Service members, state leaders condemn ban

A 2012 CGA grad says she feels ‘deflated and disheartened’ by policy

A 2012 Coast Guard Academy graduate says she feels “deflated and disheartened” by President Donald Trump’s announcement via Twitter on Wednesday that the U.S. “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity” in the military.

“Being on the forefront of transgender service has already painted a mark on the select few of us who are serving. Now it feels like we are

being isolated and targeted more than ever,” Taylor Miller, 27, a transgender woman who serves in the Coast Guard as a marine inspector at Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach, wrote in a Facebook message to The Day.

Trump’s decision, she said, is indicative of how transgender people are treated by society as a whole.

“Bathrooms, work issues, legal rights, we are at the whim of other peoples’ fear-based policy and lawmaking,” she said.

Miller said she was due to speak on a panel later in the week about transgender individuals serving openly in the military, but it was canceled at the last minute due to Trump’s announcement.

“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” Trump tweeted.

An August 2016 study from the Rand Corp. estimated that between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender individuals serve on active duty in the U.S. military. No more than 140 active-duty service members a year likely would seek gender-transition hormone treatments, and even fewer would seek transition-related surgeries, the study found, resulting in between $2.4 million and $8.4 million in additional costs to the military’s yearly health care budget of more than $6 billion.

“Does that even constitute as a drop in the bucket?” said Katherine Bradford, 43, of Westerly.

Bradford, who served in the Navy in the late ’90s before transitioning to a woman, also dismissed Trump’s claim that transgender military service would be disruptive.

“That’s pretty much the same argument that’s used over and over. It was the same argument used for keeping gays, women and African-Americans out of the military,” Bradford said.

Toward the end of her Navy career, Bradford began telling people she was transgender.

“That ended up getting to the wrong people, and I was sent on military leave to be psychologically evaluated to be kicked out,” she said.

Still, she doesn’t regret the decision all these years later.

“Just being able to tell somebody was relieving,” she said. “You can’t live with those kinds of secrets.”

Trump’s announcement puts Connecticut in a unique place, said David McGuire, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, given the state established anti-discrimination protections for transgender service members in 2016.

The General Assembly voted nearly unanimously last year to update the Connecticut Military Department’s anti-discrimination laws to include religion, national origin, color, race, sex, gender identity or expression, and sexual orientation. The Military Department has oversight over the Connecticut Army National Guard, the Connecticut Air National Guard, and four companies of the state militia.

“We as a state recently sent a loud and clear message that this type of discrimination has no place in our state military,” McGuire said.

Hours after Trump’s tweets, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed an executive order reinforcing those nondiscrimination policies, and directing the state’s military department to “take no action that discriminates against service members in enlistment, promotion, or any other aspect of their service, on the basis of gender identity or expression, unless superseded by federal law, regulation or formal directive from the Department of Defense.”

Meanwhile, the defense department is in the midst of a six-month review of the policy, instituted under former President Barack Obama, to allow transgender Americans to serve in the military.

“Undercutting their work, and setting military policy by tweet, is reckless and disrespectful in the extreme,” U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, said in a statement.

U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who also put out statements condemning Trump’s announcement, emphasized qualifications.

“Anyone who wants to and is qualified to serve in our military should be able to do so, period,” Murphy said.

“Service members should be accepted on the basis of their ability to fight, train, and deploy without discrimination,” Blumenthal said.