Maj. Erica Vandal had just finished briefing 200 soldiers on her brigade’s plan to employ artillery fire in a big combat training exercise. She exited the cavernous warehouse where the troops had gathered and was headed to the bathroom between sessions when her phone reconnected to the network and began pinging.
Dozens of new messages flashed across her screen. One was from her mother.
“Just heard about the Supreme Court ruling,” it read. “That totally stinks! How are you doing?”
The other texts confirmed what she already assumed. The justices had ruled that President Trump could immediately begin expelling transgender troops from the military. Major Vandal, 36, and thousands of others would be forced out.
It didn’t seem real. She found it hard to conceive of a life outside the Army. The daughter of a three-star general, she had grown up on bases around the world and thought of them collectively as home. She had been a West Point cadet, an artillery officer and a Bronze Star recipient for her service in Afghanistan.
In combat, she had taken cover in concrete bunkers from incoming Taliban rockets and, alongside her troops, fired back at the enemy. She had pushed herself to exhaustion during training exercises, then grabbed a few hours of sleep in a dusty Humvee. She had found meaning and purpose in placing her soldiers’ needs ahead of her own.
“Supreme Court just ruled,” she texted her wife. “I’m out.”
Hulking Chinook helicopters thrummed overhead. Major Vandal could smell diesel fuel and dust in the air. She knew she could not lead the next planning session without falling apart, so she pulled her soldiers together and told them the news, then handed off her briefing notes and retreated to her pickup truck to call one of her lawyers.
Her legal team, which was representing more than a dozen plaintiffs challenging the transgender ban in court, would keep fighting. But her lawyer told her that she did not want to give her false hope. The chances of a reversal in the next year or so were small.
Major Vandal began driving to her house on the other side of Fort Drum, N.Y., where her wife and two children were waiting. The Trump administration was offering transgender troops extra money if they didn’t contest their dismissals. Major Vandal, an officer for 14 years, knew she stood to get an additional $160,000, which she could use to restart her life or help secure her children’s future.
Should she take it, or stand on principle and fight? If she left, where would she and her family live? What kind of job could she find?
She arrived at a neighborhood of white, two-story houses set aside for field-grade officers and their families, parked her truck and walked under a homemade red, white and blue plaque on which her wife had stenciled “The Vandals.”
In front of her troops she had been determined to remain stoic and strong. Inside her home she broke down. Numbness and disbelief turned into sadness and then anger at the unfairness of it all.
For the next several minutes Major Vandal sobbed as her wife quietly held her.
‘A Future Tactical Battalion Commander’
Major Vandal’s first sense that she was living in the wrong body had come when she was 6 and playing with friends on an Army base in Texas.
“I wish I was a girl,” she recalled telling them. She said they stared at her in disbelief. In a military community that prized conformity and conservative values, she quickly learned that it was not acceptable, and even shameful, to be different.
In the years that followed, she tried to fit in by emulating her father, a former Army general.
“The best man I’ve ever known,” she called him. He was happy, well liked and successful. Maybe she could be, too, if she followed his path?
She became the star of her high school wrestling team, just like her father. She attended West Point and was commissioned as an artillery officer, like him. Later in her career, she would live in South Korea near the Lt. Gen. Thomas S. Vandal Training Complex, named for him.
Major Vandal was at West Point in 2009 when a classmate connected her with the woman, Janelle, who would become her wife. They got to know each other mostly by text and then phone calls. For their first date, Janelle flew to the academy for a dance that celebrated the 500 days her class had until graduation.
Janelle was funny, caring and outgoing. “She just had this beautiful personality,” Major Vandal recalled. Major Vandal, who was still closeted at the time, was more introverted and analytical, her sense of humor more wry. They married shortly after she was commissioned as a lieutenant and reported to Fort Sill, Okla., the same base where her parents had started their military life in 1982. (Janelle declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Major Vandal was building a successful career as she moved with Janelle from Oklahoma to Hawaii to Colorado.
“A superb officer and leader by every measure,” one commander wrote of her in a 2011 performance review. “Without a doubt a future tactical battalion commander,” another wrote four years later. There was “no limit” to her potential in the Army, a third supervisor added when she was promoted to major.
By 2018, Major Vandal’s father was battling pancreatic cancer, just as she was readying her artillery battery for an Afghanistan deployment. She sat with him at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center but did not share her secret, which she assumed she would take to “the grave,” she said.
Coming Out to Her Wife
She tried to manage her struggle by putting in long hours at work and leaning into masculinity. She bulked up in the gym, hoping her outward toughness would hide her inner torment. “You might forget about it for a week here or a month there, but every time it comes back,” she recalled. “And it just gets worse and worse.”
She was on a one-year assignment to South Korea when a military doctor diagnosed her with gender dysphoria, defined as the distress people feel when their gender identity is different from their sex assigned at birth. She initially kept the diagnosis a secret from her wife, who was living with their son and daughter outside Fort Carson, Colo.
Major Vandal told her commander that she was transgender and was starting her transition but asked him not to tell others in the unit. “I would like to keep this all under wraps to the greatest extent possible,” she wrote in a December 2021 email.
“Thanks for trusting me,” he replied. “You have my full support.”
During that time, Major Vandal joined SPARTA, an online group for trans troops that kept its members’ names private. In early 2021, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had signed an executive order allowing trans troops to serve openly.
Major Vandal eventually came out to Janelle in a tense phone call and a series of texts. (She had planned to tell her in person during a visit home over Christmas but “chickened out,” she said.) She emphasized that she was not choosing to be transgender. She had been this way — and fighting against it — her entire life. Her wife had no idea. Although they agreed that they loved each other, according to Major Vandal, she hung up the phone unsure whether their decade-long marriage could survive.
Major Vandal soon began hormone therapy. A couple of weeks later, she sent her mother a three-page email describing her gender dysphoria diagnosis. “Hearing that fact repeated back to me from a medical professional seemed to free me,” she wrote. “I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t a deviant.”
She said she was “already a happier person” even as she conceded that she was “terrified” that she was opening herself up to a lifetime of “discrimination and hate.”
Unable to reach Major Vandal by phone, her mother emailed to say that she loved her and that she’d help however she could.
Trump’s Anti-Trans Campaign
Near the end of Major Vandal’s South Korea tour, some of her transgender friends took her out to a gay neighborhood in Seoul. A friend offered to lend her a purple and white calf-length sundress. But Major Vandal, who had never worn one before, said she was too terrified of being derided as a “man in a dress” to accept it.
Later that evening, watching drag performers at a bar, she broke down crying. “Here were people brave enough to live their lives,” she recalled, “and I was too afraid to do any of that stuff.”
The next night she put on the sundress. Her friend snapped a picture of her seated at the bar, smiling awkwardly. As the night wore on, she said, her unease faded.
A few days later, Major Vandal flew home and saw her wife for the first time since she came out to her. Janelle and the children surprised her by taking her to her first Pride march.
The marriage was strained, but they agreed to try to make it work, Major Vandal said. In deference to Janelle, she slowed her transition, forgoing makeup and dresses and postponing surgical interventions.
Still, her body was changing in noticeable ways. The hormone treatments had softened her skin and thinned her fingers. Her wedding ring was now too big, so she wore it on a gold chain around her neck and bought a smaller gold band for her finger. She developed breasts and started wearing a sports bra.
The “brain fog” that had haunted her for decades lifted. She said she felt increasingly at ease in her body. She started to grow out her hair, slicking it back with gel to conform to the Army’s male grooming standards. She painted her toenails under her combat boots.
Most of her Army friends didn’t know she was transgender until late 2023 — two years after she began her transition — when she was serving at Fort Drum. She didn’t make a big announcement because she wanted to be seen simply as an Army officer, not a trans officer. Some soldiers asked whether they should change how they referred to her. Others simply began addressing her as “ma’am.”
“It was just a natural progression,” she said.
She started to use the women’s restroom on post. Janelle took her to her stylist, who added highlights to her hair. Her commanders showed their support, she said, by treating her as though nothing had changed.
Beyond the base, Mr. Trump was railing against transgender troops during his presidential campaign stops. At rallies he aired a video that interspersed clips of a Marine drill sergeant screaming at recruits with images of transgender troops in uniform. Every time a trans person appeared on the screen, the crowd would lustily boo.
“We will not have a woke military!” Mr. Trump vowed.
Major Vandal’s brigade was preparing for a deployment to Iraq or Syria in 2026. She was on pace to take command of a 650-soldier field artillery battalion as soon as 2027.
As she watched the election returns, she knew the results would upend her life.
Seven days after Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he revoked Mr. Biden’s directive allowing transgender soldiers to serve openly. In a new executive order, he asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”
Soon after, Major Vandal signed onto a lawsuit seeking to block the ban. She and her brother, Nick, a former Marine pilot, had talked earlier about whether she should join the case. On Jan. 28, she texted him that it had been filed. It was on CNN.
“I’m proud of you,” he told her.
“Freaking out quite a bit,” she wrote back. “There are a lot of assholes out there.”
Nick then shared an anecdote from the final moments of their father’s life. He hadn’t shared it with anyone, even their mother.
As he lay dying, delirious from pain and drugs and malnutrition, General Vandal didn’t recognize his son, who he assumed was a health care worker. He pointed to a photo of his three children and described how proud he was of them.
“He would have supported and loved you no matter what,” wrote Nick, who knew his sister often wondered whether their father would have accepted her. “He would have been against all this Trump bullshit that is clearly against the constitution and what it means to be a real American.”
Major Vandal texted that she was crying. “I feel like I lied to him for such a huge portion of my life, pretending to be who I thought he wanted me to be,” she wrote. “I missed out on soo much because I was afraid.”
‘Soaked in Animus’
In February, the Pentagon issued a memo setting March 26 as the day the trans ban would start. With the deadline fast approaching, Major Vandal’s lawyers petitioned a federal judge for an emergency injunction to block the ban from taking effect.
A hearing was scheduled for March 12 in Washington. Major Vandal led a group of about a dozen plaintiffs from their hotel to the federal courthouse, passing the Capitol on the way. As they moved through security, the youngest of them, a 19-year-old from Michigan, tentatively approached her. He was trying to enlist in the Navy.
“I just graduated from high school,” he said uncertainly. “I never thought I’d be suing the military.”
“You’re fine,” she reassured him. “I grew up in a military family. I never thought I’d be involved in a case against the military.”
Her lawyers had warned her that the government might call her to testify, so Major Vandal took a seat in the courtroom’s front row. She slipped off her tennis shoes and slid on a pair of black flats.
Previous transgender service debates revolved around practical questions: Was the cost of providing trans troops with gender-affirming care too high? Were they more likely than their peers to experience physical and mental health problems?
This time the government was questioning their character. The Pentagon’s order asserted that trans troops lacked the “honesty,” “humility” and “integrity” required to serve.
“How can you even say that — that a whole group of people lack humility?” Judge Ana C. Reyes of the Federal District Court asked the government’s lawyer, Jason Manion. The Trump administration had cited no studies and offered no testimony from officers to back up its claims that trans troops were morally unfit and damaging to unit cohesion.
Instead, Mr. Manion argued that the law gave the Pentagon wide leeway to decide who is fit to serve. “At the end of the day we are asking you to defer to military judgment,” he said.
The same arguments had been made about Black, gay and female troops, Major Vandal recalled thinking. Trans troops, though, represented an even smaller sliver of the population and were even more vulnerable.
After the hearing, the plaintiffs assembled outside the courthouse for a news conference. The group included officers and enlisted troops, people hoping to ship off to basic training and a few close to retirement.
Major Vandal stepped to the microphone and addressed three reporters and a single video camera.
She talked about her father, who had served for decades before her, and her childhood growing up on Army bases. She talked about the 70 soldiers she oversaw at Fort Drum and her “incredible” wife and children, who had supported her throughout her career, which included two deployments.
“The military,” Major Vandal said, “was and continues to be my entire life.”
She was washing the dinner dishes at her home a week later when she received a text telling her that the judge had issued an injunction temporarily blocking Mr. Trump’s ban.
Major Vandal began reading passages from the judge’s 79-page opinion to her wife. Judge Reyes praised the plaintiffs’ “exemplary” service and criticized Mr. Trump’s ban as “soaked in animus,” “dripping with pretext” and “unabashedly demeaning.”
Janelle asked her what the order would mean for them. Major Vandal said she was not going to be kicked out on March 26.
Beyond that, she said, she could not be sure.
A Final Memo
Six weeks later, on May 6, the Supreme Court sided with the government and lifted the lower court’s injunction. Major Vandal’s phone lit up with text messages. As is typical when the court rules on emergency applications, the decision was not signed and offered no rationale.
That afternoon, some of Major Vandal’s trans military friends shared a clip of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivering a speech shortly before the justices ruled. His message cut to the heart of her earlier insecurities.
“No more dudes in dresses,” Mr. Hegseth vowed. “We’re done with that shit.”
She brushed off the insult. She was comfortable now with her appearance. But she was angry that Mr. Hegseth described the ban as a necessary step to restore “merit-based” promotions to the military.
“Merit is pretty much the only thing not considered,” she texted a friend.
That night, Major Vandal and Janelle went to a fund-raising dinner for the North Country Spouses’ Club at a nearby Chipotle. She hoped the time around other Army families would ease her anxiety. Instead it just reminded her of all she stood to lose.
She spent much of the evening responding to texts from friends all over the world.
“Everything is so backwards,” wrote an Army officer from his base in Louisiana. “I thought it would take a lot longer for this country to fall so far from grace.”
Back at Major Vandal’s home, half-filled moving boxes were scattered about. Janelle had decided a few weeks earlier to move with their children to Colorado Springs, where they owned a home from a previous tour. She didn’t want to be married to a woman. And Major Vandal, who was weighing starting surgical procedures that she had long delayed, could not be happy as a man.
“I still love her,” Major Vandal said. “There’s hurt and pain but no animosity.”
Major Vandal was entitled to six months of paid administrative leave to turn in her equipment, be evaluated for any service-connected disabilities, pack up the house and figure out her future. She planned to move to a state with laws safeguarding transgender rights. Maybe Colorado or Washington. Until then, she did not have anything immediately pressing to do. She hit the gym daily and attended a weekly trans support group on post.
Most of the people in it were younger, enlisted soldiers. Some railed against their country, saying they had promised to fight and die, only for it to cast them aside. A few talked about moving to Canada, New Zealand or Australia.
Major Vandal treated them as if they were her troops. She made a point of remembering what they had talked about during previous sessions and asked about their plans for the future and their families.
Some units were requiring trans soldiers to show up for work while they processed out of the Army. Major Vandal pressed their commanders to let them start administrative leave and figure out their lives.
“She’s the rock for a lot of people,” said Capt. Alex Zarbis, a member of the group. In the barracks, some soldiers cheered her for “taking on Trump.”
She had until June 6 to decide whether to ask for a “voluntary” separation from the Army, which came with the promise of a $320,000 payment. It was a fraction of the millions of dollars in pension and health benefits she would receive if she retired in six years with 20 years of service. If she took her case to a board of inquiry — typically reserved for soldiers being separated for misconduct — she would get only $160,000.
Her instincts told her to fight her dismissal. She wanted the officers on the board of inquiry to review her records, read the accolades she had received from her commanders and then look her in the eye and tell her that she was not mentally, physically or morally fit to serve.
But she knew that appearing before the board of inquiry would be demeaning. To the Army, she was now a man. Before she could make her case to the board, she would have to cut her hair and conform to male grooming standards. She would be addressed as a man.
“They’re seeing your record at that point,” Major Vandal said, “but I don’t think they’re seeing your humanity.”
There was financial pressure, too. Soon she would be supporting two households on a single salary. Major Vandal said her wife had urged her to put her family’s needs ahead of her pride. Her mother gave her similar advice.
On June 2, she sat at her home office, which doubled as her children’s crafts room, and typed up a “memorandum for the record” requesting a voluntary separation.
She was required to write just one sentence. Instead, she filled three pages. She wrote about her deployment to Afghanistan, the Army schools she had completed and her “exemplary” evaluations from her commanders. “I do not have a single derogatory mark on my record,” she noted.
She emphasized that she was leaving the Army under the threat of “coercion, fear of unjust treatment, and pressure caused by an unstable and hostile policy.”
She closed by requesting that her memo be kept in her personnel file in case the courts overruled the transgender ban or the Pentagon changed the policy.
In the corner of her office were reminders of her father’s service: the camouflage patrol cap he wore on his final assignment in South Korea and shell casings from the 21-gun salute at his funeral.
She recalled that her father spoke often of his love for the Army, which had given him and his family so much. He described the Army as the ultimate meritocracy, a place where a person could succeed through resilience, tenacity and hard work.
Until the day she was forced from the Army, Major Vandal had believed him.
The post The Army Was the Only Life She Knew. Trump’s Trans Ban Cast Her Out. appeared first on New York Times.
