U.S. Space Force Master Sgt. Sabrina Bruce didn’t know her life was about to change forever when she got into her car last month to head to the Pentagon and reenlist for another six years.
Bruce, 34, was excited to continue a career that had set her on a life-altering path. She’d enlisted in the Air Force in 2013 to escape her gender dysphoria, she said, referring to the medical term for the distress felt when one’s sex assigned at birth does not align with their gender. Instead, she found a culture that empowered her to come out as a transgender woman.
But just before Bruce began the driveto her reenlistment ceremony on May 6, she saw the news on her phone. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the Trump administration could execute plans to bar her and thousands of other transgender service members from the armed forces. Despite her intent to keep serving, Bruce realized her military career doing top-secret cybersecurity work would probably be measured in weeks or months - not years.
“I was in shock,” she said, adding: “I was intending to serve out my time and keep working and keep contributing to the nation.”
Bruce started transitioning in 2017, seven months after the military lifted its ban prohibiting transgender troops from serving openly. Nine years after that ban ended, the same military is now kicking them out.
Active-duty transgender service members faced a June 6 deadline to self-report their gender dysphoria, which President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said is incompatible with military service. Trump called transgender identity a “falsehood” that does not comport with the “humility and selflessness required of a service member.” Advocates for transgender service members say expelling cyber experts like Bruce and others in highly specialized fields - pilots, nuclear engineers, intelligence analysts - will harm the military as leaders try to reverse a years-long trend of recruiting shortfalls.
The Washington Post spoke with 10 transgender troops as some wrestled with the decision to self-report by the deadline, others scrambled to find new jobs and all grieved the sudden, unwanted loss of a life built around military service. Each of them repudiated the Pentagon calling their de facto firings as “voluntary” separations after requiring them to report their gender dysphoria for the express purpose of casting them out.
“This is not voluntary separation. This is separation under duress. This is coercion,” said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Emily Shilling, a fighter pilot and president of SPARTA Pride, a nonprofit that advocates for transgender troops. She, like the other service members interviewed, spoke in a personal capacity and not on behalf of the military.