Despite Trump, transgender veterans honour their own

Arlington, US, June 9: President Donald Trump has made clear his opposition to transgender Americans serving in the military, but that didn’t deter transgender veterans from laying a wreath on hallowed ground: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Trump’s July 2017 tweet that people who have undergone gender transition should not serve “in any capacity” in the US armed forces raised alarm throughout a movement that had been counting gains in recent years.

“We, as transgender people, bled like anyone else,” Yvonne Cook- Riley, a US Air Force veteran and a spearhead of the transgender rights movement, told AFP after the Friday ceremony, as she walked a tree- lined path through rows of white headstones in Arlington Cemetery.

The Vietnam war veteran was among a dozen members or friends of the Transgender American Veterans Association ( TAVA) who witnessed the somber ceremony at the marble sarcophagus on a hill overlooking Washington.

For years Cook- Riley, who began her transition after returning from Vietnam, advanced the cause of transgender rights.

She shared in the jubilation of the June 2016 announcement, under then- president Barack Obama, that ended the ban on transgender people serving openly in the US military.

The gay rights movement was ascendant too, and the marginalised transgender community was suddenly seen with a sympathetic eye. National