A Trans Service Member Explains How Discrimination Doesn't End with Policy

This summer, when Tannehill was three years of service shy of the 20 required for retirement eligibility, Trump sent out a series of tweets that threw her future up in the air. To refresh your memory, and because there seem to be too many shocking tweets from the President of the United States to keep up with, his three tweets read:

After reading Trump’s tweets, Tannehill, who happens to be trans, says she found them extremely out of touch with reality. In her nearly two decades of service, she has never been deemed “disruptive.” “The argument that this costs money or that I'm not deployable or unfit, I don't find it credible,” she says. “It's not assessing me based on my actual physical or mental condition. It's assessing me based off what group of people I belong to.”

In light of recent news that a second federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s proposed ban on trans military service—meaning that, unless something changes, transgender people can begin joining the military openly on January 1 and those who are already service members may continue (or begin) to serve openly—Tannehill may be able to serve the three more years she needs to qualify for retirement. However, the very same day that Judge Marvin J. Garbis blocked the ban, the Trump administration appealed the first federal judge’s decision to block the ban in October.

Still, if this administration remains unsuccessful in its attempts to officially ban trans people from service, Tannehill says that many trans soldiers already face a number of unique obstacles under policies that are already in place due to unsupportive commanders.

Broadly reached out to the Department of Defense for comment. “I can't speak to individual brigade commanders and their interpretation of policy,” DoD spokesman David Eastburn tells Broadly. “The policy is pretty cut and dry.”

Eastburn is referencing the interim guidance, a document issued by the Secretary of Defense following the White House’s official Presidential Memorandum which was released a month after Trump tweeted about trans service members. The memorandum outlined Trump’s plan to both prevent transgender people from joining the military and end all military funding of sex reassignment surgery except for those who had already begun treatment. The policy was set to go into effect between January and March of 2018. In the memorandum, Trump directed both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a plan outlining the implementation of his directives by February 2018. Based on their suggestions, he plans to put a new, official policy in place come March 2018.

“I can tell you [the Secretary of Defense] is taking it very seriously and there's a lot of effort and brain power going into this,” says Eastburn. “At the end of the day, it's what's best for the Department of Defense, just like everything we do.”

In a Broadly documentary released earlier this week, we sat down with Rachel Waverly, a trans former soldier who believes she was mistreated and ultimately discharged for reasons related to her gender identity that began before Trump’s tweets and another trans soldier who has thus far had a positive experience in service. Broadly spoke with Tannehill about how trans service members’ experiences in the US military can vary greatly despite operating under the same policy.

BROADLY: Obviously, the military is a vast and diverse group. Can you talk about how a trans person’s experience may differ from one person to another?

BRYNN TANNEHILL: One of the things that we've known all along is transgender men seem to be having an easier time overall than the trans women. The military has a very stereotypically masculine culture and expressions of masculinity are more acceptable. It can vary from command to command and it can also vary from community to community. Communities that tend to be very frontline and have only recently integrated women are having a harder time: infantry, artillery, things like that. Some of the other challenges are if you have a command that isn't entirely supportive or is extremely risk averse. We see things like [command] not granting people exception to policy, or delaying for a year or more on signing off on a transition plan, or narrowly interpreting the policy to say that you cannot get a transition plan in place until you're stable—but you can't be stable until you medically transition.

Can you explain how command officers might misinterpret or deliberately misuse a policy and how that can be harmful?

Again, a lot of it depends on how supportive the command is and how actively supportive that command is… Commands that have been very forceful in taking care of their troops and have been proactive in working with them and their primary care managers, their people have had a pretty smooth and easy process of getting things taken care of. Other people, primarily in the Air Force, had a harder time. Some commands say, “No, we're not going to sign off on your transition plan, you have to be stable before we can sign off here." But their therapist is saying well the reason that they're still experiencing mental distress is because they can't transition. They're saying, "I'm feeling dysphoric and I need to start transitioning and I need medical care." It's like saying we're not going to sign off on you having surgery for your torn ACL until your knee is better.

So before Trump, we had an Obama-era policy put in place that was meant to be a supportive path to transition, but there are clearly issues with that policy.

Yeah. Basically, it's deliberately being read in a way to create problems: interpreting the policy in a way that it wasn't meant to be in order to generate catch-22s that the service member can't work around to prevent them from transitioning. The policy, when people apply it in the way it was meant to be applied, works pretty well. You've got supportive commands that use policy in a way it was meant to be used, as a kind of checklist to get people from one box to the other box within the system because the military is very much a gender binary system: you're male or female and it's what do you need to do to get everything from one side of that aisle to the other.

The [current] policy was intended to be a way of doing that. It was supposed to be modeled off of the British and Australian systems which work really well, but where it has not worked well is where they've deviated from what we at SPARTA recommended and what other countries have found to be successful. Out of an overabundance of caution, approval plans for transition are being pushed way higher up the chain of command than the British or Australians do. Here, it’s being pushed to the Pentagon or at least the court level. The changes recommended were designed to stop commanders from circumventing the system out of an overabundance of caution or sheer malicious intent, but that's not the majority of commanders. Trump's tweets went out within days of those recommendations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.