Today, Explained - Serving your country while trans

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Sam Rodriguez is on active duty in the US Navy. They are also trans. Now, the Trump administration wants to remove them from the US military. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Photo courtesy of Navy Petty Officer Sam Rodriguez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump addressed the Congress last night. You heard that. Uganda. But let's check in on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He tweeted from the car on his way to the address. It is an honor to be going. He tweeted again a thank you after Trump mentioned him. Our service members won't be activists and ideologues. They will be fighters and warriors. They will fight for our country.

And Pete, congratulations. Then he went on Fox News this AM to discuss enlistment numbers. From the Marine Corps to the Army to the Air Force to the Navy, we've seen record numbers across the country of Americans saying, I want to serve under the commander-in-chief, President Trump. Neither Hexeth nor the president mentioned their plan to force transgender service members out of the military. Today, unexplained, we're going to do that. There are so many things that I would not have today if it wasn't for joining the military.

I would regret not fighting to stay. I've got this condition where I don't feel pain. You're a superhero. If this is how intense Nova Kane sounds, imagine how it looks. Is there more? Yeah, big time. Nova Kane, only in theaters March 14th. On this week's episode of Network and Chill, I'm chatting with internet sensation and everyone's favorite Philly influencer, Bran Flakes. He's a social media maverick and content creator turning viral moments into cold hard cash. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on the

Your Rich BFF YouTube channel. This is Today Explained. Noelle King here with Haley Britsky. Haley is CNN's Pentagon reporter and producer and she's been following the DOD's plan to separate transgender service members from the military. Haley, what does this new Pentagon policy say exactly? Individuals who have a diagnosis or history of gender dysphoria are no longer eligible to serve. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there

are only two genders, male and female. All service members will identify as only either male or female, which the policy says is unchangeable during a person's life, and it says their pronouns must reflect that. And it also disqualifies the use of DOD funds for medical procedures and things like hormone therapy and other procedures related to gender transition and things like that. It lays out exceptions for individuals currently serving in the military who will be separated under this policy. You know, it'll be a case-by-case basis of if a service member is kept in the military basis of if a service member is kept in the military despite having a history or a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, if there is a quote government interest in keeping them in uniform because they directly support what they say is war fighting capabilities.

It also says that they, you know, there are other exceptions and if they have 36 months of what they say stability in their sex and can demonstrate they've never attempted to transition and that they can adhere to the standards laid out in the military. So they lay out a few exceptions for people. It's kind of unclear how many people will fall into that category and especially when we talk about war fighting capabilities. Well, what does that actually mean? How will commanders view that or define that within this process? All of that is still kind of in a gray area at this point as we haven't really started separating people quite yet. Do we know how many people this will affect?

We heard last week, a senior defense official told reporters that there were a little over 4,000 troops who'd been diagnosed with gender dysphoria across all three components. So that's active duty military National Guard and the reserve You know important to note that not all transgender people have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria So it's kind of unclear how many people at the end of the day. This is really going to impact between 2014 and 2025 roughly a thousand

individuals in the military received gender affirming surgery. So that's sort of what we're waiting to see is, okay, in practice, how many people will be impacted by this and ultimately how many would be eligible for waivers or even want to seek a waiver. President Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, have they come out and said why they think people who are trans are unfit to serve their country? So a lot of times what we hear is that this is tied to their deployability. Being transgendered in the military

causes complications and differences. Meaning that if an individual is undergoing a medical procedure, they may be considered non-deployable for so much time. That also is the case for pregnancy or for specific injuries or bone breaks, things like that. A non-deployable status is not specifically tied to gender dysphoria or transgender individuals. So that's oftentimes one of the reasonings that they use. specifically tied to gender dysphoria or transgender individuals.

So that's oftentimes one of the reasonings that they use. But what we see in the executive order and then in the Pentagon policy that resulted from it is they kind of go a step further than just focusing on the medical readiness of these individuals. They kind of hone in on their value system and morals by saying that individuals who have gender dysphoria

or have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, that they are inconsistent with the honesty, humility and integrity that's required in the military. In search of a non-traditional constituency, they offended their core constituency. So there aren't enough lesbians in San Francisco to man the 82nd Airborne. And in trying to cater to that,

they lost the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma. The traditional dudes who did it because they wanted, they loved their country or they wanted the adventure or they wanted to try tough things or. It goes a step further than just saying, medically you may not be able to serve, physically you may not be able to serve. It's saying that you do not align with our values

of humility and integrity and honesty. That is sort of has been made policy by existing in the executive order and within this new policy memo from the Pentagon, but we haven't seen a lot of explanation of that point just yet. So the military is using the word separation, which is the word that it generally uses in cases like this, but it means people are losing their jobs. For people who are losing their jobs and didn't expect to lose their jobs, what are they receiving?

What the memo says is that if you elect to voluntarily separate within 30 days of that memo, you will get two times the separation pay as if you wait to be involuntarily separated. And separation pay is, you know, it's kind of a complicated calculus, but it's essentially boils down to, it's calculated on how long you've served in the military

and what you were getting paid at the time of your separation. And so the Pentagon is saying, hey, if you are a transgender individual or an individual who's been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, if you know that you were going to be involuntarily separated under this policy, you can go ahead and start the process yourself and by voluntarily separating, you'll get

paid twice as much. And so we don't have a lot of answers as to, you know, when, how that will be calculated or what that will really look like in practice, other than it's clearly an incentive hoping to get individuals to start the process sooner rather than later of separating themselves from service. We're assuming there will be legal challenges and we're in an environment where it's hard to tell what a legal challenge might lead to. But during President Trump's first term, as I recall, there were legal challenges to some

of what he tried in the Pentagon. The ACLU of Maryland filed a lawsuit challenging the president's ban on transgender individuals in the military. They're asking for a preliminary injunction on the ban that was signed by President Trump over the summer after first announcing his intentions on Twitter. Can you take us back and tell us as we start to see lawsuits and look for lawsuits what we might be looking at here? Yeah, so there was legal challenging in 2017 to the ban that he issued then.

I think it was at least four different lawsuits who were saying that this was a form of sex discrimination. The Supreme Court let that ban take effect just a couple of years later in 2019. The justices did not rule on the merits of a lawsuit challenging the ban, but will allow it to move forward while lower courts work through it. So it did move forward in that sense. And then President Biden, when he took office, reversed it.

And what I'm doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform and essentially restoring the situation you just before with transgender personnel as qualified in every other way can serve the government in the United States military. It's not so about the song. This is essentially a reversal of a reversal of the original policy saying that this is going to move forward. So yeah, it's unclear where the legal status or where legally this memo or this policy can move forward given the new lawsuits against it.

It's, we may see it end up back in higher court. It's kind of unclear at this point where it's going to go, but it's certainly something that is playing out in the courts. And just as recently as this weekend, we saw more filings in which the Defense Department was given a Saturday deadline to answer some questions from the courts, which included things like,

how much money has the department spent on some of these procedures, and how many people are included under this definition. Many of the questions they could not answer in the filings saying that essentially they didn't have enough time to figure this out, that it would have taken a few more weeks than they were allowed. But it's still very actively being debated in court and certainly something that we're

going to be continuing to follow. When do these separations have to be done by? What's the deadline here? For those who are voluntarily separating, as I said, that's they have 30 days to elect to voluntarily separate. Outside of that, the policy says that the service secretary, so secretary of the army of the Navy, Air Force, et cetera,

that they need to begin establishing procedures to identify those troops within 30 days for separation and then begin separating them 30 days after that. So it sounds like roughly 60 days before separations will officially begin within the military services. within the military services. That was Haley Britsky. She covers the Pentagon for CNN. Coming up, so you've been serving honorably and now you're out. We're going to hear what that's like. I feel a lot of anger. I feel, and not just anger because of a ban, I feel a lot of anger

and disappointment at large. Just, you know, trans and non-binary people have become public enemy number one. And once you start taking away the rights of trans and non-binary people, then the rest of the chips begin to fall. Support for Today Explained comes from Shopify. I think you might have to be a little bit crazy to start your own business they say or maybe just Illusional because the amount of work required to start and grow your own company is so wild No one in their right mind would take it on

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So this is kind of a universal experience. Your job changes a policy that affects you and it is terrible because change is very hard. For most of us, this doesn't happen all that often. But Navy Petty Officer Sam Rodriguez's military service has been upended again and again and again by policy changes. Sam joins the Navy in 2015. In 2016, a ban on transgender service members was lifted. Then Donald Trump was elected, and in 2017, Trump banned transgender service members. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected.

Biden reversed the ban, and then in 2024, President Trump was elected, and his DOD is now firing trans service members. Yes. Constant changing of the policies, it definitely creates distractions and also an instability, you know, not just for me, but for our leadership too and for the rest of the military, right? Because the yo-yoing of policy can make it challenging for people to know what is the most up-to-date. And so when we need to be concentrating on training and deployment, we're often left just like navigating this unnecessary uncertainty. And

that's what's really, you know, that's what's weakening our forced cohesion and readiness. It's not the fact that I'm in uniform, because if I wasn't meeting the standards, I would have already lost my job. People get separated from the military for all sorts of reasons all the time. I had actually wanted to join since high school, but I also didn't want to join during Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I was in a family that wasn't very supportive of me as a young queer person, and so then thinking of joining an institution that wasn't going to be supportive didn't seem ideal,

even though being a part of something bigger than me did. When I ultimately decided to enlist in 2015, it was because I still very much felt this desire to join the military and I wanted to be a mental health provider. I wanted to serve the people within the military. You know, people that join the military, they take an oath to uphold the Constitution and to protect the American people. And we also have to take care of them if we're expecting them to then fight for our rights. And so for me, it was serving my country through the service that I give back to the other service members as a mental health provider.

Being in the military, it's a multi-layered system with multi-layers of stress, especially if you're in an operational command and you have a family, so your obligation and work tempo is going to be high. And then you also have to go home and take care of your family and you need to be able to find time to take care of yourself. And so, I would argue that we still don't have enough mental health care providers in the military and that we need

to do a better job at taking care of the whole service member. Again, if we're going to continue to ask them to do these very hard things and give up time with their family and essentially, you know, put their life on the line, then we also have to make sure that we're taking care of them. My place in supporting the mission is supporting the people. So identify as transmasculine, non-binary.

So my gender is non-binary. I don't align with being a woman or with a man. I identify as just being a person. And the transmasculine simply just correlates to I am masculine presenting and I have, or I take testosterone. Most outsiders, if they don't know me, they're just going to assume I'm some cis white dude,

especially if you see me with my wife and kids. When I first started receiving gender affirming care, I was working at a command that was very supportive of me, and I had colleagues that were very supportive of me. I had around almost 18 months on hormones. I did switch commands. So I returned back to C, which in the Navy, that means that you return back to a deployable command or a command that will deploy.

And it was a very small command. And I was the first person, the first trans person that any of the people that worked there had ever interacted with or worked with. So there was definitely a lot of growing pains during that three and a half years. And honestly, there were times where I felt like many of my colleagues never respected my identity. They likely still just saw me as like a butch lesbian.

But after I left that command and I got to the command that I'm at now, up until recently, no one knew any differently. I showed up there and have been assumed male. And unless I feel comfortable or safe to tell someone, they don't know any different. They don't know that I'm trans. How is this new policy gonna affect you?

What does it mean for your career? I was selected for a clinical fellowship that I'm supposed to start this year. So that was to be a two year intensive clinical fellowship, to be a clinical social worker within the Navy. So if I were to be separated based on my identity alone, then I am left trying to figure out where I'm going to work next,

where my family's going to live, where we're going to get insurance. I have a wife, I have two kids, I have bills to pay. So it definitely, it's going, it's already creating a lot of disorientation of what am I gonna do next? Where am I gonna go? Where are we going to live? We can't afford to live in our housing without my salary and housing stipend. So essentially we will be homeless unless we're able to find something

that will support us on the one income. You know, I still have to find employment. And so having, looking for employment and where that's going to be, we know that we won't stay here in San Diego. And so having looking for employment and where that's going to be, we know that we won't stay here in San Diego. And so then identifying a place to relocate where hopefully we have a support network there.

The Department of Defense is offering some terms for people who voluntarily leave the military in 30 days. We learned that in the first half of the show. Would you ever volunteer to go? No, I would not. Why not? Because I want to stay, because I want to continue to do my job. I want to finish my 20 years.

I don't want to voluntarily say, oh, yeah, I'll take this ticket out of here, because you're essentially saying that my nine years of honorable service means nothing, and I'm not going to let you have that. I'm hearing you say you wanted to and you plan to stay in the military until retirement. Yes. That was the goal. The Department of Defense has said that being trans is contrary to the, and here I'm going to quote Sam, high standards for service member readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility,

uniformity and integrity. You've been in the service since 2015. You know what this is driving at here. Let me ask you how you respond to that statement. That statement makes me feel really mad, sad, everything, right? Because our nation is built on the values of freedom and service and sacrifice. My core values in the Navy are honor, courage and commitment. My core values in the Navy are honor, courage, and commitment. And I have given nine years of honorable service with honor, courage, and commitment and integrity. I've never once received a counseling. I've never been to a disciplinary board.

I have various personal awards and awards that I received at units to include the ranks and the positions that I've held. And so for you to just say that I don't, I am not adhering to all of those standards is an actual betrayal of every principle that I've sworn to defend, because I do show up and I do continue to fight for the American people and also for the right to to remain in service And so it it just

I don't believe that my service is not worthy or honorable but for it to be for that to be the narrative that they're spinning that to be the narrative that they're spinning when all of us have served honorably. Because if we weren't, if we weren't doing all of those things already, if we weren't meeting the standards, we would have already lost our job. Again, most people are, people leave service all the time for all sorts of reasons. And if we weren't meeting the standards, they would have already given us our walking papers, not because we're transgender or non-binary, but because we weren't meeting the standards, they would have already given us our walking papers, not because we're transgender or non-binary, but because we weren't meeting the standards to uphold the missions within the military.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Listener, did you know that every branch of the U.S. military has a creed? It must be memorized and sometimes quickly recalled. Petty Officer Second Class Sam Rodriguez can recite it without a hitch. I am a United States sailor. I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, and I will obey the orders of those appointed over me. I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy

and those who have gone before me to defend freedom and democracy around the world. I proudly serve my country's Navy combat team with honor, courage, and commitment. I am committed to excellence and the fair treatment of all. Victoria Chamberlain produced today's show, Amina El-Sadi edited, Patrick Boyd and André Kristen's daughter engineered, and Laura Bullard checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. Alright Sean, you can do this promo talking about all the great Vox Media podcasts that

are going to be on stage live at South by Southwest this March. You just need a big idea to get people's attention to help them, you know, keep them from hitting the skip button. I don't know. I'm going to throw it out to the group chat. Kara, do you have any ideas? In these challenging times, we're a group of mighty hosts who have banded together to fight disinformation by speaking truth to power, like the Avengers, but with more spandex.

What do you think, Scott? I'm more of an X-Man fan myself. Call me professor. Can I read minds? I can't really read minds, but I can empathize with anyone having a midlife crisis, which is essentially any tech leader. Minds are important, Scott, but we're more than that. I think that you can't really separate minds from feelings. And we need to talk about our emotions

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