As a 20-year veteran of the Army sat in a classroom attending a mandatory course for soldiers getting out of the military and transitioning to civilian life, the civilian instructor made an odd request. He asked the couple of dozen people in the room to scratch out the words "pronoun, gender, diversity and inclusion" from the workbooks they had been issued.
Much of the class likely thought little of the request -- a lingering effect of the Trump administration's efforts to eliminate diversity initiatives in the government -- but the soldier's mind filled with frustration and anger.
The soldier is transgender and was sitting in that class because the Trump administration had made the choice to deny trans troops the ability to serve.
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As the soldiers around her were dutifully censoring their workbooks, she felt like they were quietly removing the change that she, and fellow trans troops like her, worked so hard to instill in the military. A soldier from her unit shot her a look that just said, "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
The transgender soldier, granted anonymity to protect her identity out of fear of retribution, said that the entire incident was "just yet another reminder that it doesn't matter how much they say 'thank you for all the effort you put in and that your contributions are valuable' … because at the end of the day, they're having us manually go in and remove our own contributions from all the documentation."
Her story is not unique. Over the past two weeks, Military.com spoke with six transgender service members who described their own process of leaving the military as full of indignities that ranged from evaporating support from leadership to forced administrative leave and being denied the right to wear a uniform at retirement.
Many of these experiences are largely driven by a single policy choice: the automatic reversal of the gender marker of trans troops back to their birth gender.
Logan Ireland, a master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, called the choice "absolutely heartbreaking." The soldier called it "open cruelty." Others called it "dehumanizing" and "trying to kick us while we're down."
"You've had this fantasy in mind all these years that I'm gonna be retiring in my blues, and my family's gonna be there and it's gonna be honorable," Ireland told Military.com.
However, because of the change in the gender marker, Ireland, like countless other transgender service members, is no longer authorized to wear the uniform that he's known for more than a decade.
"To be denied that opportunity -- not because of my qualifications or capability, but because of bias disguised as policy -- it's just incredibly disheartening," he added.
The troops who offered their perspectives varied in rank from senior enlisted all the way up to colonel. However, all had more than a decade of service in the military, and all held highly technical professions like intelligence analyst, IT specialist or astronautical engineer. Some had combat deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Those who spoke without anonymity stressed that they were expressing their personal views and not those of their branches or the Defense Department.
Military.com reached out to the military services and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office asking for a comment or reaction to the fact that all the transgender troops who spoke up found the policy dehumanizing.
Hegseth's office never responded to the questions, and none of the services' public affairs offices chose to answer the questions.
Standing Beside the Uniform
According to the Pentagon, the services had 4,240 troops who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria -- the medical condition that Pentagon officials decided would be a key way for them to identify troops who are trans. The two are not a perfect match; gender dysphoria refers to discomfort associated with being transgender, meaning not every transgender person has the condition.
Leaders in the Trump administration have minced few words in articulating how they feel about transgender troops.
President Donald Trump's executive order that announced the ban, released just days after his inauguration, declared 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" and "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."
In May, Hegseth issued a memo outlining the policy that would be used to separate troops, writing that "expressing a false 'gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service."
For transgender troops, the premise of the policy memo and the executive order is false.
"For them to see us as less than human, as less than equal, as someone who is 'dishonest' with their military service … that's just untrue," Ireland said when asked about the sentiment.
The policy offered trans troops two paths forward: either volunteer to leave and get a large payout or be separated with no pay. In the days that followed the memo, a senior official at the Pentagon told reporters that the military services would lean on commanders and annual medical screenings to find any trans troops who may have eluded the ban.
However, unlike Trump or Hegseth, the senior official who spoke anonymously as a condition of the interview presented the policy as kind and respectful.
"They will be afforded a very significant, voluntary separation pay," the senior defense official said in May, adding that "this policy will treat anyone impacted by it with dignity and respect."
The service members who spoke to Military.com stressed that, even though many transgender troops may take the "voluntary" option, they are not doing so because it is what they wish to do but because they feel as if they don't have a choice, given what continued service would entail.
One senior noncommissioned officer, who asked not to be identified because they were part of ongoing litigation, said that they read this policy as a veiled threat. "You don't even know how bad it's going to be, right? And so maybe you should 'volunteer," they said.
The Hegseth order meant that the military services began reversing any gender marker changes for trans troops, setting off a wave of consequences, the most visible of which has been the inability to wear uniforms daily or to events like retirement ceremonies.
Ireland, as well as others who spoke to Military.com, say that they have already had their gender officially changed in their records. Others said that they anticipate the change, and they are proceeding accordingly.
"There was a conversation I had with one of the people in my unit about [the fact that] 'nobody's going to enforce the uniform standards on you for stuff like this,'" the transgender soldier said.
But she also noted that she couldn't, "in good conscience, be in this situation where I know I'm the only one just getting away with something. … It goes against everything that I believe about what it means to be a good soldier."
The result is that the trans service members who are fortunate enough to formally retire -- something that several said their units had to fight for -- will not be in uniform.
One transgender Coast Guard officer recently retired with their uniform on a stand beside them, posting the images to social media.
In their posts, the officer said that they did so "not because I didn't love the uniform, but because policy and identity collided. … There's a current policy that says I can't wear the uniform I feel authentic in."
Rylee Marcotte, a technical sergeant with the Air Force who has served for about 13 years, was hoping to be able to wear her uniform to her final outprocessing appointment before being involuntarily separated.
She was told she had to report in uniform -- not civilian clothes -- but a male uniform.
"So now I am outprocessing the Air Force at Fairchild Air Force Base virtually, when four minutes south of me is the military personnel flight -- I can walk there -- but I'm not being allowed to walk out in uniform," she said.
Col. Bree Fram, an astronautical engineer in the Space Force and a leader among trans troops, said that the fact that "we can't even retire in our uniforms without potentially facing punitive action against us hurts. … It hurts a lot because we bled and sweat into those uniforms for decades."
'The Villain of Their Story'
The change in gender goes beyond just the uniform, though.
By reverting a service member's gender marker, military leaders trigger a cascade of consequences for them that range from needing to be addressed by pronouns that now come across as incongruous with their appearance and mandating the use of an alternative gender's bathroom, all the way to creating issues with medical records at a time when troops are being discharged and turning to the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical care.
"When I go to a medical appointment and they request a 'Mrs. Ireland' to come forward, and I stand up, one, it's very, very embarrassing but also, my safety is now an issue," Ireland explained.
"It's our family too," Fram said, noting that her wife told her that "there is no way in hell you're gonna cut your hair."
As a result of the many complications that reverting thousands of service members' gender markers would cause, the services seem to have turned to a novel solution -- just placing many transgender troops on months of administrative leave.
All of the troops who spoke to Military.com said that they had been placed on leave, sometimes over their objections. The move means that they are still drawing a paycheck but are sequestered from their colleagues and fellow service members.
Marcotte described the move as "telling me to go quietly into that good night."
The senior noncommissioned officer said that, to them, it "seems like cruelty is the point."
Marcotte described the idea that the Pentagon's policy treats troops like her with dignity and respect as "the warm blanket that they're wrapping themselves in."
"It's not true, but that's what they're saying to make themselves feel better about the bull---- that's happening," she added.
Troops are also frustrated about their service suddenly being categorized as somehow less than honorable, because it goes against many of the things they've been told over their many years of service, often citing years of stellar evaluations and fitness reports, awards and professional accomplishments.
During those years of service, most described broad acceptance from their peers.
"When you're in uniform, those that work with a trans service member, they don't give a sh--," Ireland said.
But for Marcotte, the Trump administration's policies are not about her or her performance.
"We are the villain of their story, and they don't want us around," she said.
Pentagon officials have confirmed that, as transgender troops are separated, they will also receive special discharge codes on their paperwork and files that carry potential impacts for their future.
While enlisted transgender troops will be separated under the code "JFF," meaning that they were discharged under the authority of their service's top civilian official, officers will receive the code "JDK," which labels them a national security threat, possibly triggering implications far beyond the military.
"Having this code, as best I understand, was last used for discharging homosexuals during the Lavender Scare in the McCarthy era," Fram said.
Fram and others noted that, aside from the emotional impact of being labeled a security threat, the codes raise concerns for the future since they are likely to be a hindrance to anyone who would try to keep their security clearance and utilize it for a civilian or government job.
"That option of just wanting to serve my country, no matter what, within the federal government is kind of taken away from multiple aspects, multiple angles," the senior noncommissioned officer said.
A defense official, when asked about the practice, offered no explanation behind the choice of either the JFF or JDK code but said that the code being given to enlisted service members "has nothing to do with clearance eligibility."
The transgender soldier said that the code has "become a bit of a morbid joke" among transgender troops.
"I know a couple of people, at least, who have already gotten tattoos that say 'national security threat.'"
As trans service members begin to deal with their impending separation from the military and the end of their service, they've also begun to grapple with how that moment will look to them and those around them.
Ireland, who anticipates retiring in December, said that at first he was going to leave quietly, but then he thought about his wife, who is also transgender and an Army veteran who was separated over her gender identity in 2015.
"I want to have a ceremony … not just for myself, but for her and for all the other transgender service members that had their careers purged and robbed," he said.
Ireland plans to have his ceremony at the historic base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he's currently stationed, and "I'll be inviting anybody who is a transgender service member to come and attend." The ceremony will be officiated by the woman who was his deployed commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
"She was one of the first people that I told I was transgender, and when we sat down to talk, what mattered to her was that I could lead our convoy safely outside the wire, not me being transgender," Ireland explained.
Yet even in the twilight of his own career, Ireland remains hopefully defiant.
"You can't purge us from the military," he said. "There will be trained service members serving in silence and serving through this ban and, once the ban is repealed, we will still be here serving, and there will be people that will come after us and walk in our same footsteps."
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