A landmark 2016 theme study that highlighted the history of the LGBTQ community was pulled from the National Park Service website on Thursday. 

Last week, NPS received instructions to remove the “T” and “Q” from “LGBTQ” from all internal and external communications, triggering an uproar when trans people were removed from the website of the Stonewall National Monument. 

At that time, an internal debate ensued over what to do with the LGBTQ Theme Study, with Trump political appointees calling for removal of all transgender references and some NPS staffers pushing back, suggesting instead that the entire study be removed. Editing the document to remove one community’s contributions violates the academic intent of the project, the source told the Blade.

In 2014, the Gill Foundation recognized an omission of historic LGBTQ sites in the nation’s records, and the organization made a grant to the National Park Service to commission a first-of-its-kind LGBTQ Theme Study, which was published in 2016. It was a landmark project that represented major progress for the LGBTQ community in having our contributions included in the broader American story. 

The Blade took screen shots of the Theme Study site last week. This is how the study was described on the site: “LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History is a publication of the National Park Foundation for the National Park Service and funded by the Gill Foundation. Each chapter is written and peer-reviewed by experts in LGBTQ Studies. … During Pride Month in 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall National Monument as the country’s first LGBTQ national monument. Today there are 10 LGBTQ sites designated as a National Historic Landmark or listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Removal of the theme study has raised concerns that future LGBTQ monuments and project work are dead in the water. The Blade reached out to the National Park Service last week for comment and received a curt response that the agency is implementing Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” as well as agency directives to end all DEI initiatives.

Marc Stein, director of OutHistory, a public history website that generates evidence-based LGBTQ research, issued a lengthy statement in response to the removal of the theme study.

“Our histories have been appropriated, censored, commodified, distorted, erased, falsified, marginalized, pathologized, rejected, silenced, and simplified,” Stein wrote. “… They think they can erase trans and queer people from history, remove trans women of color from the history of Stonewall, pretend that LGBTQ+ people did not exist, did not struggle, did not fight, did not suffer, did not survive, did not thrive. If they think any of this, they have never experienced or witnessed our perseverance, our rage, our resilience, our joy.”

When faced with questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, detractors often respond with demands for evidence or complaints about cost. 

Husbands Chad Topaz and Jude Higdon spend their time trying to find answers to those questions — on top of their other jobs as math professor, university administrator, and parents to a son and two dogs.

It started when Topaz, a mathematician, found himself as one of the only people in justice spaces able to quantify some of the issues facing marginalized communities. When community members pointed out that all the artists in the new wing of a local museum were white, Topaz then researched the diversity of artists at major museums. The study found that in 18 major U.S. museums, artists are 85% white and 87% male. On top of that research, Topaz determined more diversity existed in regions, time periods, and even museum permanent collections than was being displayed. “You’re taking a bad problem and making it worse through your curatorial decisions and practice,” says Topaz.

As it turned out, it also meant that Topaz was sometimes one of a few mathematicians with a concern for justice. When a colleague pointed out that there was only one woman on a 50-person mathematics editorial board—one of the highest professional achievements for an academic—Topaz set out to figure out if that was the exception or the trend. He looked at 435 journals, and it was indeed the trend.

These experiences were transformative. “My activism and sense of justice and my quantitative skills could be brought together,” said Topaz.

But finding projects was another story. Higdon, the administrator who Topaz praises as an “organizational genius,” was able to channel some of Topaz’s math-justice energy into collaborations with community partners. “I’m not afraid of tech nerds [and] mathematicians,” said Higdon, looking affectionately at his husband, “I know how to speak their language enough, but I also know how to build an organization and how to connect that work with other folks.”

So, following the success of early projects, the two co-founded the non-profit research institute QSIDE in 2017, which “uses data science to promote justice.” Citing Ida B. Wells’s famous quote, “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” Topaz says they believe that “data science can be a potent form of that light of truth.”

Since then, the team—which has grown beyond Higdon and Topaz—has published more than 15 peer-reviewed research articles, in addition to writing white papers and creating data tools.

One of their biggest projects bucks up against some of the biggest arguments against any work concerned with diversity, equity, and inclusion: that it’s too expensive. At least in one case, they have the numbers to prove otherwise.

QSIDE works with community partners who make programs to lower incarceration rates. People of color are more likely to be incarcerated. Community partners make programs for youth to “disrupt these cycles of incarceration and poverty,” says Higdon.

Regardless of how effective the programs are, state governments often opt not to fund them because of their cost. That cost analysis fails to acknowledge broader economic benefits from the programs—and losses from incarceration.

“We’ve built this econometric model that models out what’s the true cost of incarceration versus the cost of a program that can be used by community-based organizations,” says Higdon.

Topaz is also the author of a forthcoming book on the intersection of data and criminal justice, titled Counting on Justice. It explores the numbers behind inequality in the U.S. criminal justice system.

In the recent weeks, Higdon, Topaz, and QSIDE have been hit by the wave of anti-science and anti-DEI actions washing over the nation.

Higdon said that QSIDE lost a major corporate funder out of the blue, despite being assured they were set for renewal two days prior. “Is this because we have DEI in our name?” Higdon asked the grant manager, “and he kind of hemmed and hawed about it,” before saying no, but Higdon was not convinced.

Topaz, a career academic, has been watching the cuts to scientific agencies with horror. As a member of an advisory subcommittee at the National Science Foundation, Topaz had a mechanism to lodge an official complaint against the cuts, but the rest of the group balked, citing unspecific rules. When the group didn’t budge, Topaz publicly resigned.

“The director of the NSF is complying with illegal executive orders and not complying with stays that judges have put on those illegal actions,” Topaz said, “It seems to me like now is exactly the time we should be speaking out about these cuts.” 

Topaz said the idea that any of these actions will promote better science or a meritocracy is a lie. “[It] is essentially segregation and keeping a vast pool of talent away from opportunities so that those opportunities can belong to white men. I won’t even use the word meritocracy to describe what they’re doing because that is a lie.”

With the widespread cuts to science funding, especially science concerned with DEI, the team is dedicated to doing the work. “We can weather this storm in a way that organizations that have a bigger infrastructure are not,” Higdon said. “We can stick to our principles despite the headwinds that we’re facing right now.”

At every point in the interview, Topaz and Higdon emphasized that while they are excited about the power of math and data, they don’t view their contributions as more important than others. Each project has partners from “boots on the ground, community members or community-based organizations that can represent the voices of affected people,” alongside any other subject-matter experts they may need.

“We don’t think our technical skills are better in any way,” said Higdon. “They have superpowers. We have superpowers. Together, we have a Justice League.”

(This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.)

Since President Trump signed a series of executive orders rolling back federal worker protections, advocacy groups are ringing alarm bells signaling this could disproportionately impact more than 300,000 LGBTQ federal workers. 

Trump has so far signed 65 executive orders, most of which attempt to shrink the size of the federal government and restructure how it works to better suit his interests. Of those 65 executive orders passed, at least six directly target LGBTQ people, one outright bans transgender people from serving in the military, and another ends all government efforts at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

A study conducted in January by the Williams Institute, a research center that focuses on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, showed that “one in ten LGBTQ adults are employed by the public sector,” with higher numbers of LGBTQ people working in federal government bureaus, the USPS, and as government contractors. This means that Trump’s orders could be particularly dangerous for LGBTQ Americans, potentially displacing hundreds of thousands of queer federal workers. 

The Blade spoke with an LGBTQ executive branch employee who works directly with one of the resource groups targeted by the Trump administration to understand how these orders are being implemented internally. The source, fearing retaliation, requested anonymity.

“We had established lots of different things that were positive for LGBTQI+ employees to make sure that our identities were respected,” the source said. “What some folks may see as a simple thing like the allowance for pronouns in email signatures and the use of inclusive language, all those kinds of things are kind of in limbo right now. It’s fully expected to be said [by the Trump administration] that these things can’t be utilized anymore.”  

The source noted that the public often misunderstands the role of these resource groups, making it harder to justify the need for such positions. A common misconception is that groups promoting DEI exist solely to hire minorities. Although part of their mission involves reaching historically underrepresented communities, their work extends far beyond recruitment, playing a crucial role in fostering inclusive workplace cultures and supporting employees.

“It’s just about creating that level playing field environment to make sure that you are doing the best for your organization to attract the best talent, and then the knowledge that it’s not just any one demographic that is best suited for a certain role,” they said. “Let me be very clear: It’s not about quotas, it’s not about checking boxes. It’s not about hiring one person on anything other than qualification over another. It’s about making sure that we’re looking at places where we may be missing opportunities for not just qualified candidates, but the best and brightest. And sometimes that means adjusting your recruitment style.”

This ongoing attack on DEI, as well as other efforts to promote inclusivity and fairness within the government by the twice-impeached president is a borrowed tactic from another infamous Republican who weaponized demagoguery to consolidate power — Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“We could very easily be entering a Lavender Scare 2.0,” the source continued. “I mean, when you’re asking employees to rat on each other, basically, for anybody who might be involved in anything surrounding this work, it’s not unknown that a majority of folks who do diversity, equity, and inclusion work are members of minority, marginalized communities. It just painted a big target on the back of all those people.”

When asked to speculate on what they think this could mean for the roughly three million federal workers, the source said it could lead to a chilling effect where LGBTQ employees either face direct removal or feel compelled to leave due to a hostile work environment.

“I see an exodus coming — whether it is forced or voluntary,” said the source. “I don’t see with all the progress that’s been made over the last two decades people willing to stay working for an organization where they don’t feel like they’re safe. If you feel like you don’t have the psychological safety to do your job, and you’re worried about whether you’re gonna get fired, it kind of kills your psychological availability to do your job. People are not engaged.”

Colonel Bree Fram, the highest-ranking out transgender officer in the Department of Defense, who spoke to the Blade in her personal capacity and does not speak on behalf of the U.S. government or military, agreed with the source’s thoughts on inclusive spaces being critical for the success of government work and safety.   

“Any policy that excludes a class of individuals is inherently damaging to national security, because if those individuals can meet the standards of the service, if they can accomplish the mission that they’ve been given, they are participating in a way that makes us stronger,” Fram said. “We create better solutions from a diverse set of perspectives that allows us to accomplish the mission in ways that support national security objectives. So if there is a transgender service member out there excluded merely for who they are, rather than their ability to complete their mission it’s an issue for our national security today and far into the future, because we have thousands of transgender service members actively accomplishing the mission today. They are doing so in a way that meets, or, in most cases, exceeds the standards, because they are highly capable, competent warriors that have learned their skill set and mastered their craft over decades, they are crushing it on behalf of the United States and in upholding their oath to the Constitution.”

The executive branch source echoed that sentiment. Both sources agree that the removal of these policies has the real potential to harm the government’s ability to function as a resource for its people. 

“It takes a special type of person to work for the government,” the source said. “You’re not going to get rich. You’re not going to make as much money, generally. In the private sector you would, especially for folks who work in some of these specialized areas. Why would you want to work somewhere that you’re going to go nowhere, and no matter how hard you work, you’re not going to get anything?”

Not only do government employees feel they can’t perform at a professional level with these executive orders, some have expressed that they fear for the personal lives of LGBTQ staff members now too. 

“People are concerned,” Fram said. “People are worried about what will happen to people that they work with. When any leader sees someone in their organization having a difficult time or having something outside of what they need to focus on to accomplish their duties, it is our responsibility as a leader to help that person through those issues. That is what leaders within the military, I believe, are seeing right now. They see members of their military family hurting and concerned about what their future may be. As a leader, we want to take care of people so that they can take care of the mission and having to spend resources to take care of people when they are hurt is very important, but it is also time consuming, and takes us away from things that we do need to be focused on.”

To find “things that we need to focus on,” is easier said than done. Fram said that for LGBTQ members of the federal workforce, specifically trans members of the military, it’s not only the fight against unjust actions and rhetoric from Trump, but also internally within the service members themselves.  

“The challenge all of us face is, how do we determine and know our own self worth?” Fram asked. “Do we let an outside source define who we are? For transgender people, that is a deep strength of ours. … We know what to focus on. We know that we are who we are. We exist, and it is our deep duty and responsibility to care about future generations and protecting and defending our freedoms.”

When asked how to support people in these groups as workplace inclusion shifts away from being a standard part of their professional environment, Fram had a simple answer: listen to those who are being excluded.

“I believe the most powerful thing any of us have is our story,” Fram said. “Our story of courage and commitment and development and capability, how we serve, how we accomplish the missions that we’ve been given. So the best thing people can possibly do right now is share our stories, connect with our humanity, understand who we are in reality, not the rhetoric being used to demonize us. Trans people are a small portion of the population, so it’s easy to hate who you don’t know or don’t understand or have never met. So meet a trans person, read their story, share their story, and your perceptions may change.”

The Blade reached out to the Trump-Vance administration for comment but did not receive a response. 

In the long run, Fram explained, vilifying and marginalizing people for who they are ultimately harms the cohesive team dynamics essential to achieving a common goal — whether on the battlefield or in the boardroom.

“What we’ve learned from countless examples through history, for trans people, for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, and for other groups, anyone really who had to hide a piece of their identity in order to serve,” Fram said. “You cannot be as effective as you can be when you are spending energy hiding who you are. That’s a concern I have as more people pull back and have to hide a portion of who they are. We lose some of that cohesion within teams, because that energy that you have to spend on protecting yourself could be dedicated to building the cohesive relationships around you that foster teams that become incredibly successful. That’s one of the things where people being authentic serves the purposes of the military. It builds those strong bonds that allow teams to function effectively and accomplish their wartime mission.”

President Trump’s efforts at erasing trans identity intensified this week as employees at the National Park Service were instructed to remove the “T” and “Q” from “LGBTQ” from all internal and external communications.

The change was first noticed on the website of the Stonewall National Monument; trans people of color were integral to the events at Stonewall, which is widely viewed as the kickoff of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The Stonewall National Monument is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history.

Reaction to that move was swift. New York City Council member Erik Bottcher wrote, “The Trump administration has erased transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument website. We will not allow them to erase the very existence of our siblings. We are one community!!”

But what most didn’t realize is that the removal of the “T” and “Q” (for transgender and queer) extends to all National Park Service and Interior Department communications, raising concerns that the move could jeopardize future LGBTQ monuments and project work.

The Blade reached out to the National Park Service for comment on the trans erasure and received a curt response that the agency is implementing Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” as well as agency directives to end all DEI initiatives.

The question being debated internally now, according to a knowledgable source, is what to do with a massive LGBTQ Theme Study, which as of Feb. 14 was still available on the NPS website. In 2014, the Gill Foundation recognized an omission of historic LGBTQ sites in the nation’s records, and the organization made a grant to the National Park Service to commission a first-of-its-kind LGBTQ Theme Study, which was published in 2016. It was a landmark project that represented major progress for the LGBTQ community in having our contributions included in the broader American story, something that is becoming increasingly difficult given efforts like “Don’t Say Gay” laws that ban the teaching of LGBTQ topics in schools.

A source told the Blade that National Park Service communications staff suggested that removing chapters of the 2016 Theme Study that pertain to transgender people might placate anti-trans political appointees. But one employee pushed back on that, suggesting instead that the entire Theme Study be removed. Editing the document to remove one community’s contributions and perspective violates the academic intent of the project, according to the source. A final decision on how to proceed is expected soon. 

Meanwhile, a protest is planned for Friday, Feb. 14 at noon at Christopher Park in New York City (7th Ave. S. and Christopher Street). The protest is being planned by staff at the Stonewall Inn. 

“The Stonewall Inn and The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative are outraged and appalled by the recent removal of the word ‘transgender’ from the Stonewall National Monument page on the National Park Service website,” the groups said in a statement. “Let us be clear: Stonewall is transgender history. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless other trans and gender-nonconforming individuals fought bravely, and often at great personal risk, to push back against oppressive systems. Their courage, sacrifice, and leadership were central to the resistance we now celebrate as the foundation of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.”

An email sent to employees at the U.S. Department of Education on Friday explains that “programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices” will be reviewed and cut in cases where they “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex.”

The move, which is of a piece with President Donald Trump’s executive orders restricting transgender rights, jeopardizes the future of initiatives at the agency like mental health services and support for students experiencing homelessness.

Along with external-facing work at the agency, the directive targets employee programs such as those administered by LGBTQ+ resource groups, in keeping with the Trump-Vance administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government.

In recent weeks, federal agencies had begun changing their documents, policies, and websites for purposes of compliance with the new administration’s first executive action targeting the trans community, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

For instance, the Education Department had removed a webpage offering tips for schools to better support homeless LGBTQ+ youth, noted ProPublica, which broke the news of the “sweeping” changes announced in the email to DOE staff.

According to the news service, the directive further explains the administration’s position that “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

A U.S. Senate committee hearing will be held Thursday for Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, who has been criticized by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. GLAAD, for instance, notes that she helped to launch and currently chairs the board of a conservative think tank that “has campaigned against policies that support transgender rights in education.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Trump planned to issue an executive order this week to abolish the Education Department altogether.

While the president and his conservative allies in and outside the administration have repeatedly expressed plans to disband the agency, doing so would require approval from Congress.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday issued another executive order taking aim at the transgender community, this time focusing on eligibility for sports participation.

In a signing ceremony for “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in the East Room of the White House, the president proclaimed “With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over.”

Despite the insistence by Trump and Republicans that trans women and girls have a biological advantage in sports over cisgender women and girls, the research has been inconclusive, at best.

A study in the peer reviewed Sports Medicine journal found “no direct or consistent research” pointing to this conclusion. A different review in 2023 found that post-pubertal differences are “reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy.”

Other critics of efforts to exclude trans student athletes have pointed to the small number of people who are impacted. Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, testified last year that fewer than 10 of the NCAA’s 522,000+ student athletes identify as trans.

The Trump-Vance administration has reversed course from the Biden-Harris administration’s policy on Title IX rules barring sex-based discrimination.

“If you’re going to have women’s sports, if you’re going to provide opportunities for women, then they have to be equally safe, equally fair, and equally private opportunities, and so that means that you’re going to preserve women’s sports for women,” a White House official said prior to the issuance of the order.

Former President Joe Biden’s Title IX rules, which went into effect last year, clarified that pursuant to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), sex-based discrimination includes that which is based on the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The White House official indicated that the administration will consider additional guidance, regulations, and interpretations of Title IX, as well as exploring options to handle noncompliance by threatening federal funding for schools and education programs.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump “does expect the Olympic Committee and the NCAA to no longer allow men to compete in women’s sports.”

One of the first legislative moves by the new Congress last month was House Republicans’ passage of the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which would ban trans women and girls from participating in competitive athletics.

The bill is now before the U.S. Senate, where Republicans have a three-seat majority but would need 60 votes to overcome the filibuster.

The State Department has eliminated references to transgender travelers from its travel advisories.

The International Travel tab that the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs maintains has a section for “LGB Travelers.”

“LGB travelers can face special challenges abroad,” reads the introduction. “Laws and attitudes in some countries may affect safety and ease of travel. Many countries do not recognize same-sex marriage. Many countries also only recognize the male and female sex markers in passports and do not have IT systems at ports of entry that can accept other sex markers. About 70 countries still consider consensual same-sex relations a crime. In some of these countries, individuals who engage in same-sex sexual relations may face severe punishment.”

Steven Romo of NBC News and other reporters have noted the same page before President Donald Trump took office used the LGBTQI+ acronym to describe the community. State Department officials with whom the Los Angeles Blade spoke during the Biden-Harris administration routinely used the LGBTQI+ acronym.

The State Department website is replacing LGBTQI+ with simply LGB

Last month vs today pic.twitter.com/U4U0DHMasR

— Steven Romo (@stevenromo) January 31, 2025

Trump since he took office on Jan. 20 has issued a number of executive orders that specifically target trans people.

One directive bans the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers, reversing a policy that took effect in 2022.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this week issued a waiver that allows the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending. The waiver does not apply to “activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences” and “gender or DEl ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”

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.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order barring gender-affirming health care for minors, the latest action by the newly seated administration that takes aim at the rights and protections of transgender Americans.

The executive order, which prohibits the federal government from engaging in activities to “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” trans medicine for patients younger than 19, is based on arguments that these treatments lead to financial hardship and regret later in life.

In reality, scientific and medical organizations publish and maintain clinical practice guidelines on gender-affirming care that are based on hundreds of peer reviewed studies assessing the relative risks and benefits associated with each intervention.

“Everyone deserves the freedom to make deeply personal health care decisions for themselves and their families — no matter your income, zip code, or health coverage,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson. “This executive order is a brazen attempt to put politicians in between people and their doctors, preventing them from accessing evidence-based health care supported by every major medical association in the country.”

Robinson added, “It is deeply unfair to play politics with people’s lives and strip transgender young people, their families, and their providers of the freedom to make necessary health care decisions. Questions about this care should be answered by doctors — not politicians — and decisions must rest with families, doctors, and the patient.”

HRC noted that in practical terms, the federal government will effectuate this policy by taking such actions as “removing coverage for gender-affirming care from federal health insurance policies, modifying requirements under the Affordable Care Act, and preventing hospitals or other medical providers who accept Medicare or Medicaid, or who receive federal funding for research or education, from providing gender-affirming care of any kind to people under the age of 19.”

“This executive order to deny young transgender people access to the evidence-based, medically-necessary and often lifesaving care they need is an attempt by Donald Trump to insert himself into doctors’ offices across the country and override their medical judgment,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus.

“Decisions about a young person’s healthcare belong with the patient, their families, and their doctors,” he added. “Politicians should not be overriding the private medical decisions of any person, period.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday issued a waiver that allows the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending.

Rubio on Jan. 24 directed State Department personnel to stop nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for 90 days in response to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration. The Washington Blade obtained a copy of the waiver that Rubio on Tuesday issued to “all implementing U.S. government agencies, partners, and NGOs.”

“For the purposes of carrying out the president’s executive order on Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, I am approving an additional waiver of the pause under the executive order on Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid and my subsequent direction of Jan. 24, 2025, for life-saving humanitarian assistance during the period of the review,” wrote Rubio. “Implementers of existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped, subject to the following directions. This resumption is temporary in nature, and except by separate waiver or as required to carry out this waiver, no new contracts shall be entered into.”

Rubio adds the “life-saving humanitarian assistance” waiver “applies to core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.” He notes the waiver does not apply to “activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences” and “gender or DEl ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”

The waiver does not specifically cite PEPFAR, but UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima in a statement welcomed it.

“UNAIDS welcomes this waiver from the U.S. government which ensures that millions of people living with HIV can continue to receive life-saving HIV medication during the assessment of US foreign development assistance,” she said. “This urgent decision recognizes PEPFAR’s critical role in the AIDS response and restores hope to people living with HIV.”

A memo the State Department released on Wednesday defended the decision to freeze most U.S. foreign aid spending. It also notes the waiver that Rubio issued.

“It is impossible to evaluate programs on autopilot because the participants — both inside and outside of government — have little to no incentive to share programmatic-level details so long as the dollars continue to flow,” reads the memo. “A temporary pause, with commonsense waivers for truly life-threatening situations, is the only way to scrutinize and prevent waste.” 

The Blade has reached out to the State Department for comment on the waiver and its impact on PEPFAR.