“She was the breadwinner of the family,” says Deborah Peace of her spouse, Army Captain Jennifer Peace, in the documentary Transmilitary. Service members like Capt. Peace will find it harder to provide for their families, however, if President Trump’s ban on transgender service members goes into effect. With the U.S. Supreme Court today refusing to delay the ban as it works its way through the courts, these parents and their three children—and many others like them—are at risk.
There are many reasons that a ban on transgender service members is patently ridiculous, not least of which is that all four service chiefs have asserted the presence of transgender troops has caused no harm. And while the ban will harm all transgender service members and impact unit readiness, its impact on the children of trans service members should not be overlooked. The U.S. military is the country’s largest employer of transgender people, the Transmilitary film asserts. The unemployment rate for trans people is three times higher than the national average, and over one quarter (27 percent) of trans people who held or applied for a job in the last year reported being fired, not hired, or denied a promotion due to their gender identity, according to Out & Equal. Trans service members who are kicked out of the military for no other reason than being trans may find it hard to find other employment—and when parents cannot find work, their children suffer, too.
The ban will also impact service members and their spouses who are not trans themselves, but are raising transgender or gender-creative children. Consider: Right now, the Department of Defense Child Development Virtual Lab School (VLS), an online professional development system for the 33,000 child- and youth-care professionals working with children of military families on bases around the world, is offering a course on “Creating Gender Safe Spaces,” which they launched last April. Sarah Lang, associate director of research and professional development at VLS, told me in an interview, “Part of the reason we developed this course was that people working in military childcare saw gender-expansive kids and reached out to us.” Modules in the program included “Understanding Development for Gender-Expansive and Transgender Children and Youth” and “Supporting Gender-Expansive Children Creates Safe Spaces for All; ” Clearly, then, enough service members have gender-expansive children that such a program was worth creating. Yet children are less likely to thrive in an environment that condemns their identities. The Trump administration is clearly willing to risk harm to those children and willing to risk losing qualified, committed service members if the parents choose to leave the military for the sake of their children.
The one thing about trans service members and parents supporting trans children, though: they don’t back down in the face of adversity. SPART*A, which advocates for actively serving transgender military members, veterans, and their families, said in a statement today, “We are disappointed in today’s ruling. However, as service members, we are trained to continue to do our jobs to the best of our ability. We are in every combat zone where troops are currently serving and we will stay the course as we serve our country with honor and dignity.” This fight isn’t over yet.
See Capt. Peace and her family at 1:17 in the trailer below, or read more about them in this 2017 profile at InStyle.