Trump’s Staggering Betrayal of Trans Service Members

Early this month, the Pentagon quietly reneged on its promise to give transgender Air Force members the retirement pay they’ve earned over nearly two decades of service. That is, of course, not how the Pentagon put it—but that’s not surprising in an administration so averse to honesty.

Only months ago, in May, after the Supreme Court’s partisan supermajority gave its approval to Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military service, a Defense Department memo invited trans people with 15 to 18 years of military service to apply for its Temporary Early Retirement Authority program. TERA, as it’s called, was created in 1993 for periods of military drawdown; the program gives those with between 15 and 20 years of service deserved benefits such as on-base housing, health insurance, and, of course, pension payments. Officials even held a special press briefing, during which they vaguely acknowledged the hardship awaiting those being forced out, hewing as close to empathy as this administration seems able to muster. “They will be afforded a very significant, voluntary separation pay,” one senior Defense spokesperson told reporters, “giving them the time they need to transition to civilian life. This policy will treat anyone impacted by it with dignity and respect.”

What could be more Trumpian than a promise broken? Perhaps giving, and then inexplicably revoking, approval for early retirement, as the Pentagon did to roughly 30 trans Air Force members, according to The Advocate. “After careful consideration of the individual applications, I am disapproving all Temporary Early Retirement Authority (TERA) exception to policy requests,” Brian Scarlett, the Air Force’s newly announced acting assistant secretary for Manpower and Reserve, wrote in an August 4 memo. Four days later, a follow-up letter put an even finer, which is to say crueler, point on things. “Retirement orders are rescinded effective immediately,” it stated, instructing recipients that they “will need to process for separation instead.”

Many of these career trans airmen and guardians have deployed to combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places multiple times, Shannon Minter, legal head of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told me. Many “have received very impressive promotions and commendations”—medals, ribbons, and other decorations. A significant portion are highly skilled in important technical areas.

Roughly 96 percent of Americans have never volunteered to serve, including the famously draft-dodging president. But all 4,240 estimated trans military members signed up to risk injury or death for a country they well knew would likely never return the favor. And most trans service people, a number of whom Minter is representing in related litigation, had planned to continue serving for the foreseeable future.

The people so cruelly betrayed by the administration’s flip-flopping had given almost two decades of their lives to the task, putting them within reach of the 20-year mark that unlocks full retirement benefits. Instead of honoring that sacrifice, this administration is booting them from their chosen careers and denying them a means to afford the civilian life into which they’re being thrust—to eat, to keep a roof over their head, to meet even their most basic needs after such a devastating loss.

“This is the promise that the military makes to people who enlist and serve—that once they serve for 15 years, they will be entitled to retirement benefits,” Minter told me. “It is the bare minimum—and it’s one of the most important commitments that the military makes with people who step forward and are willing to serve.”

Both the Army and Navy have also offered TERA benefits to trans veterans with 15 to 18 years of service, according to the military-focused outlet Task & Purpose. But after witnessing the Air Force backpedal on its promises and moral obligations, who wouldn’t be skeptical of the military’s trustworthiness going forward? How can any trans soldier in any other branch not fear another sudden rug pull—one final denigration on the way out the door? And who can be certain that this administration won’t widen its purge and start denying promised benefits to other groups—say, service members whose political stances it disagrees with or whose identities it randomly decides are objectionable? As Minter warned me, all this sets a dangerous precedent, not just for trans troops but all service members.

“This cannot help but create doubts in people’s minds about whether the military will live up to its obligations generally,” Minter said. “I mean, [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is making so many drastic changes, right and left—it’s just chaos. It must be so destabilizing and demoralizing for people who are serving to feel like the ground is no longer secure under their feet.”

With the denial of early retirement, as the August 4 memo notes, these long-serving Air Force members are being told they must either be “voluntarily separated” or “involuntarily separated”—each an “Orwellian misnomer,” as Minter has rightly called them, for what is really forced removal. And like trans soldiers with far fewer years under their belts, they are now only eligible for a one-time lump-sum “separation” payment that pales in comparison to an ongoing pension.

What the government is doing to these service members should be recognized as theft on two fronts. First, robbing them of the careers they built year by year and rank by rank. Then, ripping them off of even the bare scraps it owed them in return. Treating all of this as a mere policy adjustment, and not a calculated betrayal that leaves so many lives, careers, and financial states in limbo, is yet more insult added to injury. I have long understood Trumpism as a movement that relies—thrives, even — on sadism, but it’s still jarring to watch the vicious pleasure it takes in all this.

What’s more, stripping these veterans of their well-deserved benefits was the culminating blow in a series of escalating indignities. Even before the ban was issued, the administration was spreading anti-trans hatred far and wide—treating trans people not as the vulnerable minority they are but as a societal taint and existential threat to everyone else.

“We will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military—it’s going to be gone,” Trump told a roomful of cheering House Republicans just hours before signing a January 27 executive order barring transgender soldiers from military service. “No more pronouns,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth menacingly gloated the same day the Supreme Court rubber-stamped Trump’s order. “No more dudes in dresses—we’re done with that shit.” The whiskey-breathed administrator, who struggled to do a decent pull-up earlier this week, would later tweet the same words, followed by the message, “No more trans @ DoD.”

Even more recently this month, Trump claimed that a nameless, faceless “they” wants “everybody transgender.”

And then there’s that January order itself, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” which takes such obvious pains to insult and humiliate trans service personnel. It declares that the military has been “afflicted with radical gender ideology”; claims transgenderism is inherently at odds with “a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle”; and falsely asserts that trans soldiers are neither “mentally [nor] physically fit for duty.” And then, this—a bit more red meat for a MAGA crowd to salivate over: “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.”

At the same special DoD press briefing during which trans soldiers were promised “dignity and respect,” a Pentagon official acknowledged the dark reality that military commanders are being directed to ferret out any trans soldiers who might be keeping their identities under wraps so as to avoid the cruel humiliation and financial pain the administration has in store for them. Through record reviews, those leaders are expected to essentially hunt down anyone diagnosed with or treated for “gender dysphoria.”

I won’t get into the fact that not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria, which describes emotional distress arising from a conflict between assigned gender and gender identity. Nor will I spend too much time noting that, if the administration is going to hang its ban on gender dysphoria, a clinical diagnosis, every trans service member should be eligible for a medical retirement, as with every other “medical condition” that exists.

Instead, I’ll simply point out how chilling it is that trans service members are told they might as well step up for removal, because if they don’t, they’ll just get smoked out anyway. “Any individuals who meet the criteria,” the official said, “and do not voluntarily identify themselves and go through the voluntary separation process will be processed involuntarily unless they are granted a waiver.”

Ah, yes, the basically impossible-to-get waiver, which requires that recipients go back into the closet and serve as their birth “assigned gender.” (Since the first Trump ban on trans military service, in 2019, only one person has been granted such a waiver.) In any case, last week, the Pentagon ended the charade of due process or choice by announcing it will no longer allow trans soldiers to request hearings to argue against their removal. So while the Navy has, for example, let members who were part of the violent mobs attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, remain in the service, the Pentagon is denying the same to folks whose sole infraction was offending a bunch of transphobes by merely existing.

But this government hates trans people too much to merely try to ruin their lives in the present. So the Pentagon is also doing its damnedest to sabotage the futures of trans service members who have succeeded the most. On separation paperwork, trans officers—meaning specifically those who have reached officer level — will be branded with a “JDK” discharge code, a sort of scarlet letter. The JDK code suggests ex-military personnel “could not be trusted with national security matters,” Air & Space Forces magazine writes. Trans people already face staggering rates of workplace discrimination. This bureaucratic code might well be a professional death sentence.

“If someone wants to go into classified work, it’s huge,” retired Air Force Col. Joshua Kastenberg told Air & Space Forces. “Keep in mind that people who leave the military honorably, some of them want to find jobs with contractors that require a clearance because they pay well and it gives them an opportunity to serve national defense without having to put on a uniform. That door may be shut to them as a result of this.”

All this is yet another reminder of the circularity of history and, unfortunately, of oppression.

There are endless echoes of the 1950s and ’60s Lavender Scare, during which the government purged somewhere between 2,000 to 5,000 “suspected homosexuals” from the military. From 1994 until 2011, under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the armed services likewise claimed LGB people were a threat to both national security and unit cohesion. And before the military was desegregated in 1948, Black service members were denied benefits readily extended to white service members, including the GI Bill—an exclusion which helped keep black folks out of the middle class, suburban homes, and the so-called American Dream.

Any trans person serving a decade or more—including, of course, every trans Air Force member currently being denied early retirement—knows what it means to serve while in the closet. It was only in 2016, after all, that Obama’s Department of Defense told trans service members it was finally safe for them to come out and live as themselves. They trusted their government’s assurances of honesty and integrity and now, they’re being punished for it.

So much, I guess, for all that sermonizing about the perils of DEI, the need for “meritocracy,” and claims of “supporting the troops.” The effort to push out capable military members proves all that stuff was performative. The message they want you to receive is that certain people’s right to be themselves is conditional.

This is far less about policy than it is about humiliation and erasure. Purging trans folks from the military was always just one part of a broader Trumpian agenda that seeks to blot trans people entirely from American public life. Hence the administration’s decision to retroactively reverse trans military members’ genders in their records; its requirement that, going forward, they be publicly misgendered with “birth sex” pronouns conflicting with their gender presentation, which some have noted puts them at the risk of transphobic violence; even prohibiting them from wearing their uniforms, which some have worn for decades, regardless of the occasion.

In May, the Pentagon also announced that it would halt all gender-affirming healthcare for transgender military members. There is no case to be made about saving money; the military doles out $42 million per year on Viagra and similar erectile dysfunction drugs but just $5.2 million per year on gender-affirming care. It’s a campaign to scrub trans folks from military history—and with it, their dignity.

At the very least, Minter believes that the denial of TERA benefits probably “violates the most basic due process requirement.

“It’s unprecedented,” he told me. “No one is aware of any prior instance where the military approved early retirement benefits and then rescinded them without any explanation. There’s a good chance the legality of this is going to be called into question.”

Earlier this summer, photos of an emotional Captain Trey Wirth at his retirement ceremony—the Coast Guard uniform he is now forbidden to wear hanging next to him—spread on social media. The image seemed to capture the needless heartbreak of a serviceperson who, after more than two decades, the military refuses to honor. The latest trans purge, like the periods of targeted cruelty before it, was undertaken to convey the idea that some groups aren’t just unfit for the uniform but wholly expendable.

“It’s such a betrayal on every front. Principle, history, tradition, law, and just basic decency,” Minter told me. “Just incomprehensible.”

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