Just five days after being sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden signed an executive order overturning former President Trump’s ban on openly transgender Americans serving in the military. “All Americans who are qualified to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States should be able to serve,” it read, going on to argue that an “inclusive military strengthens our national security.”
Biden’s executive order, one of a flurry he signed during his administration’s first week, marked the fulfillment of one of his foremost policy proposals regarding the advancement of LGBTQ+ equality in America. More specifically, the order counteracted a 2017 directive by the Trump administration banning openly trans folks from the armed services — itself a reversal of the Obama administration’s 2016 order that paved the way for trans Americans to serve in the military without hiding their gender identity.
Public responses to the Biden order were swift and celebratory, with a broad swath of trans servicemembers, veterans, advocates, rights organizations, and media outlets (including this publication) hailing the executive order as a victory in the process of realizing trans equality. Statements by organizations from GLAAD to the Human Rights Campaign spoke glowingly of the role “brave trans patriots” have played throughout history in “defending our country” as part of the “greatest military in the world.” The National Center for Transgender Equality pointed out the importance of trans military inclusion in light of the military’s role in employing trans Americans; by some estimates, America’s armed forces is the largest employer of trans folks in the country.
Yet despite widespread praise of Biden’s action as a home run in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, critics on the left decried the order and its reception for failing to acknowledge the devastation wrought by U.S. imperialism — both abroad and for those employed by the armed forces at home. Though there’s no questioning the ban was rooted in transphobia, some questioned whether its reversal would actually improve trans lives.
Those critics include trans veteran Aaron Myracle, who has long sought to counter the idea that trans service members — prospective, current, and former — all support these efforts. “If what we really care about is strengthening trans people, military enlistment is not the way to go about that,” he said in May 2014, when the White House announced it would conduct a review of the policy that forced Myracle to live stealth during each of his eight years of service. “I can’t endorse anyone joining the military, knowing what I know, and having seen what I’ve seen – the way sexual assault is covered up and hidden, and victims are re-victimized by the system, and disenfranchised, and oftentimes punished to such a degree that they forfeit all of their benefits.”
Another critic is the activist, legal scholar, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project founder Dean Spade. Through local organizing, academic publishing, and campaigns like the Queer Trans War Ban, Spade has spent the better part of two decades fighting popular calls to expand access to participation in the United States military to LGBTQ+ people. If anyone can help add a necessary dissenting voice to the broader conversation surrounding trans military inclusion, it’s him.
Below, them. spoke with Spade to learn more about the main counterarguments to advocating trans military inclusion and the history behind these critiques.WATCHNyle DiMarco Gets A Drag Makeover From Miz Cracker
What are the main pillars of the argument against promoting trans inclusion in the military?
Trans inclusion advocacy often functions as pro-military propaganda. Consider how the fight for same-sex marriage recuperated the institution of marriage, which feminists had been working to delegitimize for years, arguing that marriage is an institution of violence and oppression, not love. Marriage has historically made women and children into men’s property and is still the method by which the government rewards and punishes people for organizing their sexual and intimate family lives in particular ways. Same-sex marriage advocacy reframed marriage as a site of dignity and love, refashioning the conversation such that if you weren’t for same sex couples getting married then you were homophobic.
Trans military inclusion advocacy similarly ends up being advocacy for a brutal and oppressive institution. Specifically, it propagates two main lies about the armed forces: that “protecting our country” is this patriotic, dignified job spreading democracy around the world, and that it is a wonderful job opportunity for trans people. In fact, the U.S. military is a brutally violent force focused on expanding and sustaining American empire for the benefit of a small elite, and people in the military are treated terribly while they are there and after they leave.
“If we wanted to ask, where are trans people concentrated and use that to guide what we work on, we would be working on supporting trans people in the sex trades and other underground industries, and trans people in prisons, jails, detention centers, and psychiatric facilities.”
I want to dig a little deeper into these two points. Can you elaborate on the dangers of advocating for trans military inclusion as it pertains to its implicitly pro-war message?
First, when military inclusion advocacy casts the U.S. military as a site of gender inclusion and liberation, it ignores well-documented facts about U.S. militarism and sexual and gender violence. The U.S. military has more bases than any other military in the world. Where there are U.S. military bases, there is intense sexual and gender-based violence. This includes sexual violence towards women living near military bases, towards sex workers of all genders, towards women inside the U.S. military, and harassment and sexual violence towards people perceived as weak or as gay or as trans. This is just a normal part of what U.S. militarism is. It’s inseparable from the culture. Rape as a tactic of U.S. militarism is as old as U.S. militarism itself, going all the way back to the systemic rape of Indigenous people to colonize and settle North America.
Second, when you destabilize a country, which the U.S. military does and continues to do, not only is the military and its contractors there harassing, raping and murdering people; it’s causing the burden of warfare to fall on women, queer, and trans folks. Those who are already subject to violence face even worse conditions when everyone is living with food and housing shortages, increased stress, and the presence of more weapons.
Finally, military inclusion advocacy is silent about how the U.S. military is arguably the biggest source of violence in the world and largest polluter in the world. Inclusion campaigners hide this when they say, “let these people serve in this proud institution keeping us safe and spreading democracy around the globe.” It takes our liberation fight and uses it to paint the military as a site of freedom for us. This is an outrageous pro-military and pro-war message that we can’t support if we care about people and the planet.
A lot of the advocacy surrounding trans inclusion in the military notes the armed forces’ being a massive employer of the trans community. According to some estimates, Trump’s ban could have led to roughly 13,700 trans folks being forced to choose between holding their job and transitioning. How would an anti-inclusion politics address this point?
It’s not enough to say, “How wonderful: this executive order will create jobs for trans people.” We need to keep paying attention to what it’s really like to be a part of the U.S. military, and whether access to becoming a soldier is actually going to increase the well-being of trans people. Should folks be economically coerced into one of the most dangerous and violent jobs possible?
Sexual assault in the military continues to increase, and is widely underreported. 38% of women in the military experience sexual assault and 55% (of those who use VA healthcare) reported experiencing sexual harassment. In 2018, over 76% of people sexually assaulted in the military did not report it. Why? Because the culture of the military normalizes harassment and assault, rendering reporting dangerous. A third of survivors who report are discharged after doing so. Those who report receive stigmatizing discharges, with 24% discharged less than “honorably.” When people are discharged in these ways (and sometimes even when they are not) they are often excluded from VA services, even though they have served and may be in need of medical, mental health and other care. 40% of women homeless veterans are survivors of sexual violence in the military, and veterans who have experienced sexual violence in the military are over twice as likely to experience homelessness.
In addition to sexual harassment and assault, many vets experience significant injury and trauma while in military service, then are functionally abandoned when they return home. Between 11 and 20% return home with PTSD. 17 veterans per day die by suicide in the U.S. More veterans die by suicide every two days than were killed in action in 2019. It is unethical to portray the military as a wonderful job opportunity for trans people given these realities.
I also want to address the talking point that the military is the largest employer of trans people. This is immensely misleading. If we wanted to ask, where are trans people concentrated and use that to guide what we work on, we would be working on supporting trans people in the sex trades and other underground industries, and trans people in prisons, jails, detention centers, and psychiatric facilities. A 2011 report by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 16% of transgender Americans had been sent to jail or prison. At that rate, if there are at least 1.4 million trans adults in the United States, then we can safely argue there are nearly 10 times as many trans people who have been impacted by the American carceral system than are currently serving in the military. The way to support trans people’s wellbeing, therefore, is to focus on decriminalizing trans lives. That means supporting trans prisoners, stopping prison expansion, defunding the police, decriminalizing sex work, and drug use, and poverty, and providing housing, food, and health care to all trans people. This is the advocacy we should focus on, not a heartbreaking resolution that because of our communities’ desperation we should seek the “chance” to be economically coerced into being cannon fodder for U.S. empire.
“Trans inclusion in the military, like marriage equality, does nothing to redistribute wealth, stop police violence, housing and health care crises plaguing queer and trans communities.”
You’ve spoken before about the circumstances regarding where the organizing around trans military inclusion got its start. Can you take us through the origins of these campaigns, and what they say about which issues make it to mainstream attention?
In 2013, there was a sudden explosion of media coverage about the idea of trans military service, virtually all of it portraying proud trans soldiers who loved the military. I had already spent many years in trans movements where people were primarily talking about homelessness of trans people, about healthcare deprivation, and about police violence. In all those years, in so many public meetings and in organizations working on trans issues, military service was never the demand the community was lifting up. Yet in 2013 this kind of advocacy was suddenly so visible. The driver behind this was not community consensus, but the power of one billionaire: Col. Jennifer Pritzer, heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, came out as trans and gave likely the largest grant ever given for trans advocacy to the Palm Center to work for trans military inclusion. This was frustrating for those of us working in the long fights against trans poverty and criminalization — to see how the power of one conservative philanthropist could create the illusion that trans communities were saying that this was our number one issue.
This process recalls the histories of how gay and lesbian advocacy conservatized in the decades after the ‘60s and ‘70s, when wealthy white donors built up organizations that, rather than advocating against police violence and war, created agendas that sought hate crimes legislation (which gives more punishing power to prosecutors but does not reduce violence), marriage (which primarily benefits people with resources and statuses they can share through marriage), and military inclusion. Eventually, that conservative agenda became the most visible gay and lesbian politics in the U.S.
Of course, there are some trans people who really want to serve in the military, just as there are some gay people who feel safe with cops or feel freed by marriage. What I’m concerned by is how money manipulates the field of advocacy and makes it seem like something is a main fight that will help a population of targeted people, when in fact it only appears central because it is backed by people who are invested in preserving the most harmful institutions in our society.
“When it comes to trans advocacy, we want to ask what reforms will save trans people’s lives. The answers are clear: access to housing, income, food, childcare, health care. Military inclusion advocacy does not make the list.”
Everyone reading this is hopefully familiar with the swath of systemic issues plaguing the trans community — from criminalization, to homelessness, to health care discrimination, to the epidemic of transphobic violence continuing to take the lives of our Black and brown trans siblings. And yet, on day five of his presidency, Biden placed his focus on allowing trans folks into the military. What do you think explains the new administration’s urgency where trans military participation is concerned?
It’s pinkwashing. “Pinkwashing” is the word we use when institutions, organizations, political parties, and, indeed, politicians strive to appear progressive (and often to cover up their actual harmful activities), so they do something to associate their instiution with the queer and trans liberation struggle. The goal isn’t queer and trans well-being, but rather good PR. It’s a branding move. An example is when a city paints some of its police cars with rainbow flags for Pride, or when they hire a couple gay cops or a trans cop. Nothing changes for queer and trans people, but the police get to borrow the good liberation feelings off our movements for PR. Now we’re seeing Biden follow Obama’s footsteps of making a few token nods to gay and trans issues without disrupting the larger commitments to the fossil fuel industry, U.S. military imperialism, and serving the interests of the rich. Remember that Obama, in his second term, came out in favor of gay marriage, which distracted from his failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his failure to address the climate crisis, and his role in deporting more people than any prior president. Trans inclusion in the military, like marriage equality, does nothing to redistribute wealth, stop police violence, housing and health care crises plaguing queer and trans communities. It does nothing to address the fundamental harms of the criminal system, the immigration system, or the military, itself.
Part of what we’re talking about seems to be the debate between the more pragmatic, “work-within-the-system-to-change-the-system” brand of reform-oriented change versus a more transformational, “tear-it-all-down” approach. Does that square with how you see the conversation regarding trans military inclusion?
I do not consider pro-military advocacy pragmatic. I consider reforms pragmatic when those reforms will have the most positive material impact on the people suffering harm. What’s pragmatic is to assess reforms and say, “Well, what will we get out of this? Whose life will be made better? Will this reform legitimize or expand a system that is harming us in our name?” These are the kinds of questions that prison and police abolitionists are always asking. Our movements say “stop police violence” and the government turns around and offers reforms like hiring cops with certain identities, training cops, banning certain chokeholds, creating meaningless oversight boards, all of which has proven ineffective. What is effective and pragmatic is whatever reduces contact with the police, which is why people are trying to defund police, to get rid of them so their violence can end. Similarly, when it comes to trans advocacy, we want to ask what reforms will save trans people’s lives. The answers are clear: access to housing, income, food, childcare, health care. Military inclusion advocacy does not make the list. Further investing in legitimizing the military, an institution that causes immense harm to people all over the planet including the people enlisted, is not a pragmatic solution to trans people’s suffering.