Reversal of Transgender Military Ban Is an Important Moment

This month, Pres. Biden repealed a Trump-era ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military. “It is my conviction as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces that gender identity should not be a bar to military service,” read a portion of the executive order.

William Robert is the director of LGBTQ Studies and an associate professor of religion at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. He provides a written perspective about how the ban was basic discrimination, and what this move by President Biden reaffirms for all Americans, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.

Prof. Robert says:

“Arguments against allowing transgender persons to serve in the military aren’t new. They’re straight out of discrimination 101. Anti-progressives have dusted them off and trotted them out many times, to try to ban men of color, then women, then LGB persons from military service.

“It’s reassuring to see that, once again, these arguments have failed. Because these arguments are really about who gets to count as a citizen, and whose lives count enough to be lost in military service. There probably hasn’t been, in the last few decades, a more important moment to reaffirm that American citizenship is a capacious category, one more interested in welcoming folks in than in keeping folks out.”

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