This week, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s injunction preventing the Trump administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from discharging any member of any branch of the U.S. military who is transgender and from denying enlistment opportunities for any trans person interested in joining the service.
By lifting that injunction, SCOTUS is allowing the Trump administration to immediately begin discharging transgender service members, regardless of their rank or their service record and commendations. This is despite the fact that there are several legal challenges currently working their way through the courts. In fact, in Shilling v. U.S., the case in which the injunction was ordered, lower courts have already determined that the ban is unconstitutional.
In essence, the Supreme Court is allowing an “executive order” with the ridiculously misleading title of “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” to significantly damage the excellence and readiness of the U.S. military while destroying the careers of transgender men and women serving their country with honor, integrity and distinction.
With that in mind, let’s stop for a second and do a bit of compare and contrast between, say, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and U.S. Naval Commander Emily Shilling, the lead plaintiff in Shilling v. U.S. Let’s start with Hegseth.
Now, Pete does have some military background. After graduating from Princeton, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army through the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. After a brief stint as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Sterns, he completed basic training at Fort Benning and spent 11 months as a Minnesota Army National Guardsman stationed at Guantanamo Bay. Then he went back to Bear Sterns before volunteering as an infantry officer in the Iraq War in 2005.
During his time on active duty in Iraq, Hegseth was awarded The Bronze Star, given in recognition of either heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious achievement or meritorious service in a combat zone. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Army alone awarded more than 170,000 Bronze Stars.
Then in 2011, Hegseth commissioned into the Minnesota Army National Guard as a captain and taught at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Afghanistan. At the end of his tour of duty in 2014, he was promoted to major and enlisted in the Individual Ready Reserve.
Through the reserve, he joined the District of Columbia Army National Guard in June 2019 as a traditional drilling service member, remaining in duty until March 2021.
Hegseth wasn’t allowed to serve on duty at President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 after another guardsman reported him as an “insider threat” because of a tattoo on his biceps of the words “Deus vult.” That’s Latin for “God’s will,” and in the modern context, the phrase is widely associated with Christian nationalist movements, as well as with Christian right and far-right groups — you know, like many of the folks who tried to overthrow the will of the voters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Hegseth claims he left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024 because of that incident.
What about his life outside the military? Well, let’s see: He has been married three times. His first marriage ended after four years when he admitted to having five affairs. His second marriage lasted seven years, and his former sister-in-law told U.S. senators, during confirmation hearings for the Defense secretary post, that he had made his wife concerned for her safety, causing her to once hide in a closet and come up with an “escape plan” that she used at least once.
He has been married since 2019 to Jennifer Rauchet, a producer on Fox & Friends.
His own mother in 2018 sent him an email saying, “You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth, and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years).” (In all fairness, his mother told The New York Times in November 2024 that the email was sent in anger and that she had immediately apologized to him in a separate email).
Then there was that incident at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in October 2017 in which police investigated allegations against him of sexual assault. And let’s not forget that, in his very brief stint so far, there have been numerous allegations made against him of security breaches, at least 12 of which involved using the public app Signal to conduct top security level meetings, not to mention sharing top secret info with his wife and others through Signal.
There’s more, but I’m running out of room. And I want to say a little about Cmdr. Shilling, who currently serves as an aerospace engineering duty officer, program manager, with NAVAIR in the DC area. She has a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from the University of Colorado and was winged as a naval aviator.
Cmdr. Shilling conducted 60 combat missions in support of operations Enduring Freedom and New Dawn in both Afghanistan and Iraq and was awarded three Air Medals and the Order of Daedalians Distinguished Airmanship Award. She then graduated with honors from Test Pilot School and earned a master’s in systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School , served as an electronic attack project officer with Test and Evaluation Squadron Two Three (VX-23) where she conducted high-risk test flights in support of the Navy’s most advanced air combat systems, then was selected as an aerospace engineering duty officer and is now a military deputy program manager charged with developing and acquiring the next line of offensive and defensive air systems.
But yeah, she’s a danger to military readiness, right? Kicking her out for no reason other than her gender identity won’t damage effectiveness at all, will it?
Seriously though, let’s be clear: Trump’s trans military ban is nothing more than bigotry, hatred and discrimination, and its impact will be the exact opposite of prioritizing military excellence. And the Supreme Court of the United States is guilty of allowing that discrimination to persist.
Tammye Nash is managing editor of Dallas Voice. The opinions expressed here are her own.