Different gender, but still a good soldier
Army Maj. Charles McGrue barely blinked when he met Capt. Sage Fox near their post in Sacramento for lunch in 2012 after not seeing her for a couple of months, even though there was one big difference.
The Capt. Fox he had talked to a couple of months before was a man. Now she was a woman.
“No problem,” McGrue recalled last week. “Male, female, transgender, whatever — if you are capable of doing the job you’ve been assigned, that’s what matters. And Sage is great at her job.”
In the wake of President Trump’s tweeted declaration Wednesday that he intends to ban transgender people from serving in the military, interactions like McGrue and Fox’s are at the center of national debate about whether serving alongside transgender people is an
expensive distraction.
For Fox, who had transitioned from male to female not long before that lunch with McGrue, and several soldiers who have served with her, the answer to that question is an emphatic “no.”
Fox, a 44-year-old Army Reserve officer in her 14th year of service, realized she was a woman in a man’s body while on deployment in Kuwait five years ago, and after taking a brief break to make adjustments including hormone treatment, she reported back to duty. Her commander told her it was fine to serve as a female officer, and her troops accepted her well, she said. It all seemed to fall in line with military tradition that what matters most is obedience and competence.
“It was like, ‘OK, you’re an asset, and that’s what counts,’ ” said Fox, who lives in Elk Grove (Sacramento County). “And I have to say, I specialize in information technology, and I’m good at my job.”
Any possibility of continuing to do that job may soon end.
Trump’s tweets carried no official weight, and though Defense Department officials have said any ban won’t be enacted until they receive formal notice, transgender service members, veterans and their advocates are on high alert. They are braced for a return, for trans people, to what military life was like before the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that barred gays and lesbians from serving openly ended in 2011 — and before last July, when thenDefense Secretary Ash Carter set policy allowing service members to transition genders in the military.
Fox said she is telling transgender active service members “not to lose hope and to be patient and maintain their professionalism.” But conservatives who have been pushing not only to bar transgender people from the armed forces but to return to a ban on gays and lesbians in the military say they hope Trump’s tweets lead to a mass exodus.
“The science doesn’t back up the notion that if you’re a man, you can suddenly decide to be a woman,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. “Everybody knows this policy of allowing transgenders in is not about military readiness, and we’re not going to stand for it.”
Next, he said, the permission for gays and lesbians to serve “needs to be readdressed.”
Fox’s experience to date speaks of both hope and caution for the transgender military experience.
On one hand, she was welcomed back to duty after openly transitioning to female in 2012. But on the other, that active duty only lasted about two weeks. Then her superiors suddenly put her on inactive status — not discharged, but in a holding pattern waiting to be called back — and have not answered her queries for explanation.
Army representatives didn’t offer any comment in response to Chronicle requests for details of Fox’s service.
“My sexuality was never an issue in the Army except for one thing,” Fox said. “I had one woman tell me after I transitioned, ‘Capt. Fox, I’m not comfortable using the restroom next to a trans person.’ I said, ‘I’m not comfortable using the restroom next to a bigot, but we’re both going to have to suck it up and use the bathrooms the way they should be used.’ And that was the end of it.”
Maj. McGrue, who outranks Fox, was joined by several of the captain’s subordinates in saying they didn’t find her transition to be a disqualifying issue.
“She was one of my squad leaders in the late 2000s, and she was very reliable, intelligent, trustworthy — everything you’d want to see in a CO (commanding officer),” said Master Sgt. Alan Shanahan, 47, of Sacramento. “Her transition did not make her less competent. They don’t take away your brains and your courage when you change your gender.”
In one of his tweets, Trump cited “the tremendous medical costs” of transgender troops, but trans advocates dismiss that. The medical costs of her transition, Fox said, were carried by a civilian medical insurance policy — bolstering her contention that the idea of going to all the trouble of enlisting, putting oneself in harm’s way for one’s country, purely to get medical costs of transition paid, doesn’t reflect reality.
Estimates of the number of transgender people in the military range from 6,000 to over 15,000, and the nonprofit Rand Corp. determined that the cost of gender-transition procedures is “relatively low.” The total cost of medical care for transgender troops would increase annual health care costs by $2.4 million to $8.4 million, Rand said — a pittance by Pentagon standards.
“Saying health care costs are a reason for banning transgender people from service is just ridiculous,” Fox said. “This is all purely based on discrimination. Twenty of our allied countries allow transgender soldiers — Britain, Argentina, Australia and more — but then Trump knows more than anybody, right?”
She exhaled derisively. “What do I know? I’m just a soldier,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was serve my country. I love the camaraderie of it, the esprit de corps. There are very few environments where you have this brotherhood, sisterhood, the ‘I’ve got your back mentality’ that exists in the military.”
In the time since being put on inactive status, Fox has built a full civilian life. She expanded on her military expertise as an IT engineer and manager — a “geeky computer nerd as a kid,” she has a bachelor’s of science degree in technology — and is now a manager at an engineering firm in Sacramento.
She married 45-year-old Olga Evans a year ago, and they live in a spacious suburban ranch home in Elk Grove. With six children, they stay busy “with the normal life you have with a big family.”
“I come home, take out the trash, play with the kids and our two dogs — do all those things,” Fox said at home while she, her wife and their 10-year-old son prepared to go out for dinner. “What do people think — that we have a dungeon or something?” she said, laughing. “No, we live a pretty quiet, nice life.”
What’s missing, though, is the active military life she loved, the steadiness of its fellowship and service to country. She’s got a uniform in the closet with a chestful of commendations — two meritorious service medals and two expeditionary medals among them — that she would quickly put on again if the way back were warmly welcoming, she said. But that’s not on the near horizon.
The Army has been grindingly bureaucratic about granting a medical review that could qualify her for disability payments for shoulder injuries unrelated to her transition, Fox said, and she is “contemplating resigning my commission.”
“At this point ... if I’m honest with myself, I’ve been more effective in creating change out of uniform than I could have in uniform,” said Fox, who has advocated for transgender rights at national conferences and gatherings of advocates and veterans over the past few years.
She stopped to look at a collage on a wall in the living room that shows the younger, rugged Fox with a motorcycle, sporting a beard, posing in camouflage. It’s a sharp contrast from the Fox of today. She is still a black belt in karate and can bench-press hundreds of pounds, but her body contours, extravagantly colorful tattoos of a fox and an angel on her shoulders, and red hair stylishly swept to the left proclaim womanhood.
“That feels like a million years ago, a different life,” she said, touching the collage.
After transitioning, Fox said, “suddenly I could feel more emotions, hear things and see things more clearly. I was so much more myself. I would describe it like, if you’re in a house and you can hear a radio way in the back somewhere, hear the music but you can’t quite make out the words.
“That was my emotions before. And once I started on estrogen, it was like somebody suddenly cranked it up. And rather than listening to this scratchy little thing in the back room, I’m now sitting in the middle of an orchestra and they’re playing this amazing thing — Beethoven’s Fifth. It was just so emotionally impacting.”
The transformation cost Fox some old friends, triggered a divorce and chilled relations with some family members. But her 23-year-old daughter, Mystic Wells, said she appreciated the difference right away. And still does.
“We talked when she was male, but she listens better as a woman,” Wells said. “She’s been in the military for so much of my life, I’d have to say she would be a better soldier because she is more herself.
“Anyone who’s living in a different skin can’t really be themselves.”
“Her transition did not make her less competent. They don’t take away your brains and your courage when you change your gender.” Master Sgt. Alan Shanahan, on Capt. Sage Fox, pictured before her transition