Chapter 5: Military Service and Veterans Benefits

• Author: Ally Windsor Howell
• Pages: 41-55

§5.1 Military Service

Transgender people are denied the ability to join the armed forces as a result

of various discriminatory policies. Not only is this unjust to individual

transgender people who wish to serve their country through military ser-

vice, it weakens our national defense by barring qualied people from duty.

The Department of Defense has declared that anyone with a “current

or history of psychosexual conditions, including but not limited to trans-

sexualism, exhibitionism, transvestism, voyeurism, and other paraphilias”

is unt for appointment, enlistment, or induction in the military services

of the United States.1

Members of the military services of the United States who are transgender

and who come out while in the service of the United States can be prosecuted

under the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s catchall of “all disorders and

neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces,

1. Department of Defense Directive 6130.3, “Medical Standards for Appointment, Enlist-

ment, and Induction,” (April 28, 2010), Enclosure 4, ¶ 28.r.

41

Military Service and

Veterans Benets

CHAPTER 5

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