There will be parades and observances across America this Memorial Day commemorating U.S. service members who made the ultimate sacrifice. But not all service members will be honored for their acts of service, bravery, and patriotism.
Back in the day, LGBTQ+ service members who died while serving their country did so after facing a brutal choice: Either remain closeted about their sexual orientation or trans identity, or risk being “honorably” discharged under a classification known as “fraudulent enlistment” that remains in use today.
Prior to the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2011, discharges of LGBTQ+ service members were much more prevalent as a convenient means of exiting them from the military. It went something like this:
- Openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals were barred from military service until DADT’s repeal in 2011.
- If an individual was discovered to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, they could be discharged under the pretext of “fraudulent enlistment,” which implied that they had lied about their sexual orientation during the enlistment process, even if they hadn’t explicitly been asked about it, or if they’d simply concealed it.
- This practice essentially punished individuals for their sexual orientation, even if they were otherwise capable and dedicated service members.
With that now sorted, the focus has shifted to transgender service members, who over the last decade have endured a whiplash-inducing series of policy decisions under presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. With his second term, Donald Trump is making it clear that the military is yet another sphere of existence from which he would gladly eradicate transgender people.
Sadly, on May 6, the U.S. Supreme Court jumped on board and upheld Trump’s ban on transgender individuals enlisting in the military. The ban also allowed for the discharge of current transgender service members, and on May 15, the Pentagon began mass removal of its transgender troops.
In 2017, Trump’s first ban against transgender service members was delivered in his inimitable style of communicating to the American public the order in the form of a tweet:
After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender individuals in the military would entail. Thank you.
Ironically, Trump’s tweet came on the 69th anniversary of President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the U. S. military in 1948, and is coming from a Vietnam-era draft dodger who received five deferments, one of which was a medical diagnosis for bone spurs in his heels.
Trump’s ban primarily focuses on gender dysphoria and gender-affirming surgery as disqualifying conditions. Again, since the overturning of DADT in 2011, the military has allowed LGBTQ+ people to openly serve, even as military medical policies continue to discriminate against our transgender population.
A stark example: Evidence has shown that the military spends five times more on erectile dysfunction medications such as Viagra and Cialis than it does providing medical services for transgender troops. So the anti-trans bias has persisted nonetheless.
Trump’s binary view of gender, along with the perceived excessive cost of gender-reassignment surgery, have given rise to his notion that transgender healthcare is a “tremendous medical cost and disruption” to the military. Which is far from reality.
The “privacy” rationale is another argument that advocates for the banning of LGBTQ+ service members in combat. This argument states that all service members have the right to maintain at least partial control over the exposure of their bodies and intimate bodily functions. In other words, heterosexual men deserve the right to control who sees their naked bodies.
According to the privacy rationale argument, the “homosexual gaze” in same-sex nudity does more than disrupt unit cohesion. Its supposedly predatory nature expresses a sexual yearning and desires for unwilling subjects that not only violates the civil rights of heterosexuals, but also causes untoward psychological and emotional trauma.
While it is believed that the “homosexual gaze” would be the root cause of the disruption of unit cohesion and military capability of our service members, it is actually the macho male heterosexual culture embedded in this milieu. It is in this culture that both sexual harassment and rape of female and LGBTQ+ service members persists.
However, a 2002 study titled “A Modest Proposal: Privacy as a Flawed Rationale for the Exclusion of Gays and Lesbians from the U.S. Military” stated that banning LGBTQ+ service members would not preserve the privacy of its heterosexual service members, but instead it would undermine heterosexual privacy because of its systematic invasion to maintain it. It went on to say that in order to maintain heterosexual privacy, military inspectors would not only inquire about the sexual behaviors of their service members, but they would also inquire into the sexual behaviors of the spouses, partners, friends and relatives of their service members.
Military readiness is not a heterosexual cisgender calling. But the current administration’s claim that service members who are transgender endanger “unit cohesion” only maintains a policy of segregation and fosters a climate of transphobia.
It also maintains the military’s history of intolerance, as its argument is eerily reminiscent of a similar argument used when the military did not want to integrate its ranks racially — one based purely on naked racism.
Our transgender service members are prepared to defend this country with their lives. Transphobia, like racism and sexism, is militarily dangerous in our armed forces because it thwarts the necessary emotional bonding needed amongst service members in battle — and it underutilizes the needed human resources to make a democratic and robust military.
Memorial Day was founded by newly freed African Americans in South Carolina on May 1, 1865, just two weeks after the end of the Civil War. The holiday was to remember and honor the Union’s fallen soldiers. This Memorial Day, let’s remember our unsung transgender service members who have fallen in previous wars — and who are now falling to Trump’s current war on them.

Public theologian, syndicated columnist and radio host Rev. Irene Monroe is a founder and member emeritus of several national LBGTQ+ black and religious organizations and served as the National Religious Coordinator of the African American Roundtable at the Center for LGBTQ and Religion Studies in Religion at Pacific School of Religion. A graduate of Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary, she served as a pastor in New Jersey before studying for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and serving as the head teaching fellow of the Rev. Peter Gomes at Memorial Church. She has taught at Harvard, Andover Newton Theological Seminary, Episcopal Divinity School and the University of New Hampshire. Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s Research Library on the History of Women in America.