opinion@dailylobo.com
Though Chelsea Manning’s coming out as transgender has only been news in the past few weeks, it seems to have opened a discussion of being transgender while in the military.
For starters, a transgender individual, or — more to the point — an individual “enjoying” the current American Psychiatric Association classification of gender dysphoria, is one whose biological sex doesn’t match up with the gender that they identify with. In Chelsea Manning’s case, she identifies as female despite having a male body.
The ability to cope with that dissonance depends on the person involved. Sometimes those with gender dysphoria manage to complete their terms of service, other times they don’t. This particular instance has brought to light some of the hardships that transgender individuals in the military go through.
Back in June a Navy SEAL, now named Kristen Beck, transitioned publicly, going as far as to write a book on the matter titled “Warrior Princess.” In July a $1.35 million grant was provided by now-openly transgender Jennifer Pritzker to study transgender involvement in the military. Currently in production, a show called “Transmilitary” will be released in spring next year, documenting the lives and stories of transgender people in the military.
For transgender soldiers, the ordeal is difficult at best. Every day they’re keeping up appearances, doing their best to fit in; every desire is kept secret, and the very act of expressing themselves is interpreted as forbidden. Even talking to counselors — who are supposed to keep their sessions private — isn’t a very good option.
That one was learned from experience.
I didn’t really understand what it was when I went into the military — after all, it was the late 90s, and the Internet wasn’t quite as easy-to-use as it is now. I didn’t even think it was possible until I discovered that, yes, there were people out there like me and, yes, they actually could go through with things.
I’d decided to keep it to myself until I got out, but when I reached a phase of my training in upstate New York after almost two years in, I had to tell someone something. I decided to speak with a counselor.
Mind you, at this point I don’t really blame him; he was worried less about me having gender problems and more about paranoid schizophrenia. He was a counselor, not a doctor, and so didn’t have any sort of metric other than, “Hey, this nuke’s losing his fuckin’ mind.” Considering that getting a medical discharge on psychological grounds is something of a trope in the nuclear field, this view wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.
Regardless, he told me to go tell my story to a real Navy doctor, which I did. I went to a Navy hospital for a full barrage of psych evaluations. They give you one when you go into the Navy, but frankly, nukes — people in the same field as I was — are really good at faking sanity and normalcy when, in reality, they’re in it because they want to be there and are perfectly willing to hide their more extraneous personality details to get into the program.
The results: narcissistic histrionic personality disorder with a helping of gender identity disorder. I was told that I likely wasn’t going to get discharged because of it, which was fine by me; I wanted help, not a discharge.
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The real trouble started when I got back to base after that. The brass assumed it was a stunt — that I wanted out of the Navy. It was common enough, back in those days, for people to talk about ‘waving the rainbow chit’ in order to get out — a euphemism for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its enforcement.
I got dragged down to the Commanding Officer’s office, where I was grilled about all the potential violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice I could have committed. His final question, asked in an angry tone, was, “You want to get out, don’t you?” He didn’t like my answer of wanting help.
However, as I wasn’t directly ordered not to tell anyone, and as I was operating under the assumption that I wasn’t going to get the boot, I told people what I liked. The rumor mill did the rest.
Shortly after that, I was summoned to the chief’s office — the guy actually in charge of me. There I was officially ordered to keep my mouth shut about it, not because I was breaking any rules, but because the people who shared a house with me — also in the military — were being harassed by other people in our class about me. I was told that if I didn’t stop I’d be charged with sexual harassment.
A few weeks later the word came from on high: I was to be discharged, two years into a six-year enlistment. The official discharge was COG: Honorable — convenience of government under honorable conditions. This was the general catch-all meaning, “You haven’t really done anything we can classify as wrong, but it’s better for us if we get rid of you anyway.”
Thankfully, I kept my benefits — I have access to VA services and I had, and used, my GI Bill. I consider myself fortunate despite it: unlike many of the peers I kept in touch with, I have a zero-percentage service-related disability. I was lucky.
Even so, the memories of the time I absolutely needed to deal with my own gender issues still hang with me. The dissonance of the gender dysphoria, without an outlet and with only the barest of coping mechanisms, caused all sorts of drama for me that had me in tears in private on an almost nightly basis.
Under that level of stress, unable to share it with anyone, people like Chelsea Manning make extremely stupid decisions — such as releasing quite a bit of classified material when, under more normal circumstances, such a course of action would never have occurred to her. As such, I find it hard to hold her entirely accountable for her actions, especially since the outlet of help for transgender individuals does not exist within the framework of the United States Military.
As a final note, LGBT participation in the Canadian military has been allowed since 1992, and even before 2000 transgender individuals were allowed to transition from one sex to the other.
Compare this with VA policies, in which it was finally made clear in 2011 that the VA could, in fact, offer services to veterans with gender dysphoria to assist with this problem.
