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Air Force Under Trump Will Force Senior Trans Service Members to Retire Without Benefits
"Trans people have served this country with honor," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "They deserve dignity—not betrayal."
Aug 07, 2025
The families of transgender service members in the U.S. Air Force could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in denied retirement benefits due to a memo sent by the military branch this week.
As Reuters reported Thursday, an official at the Air Force informed transgender members with 15-18 years of military service that they would no be eligible for early retirement and would instead be forced to leave the Air Force without retirement benefits. Some transgender troops had previously been told they could retire early.
"After careful consideration of the individual applications, I am disapproving all Temporary Early Retirement Authority (TERA) exception to policy requests in Tabs 1 and 2 for members with 15-18 years of service," wrote Brian Scarlett, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs.
The memo means that many service members whose applications for early retirement had already been approved will have those approvals rescinded.
The decision follows the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in June that cleared the way for the U.S. Department of Defense to ban openly transgender Americans from serving in the military. President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year to impose such a ban.
"This is just betrayal of a direct commitment made to these service members."
Last week, in a court filing related to transgender service members' lawsuit against the administration, the Department of Justice denied that the plaintiffs are transgender, instead calling them "trans-identifying individuals."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said there would be "no more pronouns" and "no more dudes in dresses" permitted in the military at a press conference in May, and transgender service members have recently reported facing bigotry as they've departed the service.
Military.com reported last month that one 20-year transgender veteran of the Army was told by an instructor of a mandatory pre-retirement course that she and her classmates should cross out the words "pronoun, gender, diversity, and inclusion" from their workbooks.
The incident, she said, was "yet another reminder that it doesn't matter how much they say, 'Thank you for all the effort you put in and that your contributions are valuable'... because at the end of the day, they're having us manually go in and remove our own contributions from all the documentation."
The attempted "removal" of any record of transgender people's service now extends to their retirement benefits, according to the memo sent August 4, with service members who have served for close to two decades being given the option to quit or be forced out, with lump-sum payments instead of benefits.
Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights told Reuters the memo was "devastating."
"This is just betrayal of a direct commitment made to these service members," said Minter.
Reuters reported that the memo included a question-and-answer section, with one question reading, "How do I tell family we're not getting retirement benefits?"
The Air Force suggested long-serving transgender members tell their loved ones to "focus on the benefits you do retain," such as Department of Veterans Affairs benefits and "experience," and to seek counseling services.
"The Air Force told transgender service members to prepare for early retirement—then changed course and is now forcing them out with no benefits at all," said U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). "Trans people have served this country with honor. They deserve dignity—not betrayal. We must speak out and fight back, always."
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Is Medicare the Next Front in Trump’s War on Transgender People?
Transgender Americans—like all Americans—deserve Medicare coverage; nevertheless, their access to healthcare is at risk.
Jun 21, 2025
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget bill that promises a sweeping dismantling of critical public programs that millions of people rely on, including food stamps, Medicaid, and federal education loans. Buried inside the bill’s thousand-plus pages are provisions that specifically target healthcare for transgender people, including an outright ban on Medicaid coverage for transgender people of all ages.
These provisions are the latest escalation of the immense and overwhelming political attacks on transgender people in America over the last several years, which already include a ban on transgender military members, limitations on participation in sports for children, and openly spreading falsehoods about transgender youth and the healthcare they receive. Instead of focusing on the stigma, violence (which is disproportionately experienced by Black transgender women), and discrimination transgender people face every day that results in severe health disparities, higher rates of poverty, and premature deaths, legislators all over the country are enacting policies that perpetuate these very issues.
Between this congressional budget legislation and the Trump administration’s assaults on transgender youth, military service members, and veterans, concern is growing that this administration’s war on transgender people will soon include efforts to strip transgender Medicare beneficiaries of essential medical coverage. Medicare was created with the intention of ensuring that American adults have access to vital healthcare services as they age and can no longer work, and it has grown to become one of the most well-supported and positively viewed government programs of our time. Weaponizing the Medicare program to impose a political agenda in place of expert medical standards of care would be a deeply concerning development with serious ramifications not just for transgender Medicare beneficiaries but for the practice of medicine in America as a whole.
The issue policymakers should be tackling is not banning medical care for transgender youth or adults but rather ensuring that all people, including Medicare beneficiaries, can access the medical care they need.
According to expert standards of care in transgender health, medical care for transgender people is carefully tailored to align with the recommendations of healthcare providers and each person’s individual needs. To examine the frequency and trends of one particular form of care—gender-affirming surgical procedures—for Medicare beneficiaries, my team and I recently published a study using Medicare claims data. While these surgical procedures are not part of the routine standard of care for transgender youth, they are a medically necessary and important part of care for many transgender adults.
We found that gender-affirming surgeries are exceptionally rare in the Medicare program and that transgender Medicare enrollees in the South are less likely to receive surgery compared to those in the Northeast with similar characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity, age). These findings stem from discriminatory policies that result in inaccessibility. Medicare beneficiaries face barriers to receiving gender-affirming surgeries because of a lack of access to surgeons, inconsistent and unclear coverage policies, coverage denials, and high out-of-pocket costs. These barriers represent structural forms of stigma that may be particularly elevated for racial and ethnic minoritized populations due to racism. Thus, the issue policymakers should be tackling is not banning medical care for transgender youth or adults but rather ensuring that all people, including Medicare beneficiaries, can access the medical care they need.
Transgender people are under political, social, and legal attack with such intensity that it is easy to lose sight of who—and how many people—are actually directly impacted. To put our study’s findings into context: In 2019, 37.9 million people received their Medicare benefits through Traditional Medicare (our study focused on those with Traditional Medicare and excluded those with private plans, known as Medicare Advantage). Of these nearly 38 million people, we were able to identify about 35,000 transgender adults, which is 0.09% of the Traditional Medicare population. Of this small number of Medicare beneficiaries who are transgender, 1.4% received a gender-affirming surgery in 2019. In other words, less than one one-hundredth of a percent—or 0.001%—of this Medicare population was transgender and received gender-affirming surgery.
Not only is the number of transgender Medicare beneficiaries small and the number who received gender-affirming surgeries much smaller, we also observed a decrease in the number of transgender Medicare beneficiaries who received gender-affirming surgeries over time. This downward trend is unique to the Medicare program, further highlighting access issues for transgender people with Medicare coverage.
To put an even finer point on it: We included a cisgender, or non-transgender, cohort in our study because the same surgeries transgender people need are also often received by cisgender people (e.g., hysterectomies). Overall, each year, about 0.5% of our cisgender cohort underwent procedures that could be considered gender-affirming for transgender people. Our team wanted to see if transgender Medicare beneficiaries face any disadvantages in receiving needed surgical care compared to cisgender beneficiaries. We found that, unlike transgender people, there were no significant differences in the receipt of surgery based on where cisgender people lived. In other words, a cisgender person residing in New York was just as likely to receive a surgery they need as another cisgender person in Texas with similar characteristics. Our findings indicate that transgender adults with Medicare may be uniquely unable to access needed care both because of who they are and where they live.
It is timely and crucial to highlight the facts about gender-affirming care and the Medicare program: Our study suggests that transgender Medicare beneficiaries already face unique access issues when seeking medically necessary care. Just like all Medicare beneficiaries, transgender people are deserving of Medicare coverage. Just like everyone else, transgender people should have the ability to access the care that they need from providers they trust without politically motivated, anti-science barriers imposed by the federal government. Yet transgender people continue to be singled out in political attacks that deny them access to care and services that remain accessible to non-transgender people. This issue has already made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court—which could have dire consequences for the health of transgender people of all ages.
The amount of effort, time, and resources being used to target (and scapegoat) such a marginalized group—and to limit their ability to access medically necessary care, no less—is harmful, imbalanced, and malicious. It is also anti-science. Gender-affirming care is cost-effective, associated with improved mental health outcomes, and considered medically necessary by every major medical organization in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Association. Polling shows most Americans do not want policymakers to focus on the transgender community. With severe federal budget cuts looming, policymakers should, instead, do something useful and positive: They should act to ensure that all people, including transgender people, can get the healthcare they need.
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'Incomprehensible': Trump Admin To Shut Down LGBTQ+ Suicide Hotline
"This is devastating, to say the least," said one critic of the White House decision to dismantle a program that has served nearly 1.3 million young people in recent years. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics."
Jun 19, 2025
In the midst of Pride Month, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced that it will shut down the national suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.
Since 2022, the National Suicide Hotline, accessible by dialing 988, allowed users to "press 3" to speak with counselors trained to support LGBTQ+ youth.
According to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization that was contracted to run the hotline, LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers and 41% of them seriously considered suicide in the past year. Now, the service that is meant to help them will be shut down on July 17.
A statement released Tuesday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that the hotline "will no longer silo LGB+ youth services," using a hateful and discriminatory abbreviation that excludes transgender and queer individuals, which has become standard for the Trump administration. SAMHSA insisted that it would continue "serving all help seekers, including those" who used the LGBTQ+ hotline.
However, as Adrian Shanker, a senior advisor to the Biden administration on issues related to gender and sexual identity, told Mother Jones, the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention service was created to deal with the exceptionally high influx of calls from people in that community and designed to meet their specific needs. According to SAMHSA data, the hotline has served nearly 1.3 million callers since its creation in 2022.
"This is not about politics. It's not about the political divide on transgender medicine or trans people in the military, or any of the other hot-button political topics," Shanker said. "This is about suicide prevention and crisis intervention for people living at a higher rate of suicide risk."
The legislation that added special counseling for high-risk populations, including LGBTQ+ youth, was signed by President Trump in 2020. But since its passage, far-right attacks on sexual and gender minorities have become a core part of the Republican platform and the second Trump administration.
Since taking office, the administration has introduced measures that seek to erase transgender people from public life. These have included barring people from identifying as their preferred gender on federal documents, stripping the funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, and erasing the history of transgender Americans from government websites. They have described these efforts as part of a crusade to eliminate "radical gender ideology."
In their efforts to shut down the suicide prevention program, members of the administration have invoked age-old stereotypes accusing gay and trans people of abusing vulnerable youth.
Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, told NBC News last week that it defended efforts to defund the suicide hotline because "children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by 'counselors' without consent or knowledge of their parents." Another unnamed senior administration official described the organizations who provided this mental health care to vulnerable youth as "radical grooming contractors."
Ironically, rising bigotry has been one of the driving forces of the LGBTQ+ suicide epidemic. A study published by Nature Human Behavior and the Trevor Project last year found that in states that enacted anti-trans laws, the rate of suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary teenagers increased from 7% to 72%.
"This is devastating, to say the least," Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a Wednesday statement about the closure of the suicide hotline. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible."
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