#transgender-veterans

#transgender-veterans

A chief tenet of liberation is the freedom to define oneself while being accorded the rights and privileges established and guaranteed under law and social standing.

We Americans who will protect our flag should have a voice in where it is flown. Despite his unimpeachable record of heroism and patriotism, he was disparaged and mocked by his government and the corporate press.

Leyland Streiff, from the advocacy group Protect Girls Sports in Maine, said in a news release that the proposal is "inclusive, fair and safe" and that the ballot initiative will let voters decide through "the most democratic process possible," the Maine Morning Star reported.

Exploring Transgender Identity in South Carolina is a candid photographic and interview-based documentation of transgender life in South Carolina. This project offers a contemporary visual record of a community that exists largely outside of that narrative yet within its realities.

Republican-appointed judges reversed a ruling which blocked the ban, arguing with little evidence that gender-affirming care for trans adults was "dangerous," urging states not to fund what it spuriously described as "experimental procedures." It further claimed that trans people had become "disdainful of their sex" and claimed, again without evidence, that banning such provisions would "encourage citizens to appreciate their sex."

During the troop surge in Iraq, I learned to constantly scan for threats, how to distinguish the sharp crack of a gunshot pointed in my direction from one outgoing toward an enemy, and the myriad ways that explosives can be hidden on a roadside. I learned that hypervigilance can be the difference between life and death. What I didn't learn was how to turn it off. Now, I take three psychiatric medications every day, and I go to therapy every week.

A three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit overturned the lower court's ruling in its judgment on the case, arguing that the military has a "rational basis" for maintaining medical standards within the US army. The judges wrote in the ruling: "In this case, the military has articulated its need to have fit service members who can fulfill its military mission without complications from medical conditions that could compromise deployment functions, contribute to conflicts with foreign nations during deployment, and add costs over those generally necessary to maintain fit service members."

I did not have the experience that I hear many of my fellow community members did. I wasn't distraught about it, I wasn't timid about it. It wasn't gloom and doom for me because I was educated.

Professionally, the impact was absolute. For decades, I managed complex IT projects for global giants and, most recently, for Sanford Health. I am a builder of systems. But this year, I watched the federal government systematically dismantle the data structures that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people exist. When the administration stopped collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) data, it wasn't just a policy change; it was an erasure.

An estimated 724,000 Americans in this age group identify as transgender, the institute notes. Of these, 382,800, 53 percent, live in one of the 29 states that has enacted one or more laws banning access to gender-affirming care, participation in sports, use of bathrooms and other sex-separated facilities, or gender affirmation through pronoun use. Thirty-six percent - 262,700 - live in one of the 16 states that has enacted all four such restrictions.