Trump Has Found a Cruel New Way to Attack Trans Veterans

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Earlier this year, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expelled transgender troops from the U.S. military, the administration claimed—against all evidence—that bigotry against trans people was not the reason behind the move. There’s no longer any plausible deniability, though, as Trump’s Defense Department recently escalated its war on trans service members by taking away some of those soldiers’ pensions and benefits.

Transgender troops began serving openly in 2016 under President Barack Obama. In his first term, Trump announced by tweet that he would ban transgender troops. A few months later, the Defense Department decided to bar them from enlisting, but to retain those already in uniform, citing “its solemn promise to these Service members, and the investment it has made in them.” President Joe Biden again allowed transgender recruits to join. But now Trump has decided to throw out all trans soldiers, even though in the interim they have been serving honorably and successfully. (If there were any evidence to the contrary the administration would have produced it.)

Air Force Master Sgt. Logan Ireland has served for 15 years, including overseas tours to Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, and South Korea. After the Supreme Court decided to allow the Trump administration to enforce its ban, Ireland agreed to apply for early retirement; he was told that if he didn’t, he would lose half of his separation pay. His application was approved.

But then the Air Force’s acting personnel chief decided to rescind the approval for Ireland and more than a dozen others who have between 14 and 18 years of Air Force service. Instead of normal retirement benefits, they are now offered lump-sum payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less. There was no explanation.

“The first feeling I felt was betrayal,” Ireland said. “I’ve given my life to the service. I was promised this. I had my retirement orders in hand. I’ve been starting to process what life looks like outside of uniform, and now we don’t know what that looks like.”

The Veterans Administration’s declared mission is “to fulfill President Lincoln’s promise to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors.” But now earnings from years of service are yanked away at the whim of a bureaucrat.

Why the extraordinary departure from what even the first Trump administration called a “solemn promise”?

Any explanation must begin with Trump’s stated justification for expelling transgender troops. His executive order declares that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

One hardly knows where to begin. Transgender people often accept their identity after a long struggle against an undeniable truth. Their whole identities are built around rejecting dishonesty. Trump’s rationale is essentially that his notions about gender identity are so obviously right that anyone who disagrees with him must be lying and so is a bad person.

Aside from the transparent animus, Trump’s order is built on lies. If one is looking for deliberate falsehood, consider the administration’s claim that the exclusion has a medical justification. Dishonesty and indiscipline are not medical conditions. Soldiers separated for medical reasons do not lose their benefits.

The procedure Trump uses for those who won’t voluntarily leave is “administrative separation,” which is normally used for misconduct, not illness or injury, and which carries a corresponding stigma. Soldiers separated because of the ban will be ineligible for security clearances they held while serving, which will make it difficult for them to get jobs in defense industries.

So the result is a weird hybrid: treatment of a kind appropriate for wrongdoing, applied to persons who have done no wrong, deemed unfit simply for who they are. Of course, no military objective is served by denying troops their retirement pay.

This is not just about transgender people. If promises made to them are meaningless, the same is true of the promises made to every other soldier and veteran. But the dangers are even broader than that.

The new exclusion policy tests another long-standing rule, that government action cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny if it is based on a “bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” One district court observed that both Trump’s order and the implementing policy documents include “demeaning [and] derogatory language” that portrays “transgender persons as weak, dishonorable, undisciplined, boastful, selfish liars.” The administration provided no evidence to support these claims. The judge in that case found that “the Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext.”

Every federal district court that examined the evidence agreed that the policy was the product of indefensible prejudice. Yet the Supreme Court, which is supposed to be bound by lower courts’ factual findings, permitted it to go forward. It offered no explanation, as has become its customary practice when faced with unconstitutional actions by Trump. If this policy is upheld—or the new one removing hard-won benefits from veterans who served honorably—then the Supreme Court will have blessed raw hatred as a sufficient basis for the government to mistreat its citizens. Who will be safe then?

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.