JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The military is kicking out transgender troops. It's part of a new ban enacted by President Trump, and the deadline is December 1. The Department of Defense is going through medical records and identifying anyone with gender dysphoria. During Trump's first term, many of these troops were told they needed that diagnosis to keep their jobs. Now the military is using it to put them on administrative leave instead. NPR's Lauren Hodges reports.
LOGAN IRELAND: I did what the service asked me to do. It seemed kind of silly to me, but this was what the checklist was.
LAUREN HODGES, BYLINE: Logan Ireland is a master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force. In 2017, President Trump had just begun his first administration. One of his first acts was to ban trans people from serving in the military. And if a trans person were already in the armed forces, they had two options. Leave or get an official medical diagnosis for gender dysphoria, defined as the marked incongruence between a person's experienced gender and their gender assigned at birth. As long as they had that documented, they could stay. So Ireland made an appointment with a doctor, even though he says it felt a little awkward.
IRELAND: I've never felt necessarily dysphoric about who I am. You know, I'm Logan. I happened to be, you know, born female. But I transitioned to male. And I'm just here living my life and doing my job.
HODGES: But in order to keep that job, Ireland needed a military doctor to confirm the diagnosis and put it on file. So it was done. And he was able to go back to work, which was in the Office of Special Investigations. Former President Biden repealed the policy in 2021. Ireland figured the whole thing was settled.
IRELAND: You know, we're service members first. We all raised our right hand. We wear the same uniform. We deploy over the world. You know, we not only meet but exceed the standards. The only difference is we just happen to be transgender.
HODGES: Even when Trump was reelected a few years later and the ban was reenacted, Ireland thought he was safe.
IRELAND: I figured all the things would just happen like last time, that I would be grandfathered and we would still serve.
HODGES: But that medical diagnosis he was required to get, it was now being used against him. This time, instead of outright banning all transgender service members, the Defense Department included gender dysphoria as one of the medical conditions that disqualify people from military service. And thanks to all those doctors' appointments back in 2017, the Pentagon had a list now.
IRELAND: It doesn't seem real. It's been a feeling of being kicked down, being betrayed.
PRIYA RASHID: It's going to be a completely unfair process.
HODGES: Priya Rashid is a military defense attorney who represents several trans service members as the legal director of the National Institute of Military Justice. She says a few of her clients even tried to do the right thing ahead of time when Trump was reelected based on what they were told during the first ban.
RASHID: We saw a influx of transgender folks go and get their gender dysphoria diagnosis because they thought that there was going to be another grandfather clause. So we have clients that said, I wouldn't have come out. I only came out because I thought that the ban was going to be the same.
HODGES: Rashid has been helping her clients navigate that early exit from military service. She says the ban has already been traumatic for them. But recent moves by the Air Force have added insult to injury, starting with separation pay. In early August, the Air Force said it would deny transgender troops early retirement benefits and was moving to revoke requests already approved.
Troops who have served between 15 and 18 years ordinarily would qualify for the benefits automatically. But the Air Force now says transgender troops must choose either a voluntary separation, with the same lump-sum payment offered to junior troops, or an involuntary separation, which would come with no pay or benefits. Meaning if they try to stay and fight the ban, they get nothing. And what's more, says Rashid, is that the lump sum comes with conditions.
RASHID: Separation pay means that you're being paid, and you don't have to return it. What these people are actually getting is a zero-interest early loan on their disability and their accrued entitlements. So when they get older, and they're this older veteran who needs medical and financial support, they're actually depleting their future disability and military entitlement accruements.
HODGES: Meaning they'll have to take any future medical costs out of that lump sum. On top of the benefits being revoked, the Air Force also recently announced that transgender airmen will no longer have the chance to argue before a board of their peers for the right to continue serving. The separation boards, which are supposed to be independent, must recommend separation of the member if the airman has a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, according to a new memo.
RASHID: We had no idea that when we opened that document that they were going to fundamentally change the rules of the way they conduct long-standing boards. The rules are not going to apply to these people. They will not be given a fair trial. The outcome will be predetermined based on the diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
HODGES: The new rules also prohibit any recordings of the hearings or the use of court reporters. Rashid says that's illegal.
RASHID: The Administrative Procedure Act. They are required to provide appeals. The transcript is the mechanism of appeal. So, like, that's a First Amendment and a Fifth Amendment right.
HODGES: Mick Wagoner is the founder and executive director of Veterans Legal Support Network. He says more than one law is being broken here.
MICK WAGONER: You've got the unlawful command influence from the get-go, from the jump there, directing a person to be kicked out without any due process.
HODGES: Wagoner also says this puts a huge dent in one of the military's most powerful recruitment tools.
WAGONER: The quid pro quo promise of you serve, there's some benefits on the end of that. And that's just a fundamental breaking of that contract that the military has.
HODGES: Overall, Wagoner says the cumbersome effort to identify and remove transgender troops hurts mission readiness, the very priority named in the executive action that banned them. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has listed lethality, meritocracy, war fighting, accountability and readiness as his top priorities for the armed forces. But Wagoner says this effort is counterproductive to those values.
WAGONER: I think you're just cutting your nose off to spite your face. You've got this expertise in so many fields. I've got a friend of mine. She is a lieutenant colonel in the Marines. She was enlisted. She transitioned. But she fought in Fallujah. So, you know, when you talk about, you know, war fighters, people who actually fought. And she did.
HODGES: Master Sargeant Ireland, meanwhile, he's trying to plan his future without his longtime career, or the retirement pay his family was counting on. He gave the Air Force 15 years, met his wife there, served in Afghanistan, moved his family many times. It was his life.
IRELAND: I look around my house, I look at the tattoos on my arms, and my heart just breaks. It breaks because I gave so much of my life to the service. It's a core part of who I am.
HODGES: Lauren Hodges, NPR News, Washington.
SUMMERS: NPR has reached out to the Air Force for comment. They have not responded.
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