military.
• So, I understand that there’s been a lot of rhetoric around this issue, but we have been unsuccessful in predicting exactly what action will come out of this administration.
• Rand [Corporation] — who had predicted that it could cost up $150,000 per service member per year to have transgender folks serve — went back after trans folks were allowed to serve openly, to see what the costs actually were. And it was less than $1,000 per transgender service member per year, which I don’t need to tell you, is like an average military service member’s prescription costs per year.
• Statistically, there is no greater cost to care for a transgender service member than for any other service member. There is data on that. Rand has that data. They originally assumed that each service member would get every possible surgery including surgeries that change appearance — shaving a trachea, there’s a whole variety of surgeries that trans and cisgender people can get to change their appearance. And there was an assumption that every trans service member would get all of these procedures, that they wouldn’t have maybe gotten them before they had joined. The idea that they would choose not to have all these procedures, which is what has happened, wasn’t considered. The reality is we know trans service members will often get surgeries on their own dime outside the military.
• Fundamentally, transgender people want to appear to others as the person they feel like inside. And that doesn’t necessarily require a suite of, the full set of surgeries. Everyone wants to appear on the outside as they feel inside. And the military actually performs surgeries for people who are not transgender to change their appearance when there’s something that bothers them deeply. The whole conversation around transgender medical care and surgeries is fraught with myths.
• Bottom line: Transgender service members don’t cost more. They deliver at least as well — at least as well — as their counterparts in the military. And many people, because they feel the need to overachieve, will exceed standards on the regular. And we see that, we hear that from commanders, we hear that from senior leaders, and that has to be taken into account.
• I went to West Point in 1976 in the first class to include women. And since that time, almost 50 years, there have been a series of decisions opening the military or opening parts of the military to additional groups of people, whether it’s women, whether it’s gay and lesbian folks, whether it’s Sikhs.
• The Department of Defense is slow to change, but it makes sense. Recall, it’s [the largest government agency in the United States] and so if you’re going to make changes they’re going to affect millions of people. They want to go through a process where they look at how rules are written so that they can be implemented down to the lowest level of command. Ultimately, there’s an announcement — it’s like, this change is happening — but understand that the change takes months, if not years, in any case.
• I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a whole class of people who are serving without issues, without problems, who are serving honorably and effectively, summarily kicked out of the armed forces.
• I can’t recall a time when that happened. You know, there are many ways to kick an individual out of the military. If they fail to meet standards, if they are no longer medically capable, if there’s misbehavior. All of those things can happen. There are lots of ways to exit the military for individuals, but for a whole class of people, without any evidence of failure to be summarily kicked out, I don’t think there’s a precedent for that. And there shouldn’t be.
• We have trouble staffing our Armed Forces today, and there are not a lot of people who are willing and or able to serve in the United States Armed Forces. We have people who are willing and able — who have the competence, the character, and the commitment to serve. We believe they should be allowed to serve. The very notion that you would want to exit a whole class of people from the military is dangerous to our security.
• [To separate an individual from the military] there are medical boards, if someone is no longer medically qualified to serve. There are administrative boards that cover a whole host of issues like misbehavior that doesn’t rise to the level of court martial.
• The reason there are boards is that you have, first, a commander initiate it — so the commander believes this person should no longer serve. There’s evidence presented, whether it’s medical evidence or other kinds of evidence from the the leaders of that individual, and it’s presented to a board, often headed by a general officer. You’ve got to convene that board. You’re going to take the time of these people away from their day jobs, because it’s not their full time job, right, in general. And they review, does this person belonging in the military or not? Now, you know, that’s a deliberate process. It can be sped up to maybe three months. But that’s for each individual.
• When you have an organization the size of the U.S. armed forces, that’s why these processes are created. And no one loves the bureaucracy of the military, especially not people in the military, but that is the way that it operates in order to ensure that the best people are retained and unqualified people are not.
• When we worked on the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it was very persuasive to argue that service members should not just be allowed but encouraged to be their authentic selves, because the bonds that make for an effective unit, the trust that you build with the people you fight next to, are essential to winning. It is essential for people to have a level of trust with each other when they’re in harm’s way. And we get the mission done not as individuals; we get the mission done as teams. If you’re forced to lie to the people around you about who you are, that gets in the way of building the high performing teams that we need in the military.
• I went to West Point. I worked with a lot of women combat veterans. I have never been so floored by the courage of a group of people as the transgender service members, experiencing what the world says to trans people, experiencing what the military says to trans people, and [still sharing their stories].
• Even in the [Senate] hearing for [Pete Hegseth’s nomination for] secretary of Defense, there were some questioners who wanted to know how many push ups you could do and do you know what caliber of bullet goes into an M4 rifle? It trivializes the complexity of having a war-fighting military organization that can meet the challenges of the 21st century.
• You need everyone to be at the top of their game, and this nonsense about ‘well, we’re going to police gender’ and we’re not going to talk about how Black people served in the military, or how women served the military, in history, to learn from our history. That [instead] we’re only going to focus on your weapon and your physical fitness. It doesn’t build a team that has a broad range of problem solving abilities.

U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Logan Ireland

• I’m within OSI and my main job is to work in the Indo-Pacific with some of our host nation and coalition partners. One thing that I absolutely love about my job are the travel opportunities, the education benefits that I’ve been afforded to have, working with some of our foreign partners, made some awesome friends in many different countries. I’ve been able to be stationed in South Korea, UAE, deployed to Afghanistan, Qatar. I’ve had a great career, had a great experience, and that’s all been just by being visible and being the best troop that I can be.
• I just hit my 14 years. So when I first came in, I came in as security forces. I always wanted to be a cop. Have a couple people that are in law enforcement in my family, and I just kind of wanted to take on that lineage. Plus, going to college was pretty expensive. I was in a bachelor’s degree, and it was just kind of like being a hamster in a wheel, working all the time, going to college, and wanting to do something more. So, going into the military for education benefits and travel, I mean, I saw that as my number one ticket, so I enlisted in the military, the Air Force was my number one choice, got to be stationed at awesome bases, and throughout my career, I’ve had amazing leadership that have allowed me the space and the voice to serve authentically and be myself, but also holding me to the standard.
• And with what I’ve tried to do with my service, I always want to try and exceed that standard, to show other people that, hey, I’m here doing this as a good service member, raise their right hand, just like everybody else. I happen to be transgender, but that’s just one pillar of who I am and what my service represents.
• I do that because there’s going to be someone that’s one day going to come after me that wants a seat at that military table, and they want to see me being a visible trans person, because maybe they are [trans], or maybe there’s someone from another marginalized community that doesn’t know if military has a place for them. By being visible and showing that, hey, I’m doing it, exceeding the standard, you can do it too.
• I think that brings a lot of value, especially when we’re in a military that, you know, is somewhat at a recruiting deficit. You know, we want to try and bring the best and the brightest that meet the standard and want to raise their right hand to serve.
• We never came in the military to get that praise from someone else. We did it for the brothers and sisters to the left and the right of us. And for other people, especially trans people, the military was their only option. You know, they needed that financial stability, those education benefits. Maybe they wanted to travel, find a place of being and a place to serve authentically.
• The military gives them that option. It’s the number one employer of transgender individuals. Most of the people that are transgender in the military now are at the senior non commissioned officer level with an average of 12 years of service. So we bring a lot of value to the military by serving. And for those that are coming into the service, we are their supervisors. We are there to help them integrate into the military and show them all the benefits that the military has given to us.
• something that I do on the side working with SPARTA is actually helping those that are accessing into the military. A civilian who is joining the military goes through what’s called accession standards when they process through the Military Entry Processing Station (MEPS). we have a subgroup in SPARTA called SPARTA Future Warriors, and currently we have over 660 members in that group that are aspiring to join the military. These are all transgender individuals. These individuals meet the standard. Or they will be meeting the standard, because they they see now what they have to do, and we help them get to MEPS, answer some of their questions. We help them with that process of getting into the military.
• And I’ll be frank, these are some shit hot people we need in the military. We got people coming in that want to be pilots, that want to be JAG Officers, that want to be doctors. Some of them are those on the civilian side. You know, we just had one that swore into MEPS, and he got an Air Force Special Warfare Division contract, a special operations contract, who happens to be trans.
• It means a lot to me, you know, to see people coming after us. We don’t do this for ourselves. We don’t share a story for ourselves. I’ve had a great career, but we want to do it because there’s a lot of people that are going to come after us, and it matters to them. They want to find a place in the military. They want to serve authentically, and I hope that they have that chance, just like we were afforded that opportunity to have that chance.
• I came in wanting to do law enforcement. I was able to do that right. I wanted to go be working for the Office of Special Investigations. I’m able to do that. Most recently, I just put in a package to go through Officer Candidate School. I’m really hoping that I can have that opportunity, and the Air Force allows me to do that.
• And I think a trans person looking from the from the outside in sees opportunity. They see that placement and access that the military can provide to them, that community, that they may not have otherwise in the civilian sector.
• If they are willing to sacrifice their life for someone else so their children don’t have to serve, why not give that opportunity to that person? Why not give them the same benefits? They meet the standard — that’s the number one most important thing — but let’s afford them that opportunity.
• This is an amazing community, an amazing organization, an amazing employment opportunity for people, and we want to make sure that everybody has that seat at the table to serve.
• I don’t want to speak entirely for the military community, but I know a lot of us share that same mindset of, yeah, I don’t care who’s in the foxhole with me, I just want you to be able to meet the standard and return fire. That’s it.
• I’m still driving forward with my my career. I put in an officer package. I have my degree. I’m qualified. I meet the standards. In fact, I got the top endorsement recommendation by my commanding general…’m hoping to eventually become an officer.
• The military is something that I want to do until they say, ‘Hey, you are no longer needed,’ and hopefully that is well past 20 or 30 years, but I don’t have any plans to get out. This is everything to me.
• I’m looking towards my future in the military, in uniform. I’m not looking towards, well, what am I going to do as a civilian? The military taught me how to fight, and they taught me resiliency. So I know that I’ll make it. I know I’ll be okay. But right now, I just want to prove that, hey, I’m here. I’m of value to the military. This is just as much my military as anybody else’s.
• I would like to see the data that says that, you know, we we can’t do this anymore. We were worldwide deployable. Everywhere that there’s a war zone going on, a transgender service member has served.
• On order to transition, we have to go seek the approval of medical, you know, seek the approval of our commanding team as well. There is a process, just like anything else, just like if a military member wanted to get an elective surgery, if they were non trans, there’s still a process in place, because the military is based on these standards.
• When I was deployed to Afghanistan, nobody knew that I was actually born female. And I didn’t have a FUD [female urination device] or anything like that. And we’re doing outside the wire, missions, so in harm’s way, incoming, that type of stuff. And all that I did is I took a water bottle and I cut it, I built my own FUD. Because adapt and overcome, God damn it.
• Each service branch has core values and the Air Force, you know, one is excellence in all we do. If I see a problem, damn it, I’m gonna overcome it, because I want to give that excellence.
• My wife, for instance, she never got the opportunity to serve authentically in a female dress uniform. Yeah. So with my service, I want to not only exceed the standards for those that will one day take my place, but for my wife, because she wasn’t afforded some of those opportunities. That’s something that I carry on my shoulders on a daily basis. And hopefully, when I become an officer, she can render my first salute to me in that female dress uniform.
• Whenever everything came down, when it came to either the election results or the most recent EO and conversations of what this looks like as far as my service, I was reached out to by previous subordinates of mine, peers of mine, and leadership of mine, and each one of them across the board said, ‘What can we do? We have your back. You’re doing good.’ And to each one of them, I said, ‘listen, thank you. Thank you for your support. I’m okay. If I’m not, I will let you know, but at the end of the day, I am visible for a reason, because there’s many then cannot be visible or choose not to be visible for their own reasons, and we have to respect that. But I need to do this.’

Retired U.S. Army medic Laila Ireland

• I joined the military in 2003 and I medically retired in 2015. I was deployed twice to Iraq, both of the both those times were like 14 month deployments.
• Logan and I have experienced our journeys very differently in terms of our careers. I had a leadership team that just was not movable in their opinions and their own biases, and they were very old school military, very old school Army. So having to battle that while supporting Logan and watching him get the accolades and the recognition was extremely difficult for me.
• I come from a long legacy of folks in my family that served in the military, and part of that is me wanting to be part of that legacy as well, and so it was a no brainer for me to join the military.
• I served during ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ I watched the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and then here with the trans ban, and then lifting of that ban, and now it was re-implemented, and now we’re in talks of not having trans service at all.
• For a lot of trans people, the military is the only option for them to to survive, to get out of the situations they’re in, and again, we’re part of that one percent of the population that has sworn to defend the country. Why would you want to not allow them to do that?
• I joined the military, and came in as a military human intelligence collector, so I was an interrogator. After my first deployment, I felt that that job was just not — it did not align with my morals and values and so I came back from the deployment and said that I need to switch into a different position, and I became a medic.
• All through my entire career, everyone, every one of my leadership teams have been completely receptive to me. They recognize the leadership traits that I had. I became a leader. I mentored so many different soldiers along the way. It was just that last duty station in Hawaii at Tripler [Army Medical Center] that I encountered toxic leadership.
• I think part of that was that they did not have the resources nor the language to understand who and what trans people are. All I wanted them to see was my efforts — base your opinions off of meritocracy. And that’s a huge word that we’re using now when we’re talking, especially on the Hill, when we’re talking about [how] we just want to measure people by the meritocracy, which is hugely hypocritical.
• I was stationed in Alaska. I was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, where I was a part of the schoolhouse team, where we garnered all of our medics coming in from all branches, made sure that they went through proper training through the school. So I’ve had a pretty good career up until my last portion of it.
• Even when ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ was repealed and I openly identified as gay, my leadership was completely on board, and they said, you know, we don’t see that. We just see you as a leader, and you’re bringing so much to the table. And [that’s what trans people want, too] — to be seen and and valued just the same as their counterparts.
• Trans people, historically, have always had to feel like we have to prove ourselves better. And if not better, we always have to prove ourselves, period, next to our counterparts. And that’s because we are always taught or always told that we’re not going to equal up to our counterparts. We’re not worthy of of recognition. We’re not worthy of existing. But here we are doing the same work, if not better, than our counterparts. And we’re showing up every day, doing the same things every day, just like everyone else.
• So why not recognize that? Why not celebrate that? Why not put us as a part of the team, instead of seeing us as an outsider to that? So it’s really difficult to hear when you’re talking about meritocracy. If that’s what you’re going to measure our service on, then measure that — correctly.
• You can put all of the currently serving trans people together, they have a plethora of knowledge, a plethora of years of service that have gone basically unnoticed, because we’re just a part of the team
• My philosophy in advocacy is, if I can go into a room of 100 people and just change one person’s mind and heart, I’ve done my job. But without fail, every room I’ve entered, whether they were receptive or non receptive, I was able to connect with people on a very deep level.
• I come from very humble beginnings. I didn’t grow up with a lot. I come from very strict culture. I’m the oldest of four, and so having to set the example in my family was a huge burden for me to take on.
• My muse, if I may, in my advocacy is one of being a sibling, but also being able to prove all the naysayers wrong. I’m proud of the journey I’ve come from. Because when you grow up being told that you will never be and you will never do, it is ingrained in your mind. And I stand proud today to be able to share that story.
• If I were able to see someone like me when I was growing up, I would know that everything would be okay.
• And so my muse is my siblings. And I have a large circle of folks who have been my bedrock foundation. One of them is Logan. I don’t think I would be able to continue this journey without him. And Sue Fulton as well. She’s first, my mentor, but most foremost, she is my friend.
• It’s easier to just give up. It’s easier to say I’m going to throw in the towel in because I was not afforded the opportunity to continue service, or whatever the situation may be.
• This is a quote in ‘Wicked’: The wizard said, ‘the quickest way to bring folks together is to give them a common enemy.’ And right now, trans people are the common enemy. But I think most smart people are seeing through that and know who the real enemy is, here.
• When allied countries who have trans service members in open service We’ve made friends with that have reached out to us.

U.S. Army Major Alivia Stehlik

• I am an Army physical therapist, although the job I’m doing right now is not really clinical. I’m currently serving as the director of holistic health and fitness for 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
• [The only Air Assault Division in the United States Army, the 101st Airborne is known as one of the most rapidly deployable units.]
• Our Division has about 16,000 people in it, and at least I view my responsibility as making sure that all of those soldiers have all of the access and the resources they need to maximize their fitness, health wellness. Holistic health and fitness encompasses five domains: sleep, mental readiness, spiritual readiness, nutritional readiness and physical readiness. I have five teams that have all of those specialties, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and they work at our brigades and take care of the soldiers, and my job is just to make sure that they have all of the resources they need to get that work done.
• It’s a lot of operations, it’s a lot of project management, bringing people together and team building to make this whole enterprise work.
• I went to West Point, and that’s how I got into the Army. My dad was a West Point grad, and I grew up knowing that that’s what I wanted to do. When I commissioned, I commissioned as an infantry officer, and this was before I came out and transitioned, because at the time, women couldn’t go into the infantry when I graduated in 2008 so I was able to, because I was still presenting as male. I loved my time in the infantry, being a platoon leader and being in charge of people building teams, working with my squad leaders and my platoon sergeant to help train our team. I really, really enjoyed that.
• We spent a lot of time doing physical training and developing physical fitness testing, and so I got really passionate about that. Ended up applying to the Army physical therapy program,, in conjunction with Baylor University, and got in and have been an Army physical therapist ever since. And that’s how I got here. I was working with soldiers and kind of moving my way up from the hospital to a brigade and now at the Division level.
• [What’s amazing about the job is you get to] see that people could get better, right? There’s this idea that, you know, if you get hurt, then you’re stuck — the Army needs you to be operationally capable. And physical therapists, I think, in the Army are some of the most magical folks in bringing people back to readiness and back to duty. And I love to be able to be that bridge to bring them back, to be able to talk to command teams and say, your folks are getting help that they need, and they’re going to be back.
• The Army has several different kind of tracks, if you will, and they’re not explicitly laid out, but your career kind of goes in different directions. Some people end up being more hospital-based PTs and so they tend to treat, especially during the height of the War on Terror, they tended to be much more involved in amputee care and inpatient care and caring for folks who were really, truly, very sick or very, very seriously injured.
• My career has been much more in the what I would call the operational Army, where I am out with the soldiers in the field doing what they do. And so it’s rare in that scenario to see really traumatic things. It’s not impossible but usually what would happen is they would have some significant trauma, and then they would get medically evacuated, and then they would have ongoing physical therapy once they had surgery or recovery. Most of what I did was caring for folks that they twisted their ankle or they dislocated a shoulder or broke a collarbone or something that’s not insignificant, but that’s treatable and they can keep fighting or keep being out in the field, doing their job.
• I took for granted going to work and having this almost instant gratification on a daily basis, people come in and they get better. And even if I don’t get somebody better, or they don’t get themselves better that day, somebody else will come in who is better from a week ago or two weeks ago. And so there’s this, I mean, it’s so rewarding every single day with patients. I truly love being a physical therapist and taking care of soldiers.
• This job is much more challenging because all of the projects are much bigger. And so I might not see the impact that the policies we write have. I might not ever see them, and I might not see the impact of a project for a year or two or three.
• I came out publicly a year after I graduated from PT school. I came out to my boss a couple months after I graduated from PT school, because I graduated, moved to my next duty station, and pretty much immediately told him, like, ‘hey, this policy changed. I can come out now, and so I’m going to.’ He and almost everyone else that I’ve had in my chain of command over the last 10 years — I guess, eight, since coming out — have been so unbelievably supportive.
• What is so remarkable about it to me is that it’s just how leaders are. They’re there to do the right thing by their soldiers, and I think they would have done the right thing by me, if I had whatever other thing came up, whether it were a medical issue, or a personal issue, or a financial issue, or a career issue, I just had good leaders in the Army who cared about me and took the time to try to help and make me better. And I’ve tried to be that way for the folks that work for me.
• I’m going to keep getting up and going to work because I have people that I need to take care of. The Army needs me to take care of the programs that we’re running, the people that are impacted by those programs. And ultimately that builds the readiness of my Division, right? Like, my Division is actively going to be deployed around the world, right? We are one of the United States Army’s rapidly deployable Divisions as part of the XVIII Airborne Corps, and so our people have to be ready all the time. And that’s my job. My job is to make them ready.
• It is a daily discussion with our senior leaders that readiness is not an idea, it is a concrete, measurable thing that we have to be ready. Should the nation call on us to defend the country.
• I have realized, moving to the Division level, there are things that I didn’t know at the brigade level about what was going on at the Division level and how folks were tackling problem sets there. And so I think that’s what I’ve learned here, is that I’m going to tackle the problem set that I have, and the problem set that I have is, how do I make sure that my folks have access to the resources that they need?
• I’m really good at what I do. I really like being a physical therapist, and I’m a really good physical therapist. And I’m an especially good physical therapist for the operational Army, because I have this background as an infantry officer. I have my Ranger tab [awarded to members who complete Ranger School], I’ve been to Airborne School [course that teaches soldiers to parachute from planes and land safely] and Air Assault School. Commanders trust me, because I’ve lived the operational life. Soldiers trust me, because I’ve lived that life, and I have this expertise from almost a decade practicing as a physical therapist now.
• I understand the medical-scientific pieces and the recovery pieces and the strength training pieces that are required to get you back to not just like basic daily life. I think this is the thing that we don’t talk about often in the military as providers, or that folks don’t understand, is that it is not enough to go back to, like, yeah, I can play with my kids again. I can do the things in my daily life. You have to be able to run five miles at a certain pace on Monday morning, because that’s what your unit says you have to be able to do. You have to march, you know, for several hours with heavy weight on your back, and then show up on an objective and be able to conduct war. And so these physical demands are much more significant — at the level of professional sports — than just like, yeah, you’re good enough. Good enough is going to get somebody killed.
• I want to continue this career. I love being a PT. So much, I didn’t even know how much I was going to love it, and it has been one of the rewarding experiences of my life.
• We have some [other trans solidiers] in our Division. It’s big enough that I haven’t worked with any of them — or maybe I have and I didn’t even know it. That’s actually how things happen. You know, there was a time when the policy first changed, that you had these initial growing stages of people coming out, and it was kind of a topic of conversation, but now, like nobody really talks about it, we’re all just doing our jobs. It’s not a topic of conversation. We’re concerned about, ‘Hey, are you trained to sling load this load underneath this helicopter for when we go to war?’
• Because we need to, because we need an enormous pool of folks to pull from to defend this country, we have eliminated barriers for anybody to say, ‘Hey, come on in, and if you can prove yourself, if you can hack it, if you can meet the standard, then we want you here.’
• It’s all about readiness, and it’s all about taking care of soldiers. We take care of soldiers, we take care of family members, because all of that matters to providing a ready force.
• People do tend to isolate transgender medicine as this like wildly difficult thing, but it’s actually not. It’s fairly straightforward and basic for most people. Are there folks who have complications? Sure, but we have folks who have any number of orthopedic surgeries who have complications. Or we try to manage their allergies, and the solution that we start with isn’t where we end. You can have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, and maybe we put you on medications, maybe we say you need to change your diet, and we work down [to address the question of] how do we take care of you? Because we need you on the team.
• As a physical therapist, I’ve had to say, ‘Hey, you tell me, if you deploy tomorrow, are you going to be a liability to your team, or are you going to be good?’ I’ve had young soldiers, young leaders look me in the eye and say, like, ‘you’re right, I can’t do it well, I can’t do this thing because I will be a liability.’ And I’ve had other folks say, like, ‘No, I’m unwilling to put my team at risk, and I know I’m good,’ and that’s what I have to take to the bank.
• I have to do the same thing with commanders at times, to say, ‘Hey, I know you want this soldier to come to this training exercise. If you make them come to this training exercise, the likelihood [is] that they’re going to re-injure themselves, and then they’re going to be out of the fight for the next six months, instead of the next three weeks, while they recover.’
• That’s part of why I matter to this organization, is that I have that background and I can actively and accurately speak to the language of command, of leadership, and the language of a patient, a young soldier.
• Being trans isn’t special. Everybody goes through transitions in life. And truly, I mean that — it’s not tongue-in-cheek, like, we we do all go through big, significant transitions in life, and we know that those points of change are where people can grow and where people can have harder times.

Retired U.S. Navy Second Class Petty Officer and U.S. Coast Guard Seaman Lene Mees de Tricht

• As a transgender veteran, I served my country not once but twice. I took the oath to defend my country, and I did my duty honorably. I was transgender then, and I’m transgender now. The only difference is I no longer have to hide it.
• President Trump and his cronies have now decided that being transgender is dishonorable and dishonest, and thus does not fit within the ethos of military service. This spits directly in the face of the many, many transgender servicemembers, including me, who have served this nation bravely, effectively, and honorably.

• Transgender people have always served in every echelon of our nation’s military, from intelligence, where I spent most of my time, to frontline, tip-of-the-spear combat roles, including in special forces. We have always, always done our duty.
• No one has the right to try to take that from us, and it is unacceptable for the Commander-in-Chief to diminish the honorable legacy of transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen.