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‘So. Tell Me. Are You Transgender?’ — After DADT: Transgender Life In The US Military

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 Charlotte, a transwoman, is outed as a transgender soldier to her chain-of-command, but for the moment survives because a senior non-commissioned officer ignores the antiquated medical regulation that excludes transgender persons from serving

Virtually every lesbian and gay service member remembers the terror of being discovered. Many had the experience of thinking they may have been outed, and sweating through days, weeks, or months dreading that moment when the hammer might fall. During those months many experienced all the physiological side effects of prolonged and extreme stress. A few even had those fears realized when they got called into the office of their superiors and asked the question that meant the end of everything they had fought to achieve in their career.

“Close the door.”

“Have a seat.”

“So. Tell me. Are you gay?”

For those who have had that experience, you remember the blood rushing in your ears, the panic, time grinding to a halt and your field of vision narrowing as your blood pressure spikes with adrenaline.  Pure fight or flight, and yet, there you stood or sat, motionless and fighting every instinct written into your biology.

This is where Charlotte was several weeks ago, with one small change.

“Close the door.”

“Have a seat.”

“So. Tell me. Are you transgender?”

Charlotte, a transwoman

Charlotte was born male. Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) says she is male.  She is listed as male on all her documentation. However, she has self identified as female for much longer than she has been in the system.

Charlotte is an enlisted soldier who has established herself as one of the most solid and reliable people in her company. “I have never gotten any counseling, or adverse marks against me, much less legal. I’m well known for being a self-sufficient, reliable worker. When I get one of my rare a days off, I usually come back to find it seems like my unit is incapable of functioning without me. I’m not the stereotypical Army stud though; I don’t have a 300 PT or qualify as expert shot, but I always meet and exceed the Army standards in these areas. My evals are always well above average and I am on track to get my E5 sooner than most people.”

This maturity and reliability hasn’t gone unnoticed. Her chain of command had been urging her to put in a “Green-to-Gold” package, and she had been working on it up until that moment of hell came.

Being transgender hadn’t stopped Charlotte from making strong and meaningful connections with others in her unit. In fact, it was this bond that ultimately was her undoing.

Charlotte’s best friend in the unit got married after they were already close. However, meeting this woman allowed Charlotte’s friend to make some astute guesses. “His wife has trans friends, so he quickly put together that I might be trans. He actually approached me about it one day while we were in the field. I was honest, and he was fairly accepting on face value. I actually think he may be entirely accepting as a whole.”

Unfortunately, marital issues led Charlotte’s friend to start drinking heavily, and that’s when it all started to unravel. “He compensates by drinking with some pretty stupid dudes these days. He told one of them about me during a Saturday drinking binge. He may have told them because he felt the only way he could take some of the heat off of himself for some of his work performance issues was by outing me. The person he told then told my First Sergeant. I had no idea what was coming for me Monday morning.”

First thing that morning, the First Sergeant found Charlotte, and set events of that day in motion.

“Hey, you, come see me in my office.”

Charlotte felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. It always did when she got this kind of request. She was invited into his office almost every day since she handles most of the company’s paperwork. “Whenever I was called into the First Sergeant’s office, it always made me nervous, because there was always that 2 percent chance it could be about me being trans. It’s the first thought that goes through my head anytime I go in his office and I don’t have an inkling as to why I’m there.”

“Close the door.”

“Have a seat.”

“My heart about stops when he tells me to close the door and take a seat. I knew this was bad.”

“So. Tell me. Are you transgender?”

“Shitshitshitshit. I’m about to get chaptered. He’s going to pull out one of the green legal packets I see on a daily basis and I’m going to get counseled that they’re recommending chapter.”

“Yes, First Sergeant.”

“You planning on doing anything to your junk?”

“No, First Sergeant.”

“You going to keep your hair in regs and show up in the right uniform?”

“Yes, First Sergeant.”

“Good. I don’t give a damn about this trans business as long as you hold to dude standards at work and aren’t getting surgery on your junk. Now, when are you going to have that Green-to-Gold packet done?”

“Before the end of the month. How did you know, though?”

“Someone outed you to someone, and he came to me about it. That’s all you need to know. I’ve made it clear that I don’t want to hear anything about this kind of stuff if the soldier doesn’t want people knowing about it. Anyone that goes against this will be considered to be disobeying an order. I’ve got no problem with you. Now run to legal and pick up SGT So-and-So’s packet.”

“Yes First Sergeant,” she replied, and left.

And that was it.

Since then, “I haven’t gotten any hazing, harassment, or anything else. A major part of this is that I keep my hair fairly tight. I’ve yet to experience any negative backlash.”

“A big part of why is because there are only few that know. My First Sergeant also made it clear that same day to the platoon sergeants that outing soldiers that don’t want to be outed is not kosher with him. People that do it will be considered violating orders from a senior NCO. That pretty much put a stop to the rumor mill on not only me, but also a number of other soldiers often accused of queerness.”

I asked Charlotte how things have been with the First Sergeant since, and what she took away from the experience. “There have been other conversations in passing since then. I’ve explained a little more about transgender issues and transitioning in the civilian world.  However, the bigger picture is that even (military) people who know nothing of transgender issues are able to handle the idea of trans soldiers as long as those soldiers can do their jobs well.”

It took 20 years under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to recognize this as truth for LGB people in military. We can only hope that it doesn’t take nearly as long for them to realize the same is true for the service members who are transgender.


Editor’s note: The New Civil Rights Movement is publishing a week-long series of articles about transgender people who are serving or have served in the United States military despite the present ban. All week we will be sharing the stories of real people’s lives in a considerable effort to expose the unnecessary barriers that obstruct transgender open service in military, and show why the transgender medical exclusion is antiquated and must be removed. You can read all the articles as they are published here.

 

Brynn at work cropped adjusted (1)Brynn Tannehill is originally from Phoenix, Ariz. She graduated from the Naval Academy with a B.S. in computer science in 1997. She earned her Naval Aviator wings in 1999 and flew SH-60B helicopters and P-3C maritime patrol aircraft during three deployments between 2000 and 2004. She served as a campaign analyst while deployed overseas to 5th Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain from 2005 to 2006. In 2008 Brynn earned a M.S. in Operations Research from the Air Force Institute of Technology and transferred from active duty to the Naval Reserves. In 2008 Brynn began working as a senior defense research scientist in private industry. She left the drilling reserves and began transition in 2010. Since then she has written for OutServe magazine, The Huffington Post, and Queer Mental Health as a blogger and featured columnist. Currently, she is on the board at SPART*A. Brynn and her partner currently live in Xenia, Ohio, with their three children.

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

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America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

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The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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