When Alivia Stehlik, an Army major, came out as a transgender woman in the spring of 2017, she said she was nervous about how her colleagues and other soldiers would react, especially because she’s a physical therapist.
“You have to physically touch most of your patients, and I had some nerves initially that folks would be uncomfortable,” she said. However, in the eight years since she came out, she said she’s been “overwhelmingly, pleasantly surprised at every single turn.”
“My bosses, the people that I’ve worked with, the people who’ve worked for me, my patients — nobody cares that I’m trans,” she added. “They just see me as Major Stehlik or Dr. Stehlik. That’s it.”
“Our service should not be contingent on who holds political power at the time.”
Army RESERVES Lt. Nicolas Talbott
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday barring trans people from serving openly and enlisting in the military. The policy argues that the medical and mental health care that some trans people need to treat gender dysphoria — the medical term for the distress caused by a misalignment between one’s gender identity and sex at birth — is inconsistent with the military’s high standards for “troop readiness, lethality and cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity and integrity.”
It’s unclear exactly how the order will affect the thousands of trans service members like Stehlik. Unlike a similar policy Trump issued in 2017 during his first term, this order says being trans fundamentally “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” the order states.
NBC News spoke to trans service members who could be affected by the order, and they all communicated a similar plan of action: They will continue doing their jobs, and they plan to fight the order.“I’m just resolved,” said Stehlik, who is stationed at Fort Campbell on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, when asked how she’s felt since Trump signed the order Monday. Stehlik was commissioned as an officer after graduating from West Point in 2008.
In the summer of 2018, just after she came out, Stehlik was deployed to treat soldiers in Afghanistan for nine months. She said that experience, combined with patches she wears on her uniform that show she went to specialized combat training schools, helps her patients trust her and make her good at her job.
“Trans folks are every bit as ready and every bit as deployable as anyone else,” she said. “We have to meet the same physical fitness standards, the same medical standards to be deployable. And even as we speak, there are trans service members deployed all around the world in harm’s way, having already met those standards to deploy.”
Six trans service members and two trans people who want to enlist filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Trump administration over the executive order.
Nicolas Talbott, a second lieutenant who has served in the Army Reserves for almost a year, said he joined the lawsuit because he fears the worst case scenario: that Trump’s executive order will force all trans service members out of the military completely.
“That’s going to have a huge impact, not only on myself personally — where I would be facing losing my job, losing my future career, losing all of the benefits that come with being a member of the military, which includes my health insurance — but this would be a huge impact on the United States military itself,” he said, adding that removing thousands of trans service members would hurt readiness overall.
Talbott was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the 2017 Trump ban, which prevented Talbott from enlisting then. He said he decided to join the suit filed Tuesday because “it’s the right thing to do.”“The ultimate goal is that we don’t want trans people or any other minority member of the military to have to face this every single time a new politician is elected into office,” he said. “Our service should not be contingent on who holds political power at the time.”
Like Talbott, this isn’t Navy Cmdr. Emily Shilling’s first go-round with a trans military ban. Shilling — who emphasized she was not speaking on behalf of the Navy or the Pentagon — came out in 2019, two days after the first Trump ban took effect. As a result of the ban, she told NBC News in 2021, she was forced to live a double life: She was living as a trans woman in her personal life, but at work she had to continue serving as her birth sex.
After Biden signed an executive order in 2021 allowing trans people to serve openly, she began to thrive, she said. She was promoted to commander, and she fought for and won her medical clearance to fly high-performance jets again, which she said set a precedent that allowed other trans service members to do the same.
Since Monday, she said, she’s felt like she’s on a mission. In addition to serving for nearly two decades, she is also the president of Sparta, an advocacy organization for trans members of the military and veterans. She said she would like to have conversations with officials at the Pentagon or the White House about what real trans Americans and service members look like. “We’ve served openly for nearly a decade, and we’ve been able to show that all of the original arguments for why transgender service should not be made open are all just false,” she said. “Our medical costs are minimal. Our time being down is minimal, and the effect on unit cohesion, morale, it’s nonexistent.”
Since last week, Trump has issued a number of executive orders targeting trans rights. Hours after his inauguration, he signed an order declaring that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and that “these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” resulting in the State Department freezing all passport applications requesting a sex-marker change.
