Transgender troops want to keep serving. Trump is forcing them out.

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.

About 4,200 service members had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria as of Dec. 9, a senior defense official said in May on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Trump administration. That number - about 0.21 percent of the military’s total force - includes active-duty, reserve and National Guard personnel. SPARTA Pride said studies have put the number of transgender service members as high as about 15,000.

Roughly 1,000 trans troops had self-reported as of May 8, Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. Department officials said Friday they did not have an updated number of active-duty troops who self-reported by the June 6 deadline.

The Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and Space Force declined to release numbers for their individual branches. The Navy said 371 sailors self-reported by the deadline.

Most Americans support letting transgender troops serve openly, according to a January Gallup poll. But that support - 58 percent - has dwindled in recent years, from 71 percent in 2019 and 66 percent in 2021, the poll showed.

The Trump administration’s ban is the latest swing in a nearly decade-long battle between presidential administrations that have alternated political parties every four years since 2013. For decades, transgender people were barred from serving, until 2016 when the Obama administration repealed the ban, saying that doing so would give the military access to the most highly qualified recruits.

Trump tried to ban transgender troops during his first term, and while the Defense Department tightened restrictions affecting recruits, it also grandfathered in about 900 people who were already serving. President Joe Biden reversed those restrictions in 2021, but as Trump campaigned last year to return to office, he promised to crack down on what he called “transgender insanity” if elected, including reimposing the ban.

Bruce said she lost sleep over Trump winning the November election. But she hoped his vow to bring back the ban was mere bluster or that trans troops who were already serving would again be grandfathered in.

Those hopes were dashed as Trump signed several executive actions targeting transgender people. They included one he issued Jan. 27 taking aim at trans troops, accusing them of living in conflict “with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Julia Becraft, 34, cried when she heard those words by her commander in chief. She has deployed to Afghanistan three times during her 14-year career, which was mostly spent in the infantry. She’s fought the Taliban and Islamic State. She’s seen combat, lost soldiers from her company, and fought back enemy fighters to try to rescue her comrades or recover their bodies.

Becraft, who’d planned to serve at least 20 years, said the trauma of being stripped of her career and community sent her into a tailspin. On Feb. 26, the day the Defense Department unveiled its new policy, she went to the emergency room, scared she might harm herself. Doctors released her to her commanding officer’s adviser on condition that she give up her personal firearms, she said. The adviser held her in the company’s headquarters overnight, she added, and the next morning, her commanding officer ordered her to report to a behavioral health appointment that day.

She chose to participate in a 28-day inpatient therapy program for depression, she said. Including herself, four of the 20 patients in the Defense Department-sponsored program were trans service members coping with the same feelings of despair, Becraft said.

A day after Trump issued his executive order, a group of transgender troops sued Hegseth and other top military officials in a lawsuit that has grown to include 32 plaintiffs, including Bruce. They scored quick legal victories in lower federal courts, securing an injunction barring the administration from kicking them out. But on May 6, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to let the Defense Department implement its policy while the case plays out in court.

All of the trans service members who spoke with The Post said forcing them out is a waste of taxpayer dollars spent to educate and train them. Shilling, the lead plaintiff in a second lawsuit fighting the ban, gave herself as an example.

Now 42, she joined the Navy in 2005 and trained as a fighter pilot. From 2009 to 2012, she flew EA-6B Prowlers in 60 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, then became a test pilot in 2015to help improve the Navy’s aviation technology. She has spent more than 1,700 hours in a cockpit during her 20-year career, she said.

At her most recent assignment, she managed 300 people and an annual budget of about $100 million tasked with creating a mission control system for launching drones from aircraft carriers - a program heralded as a part of the “air wing of the future.”

Shilling self-reported in March, afraid that if she didn’t, officials would end her career just short of the 20 years needed to get retirement benefits, and has been on administrative leave since then. She said she already has a private sector job lined up for post-military life.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jo Ellis, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard, said she will take a different path. Members of the Guard and reserve have until July 7 to self-report. She plans to let that deadline pass and fight for her career as long as she can.

Part of what’s driving her to do so, she said, was an experience earlier this year when a right-wing influencer falsely identified her as a pilot flying the Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed midair with an American Airlines passenger jet near Reagan National Airport, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. The influencer held her up as Exhibit A for the harm inflicted on the military by diversity, equality and inclusion policies.

Ellis, 35, realizes active-duty service members’ livelihoods - pay, health insurance, retirement and other benefits - are on the line. As a Guard member with a full-time job as an information technology engineer at a Fortune 500 company, Ellis said she has more freedom to challenge the ban.

“I want to go out on my feet fighting,” she said. “I desperately want to serve.”

The 10 service members The Post talked to, who have served a combined 133 years in uniform, said the same - all of them adding that expelling hundreds or even thousands of qualified troops could harm military readiness.

Space Force Col. Bree Fram, an astronautical engineer and one of the military’s highest-ranking openly transgender service members, worked at the Pentagon to identify and combat future threats to the country’ssatellites. Fram, 46, wanted to serve “many more years” but will retire instead.

U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Ryan Goodell, a 32-year-old cryptologic technician who analyzed intelligence signals while deployed in the Middle East and Mediterranean from 2018 to 2019, had hoped to serve at least another six years. But faced with the risk of having to pay back a nearly $20,000 bonus he got for reenlisting in December, he chose to self-report and end his 14-year career.

And U.S. Air Force Maj. Jason Vero, 36, a UH-1N Huey helicopter pilot who has provided aerial security over hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles in Wyoming and trained to evacuate top leaders out of the D.C. area if disaster strikes, said he self-reported under duress, fearing the military would try to claw back nearly $200,000 in pilot retention bonuses it paid him in recent years.

By Friday, all three had been placed on leave or told they would be soon.

“These are people that our country has invested a lot of money in to make them good combat tools,” Shilling said, “and it’s just a shame to waste them.”

Goodell said he’d consider returning to the Navy should the courts determine the latest ban to be unconstitutional - but only if he’s allowed to serve openly.

“If they get me, they’re going to get all of me, not just a piece of who I am,” he said. “Being forced back into the metaphorical closet in order to serve - that’s not a Department of Defense I’d want to be a part of.”

Bruce, the Space Force master sergeant, was so heartbroken over the Supreme Court’s decision that she canceled her May 6 reenlistment ceremony that she’d planned at the Pentagon. Instead, she went back into her office at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, making sure to bring the American flag her former base commander used to first enlist her into the Space Force in 2021 and later gifted to her. She had an officer conduct the oath of enlistment without fanfare.

“It was through tears … because I didn’t know what the future would hold,” she said.

Four days before the June 6 deadline, Bruce was still wrestling with the decision to self-report but said she was inclined to fight.

“I don’t give up. That’s not what we’re trained to do,” she said. “Even if the odds are seemingly insurmountable, we’re going to fight to the end. That’s what it means to serve.”

But Bruce feared the consequences of fighting could be devastating. She might be kicked out anyway - in a way that would hurt her ability to get a civilian job. If allowed to stay, she might be forced use men’s bathrooms, cut her hair and uphold male standards for grooming and dress, which she said would strip away important “symbols of my own liberation, my own identity.”

Leading up to June 6, Bruce hit the crossroads. She thought of her spouse, who is using her GI Bill benefits to go to law school and her health coverage to treat a chronic illness. She said she worried that not self-reporting could lead to something less than an honorable discharge.

So she started the online process that would lead to her own dismissal. But she attached a three-page memo outlining the reasons she believed she was being coerced into leaving. She ended it with an implicit rebuttal to her commander in chief’s argument that she was not fit for service because she lacked discipline, humility and honor.

“I remain proud of my service,” she wrote, “and committed to the values of character, courage, commitment and connection.”

Bruce thought about coming out eight years earlier, knowing that if transgender people were going to have a future in the military, she and others would have to prove it by example with hard work and sacrifice. She thought about she’d done just that, exceeding all expectations as she was promoted again and again. She thought about her goals of earning yet another promotion this year and mentoring younger Space Force Guardians as they started their careers.

Sitting at her computer, Bruce couldn’t shake the feeling she was giving up on a future she spent nearly a decade fighting for, that she was letting down young trans people, who without trailblazers, might one day be too scared to come out of the closet.

Her eyes welled up. Her throat tightened.

Then, she clicked send.