Paul Rieckhoff, a combat veteran of the Iraq War and a nationally recognized military veterans advocate, issued a blunt warning Friday: The Trump administration’s purge of transgender service members is only the beginning, and the rest of America should take note.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
“This isn’t just a ban—it’s a purge,” Rieckhoff said during an appearance on MSNBC’sKaty Tur Reports, reacting to a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requiring all transgender troops to resign “voluntarily” by June 6—D-Day—or face administrative separation. “It’s reckless. It’s bigoted. It’s mean. And it’s crushing morale.”
Related: Meet the transgender Army lieutenant who is challenging Donald Trump's military ban
Rieckhoff, who served as an Army infantry officer in Iraq and later founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the policy is not only discriminatory but destabilizing. “We’re talking about people who’ve served 20 years—fighter pilots, Green Berets, people forward-deployed in combat zones. Removing them devastates unit cohesion, wastes resources, and sends a clear message of intolerance.”
On Friday afternoon, attorneys for the plaintiffs in Talbott v. United States submitted a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, alerting judges to Hegseth’s Thursday directive and including the full text of the order as an exhibit. Filed by GLAD Law and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who represent 32 transgender plaintiffs, the letter says the directive “restates the unsupported assertion that ‘expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for Military Service,’” and argues it “further corroborates” the district court’s finding that the ban was “motivated by animus against transgender people as a group”.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled in March that the Trump administration had implemented the policy based solely on a dislike of transgender people without showing any evidence that trans service members harm the military in any way.
Related: This trans Air Force recruit wants to jump out of planes to save others. He's suing Trump to serve
The same language appeared in a public post from Hegseth, which the plaintiffs also cited as reinforcing the ban’s unconstitutional basis.
The directive came just days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a nationwide injunction in another complaint by trans troops in Shilling v. United States, allowing the administration to begin enforcing the transgender military ban—even as legal appeals remain active.
On The Daily Show Thursday night, host Jordan Klepper sat down with transgender troops who dismantled the administration’s justifications. “This idea that we spend years of being non-deployable is just simply untrue,” said Lt. Rae Timberlake, a 17-year Navy veteran. “I’ve never missed a deployment. I can fight tonight.”
Chief Warrant Officer Jo Ellis, a Blackhawk pilot, added: “They’ve paid for nothing for my transition. I paid out of pocket because I wanted to be mission-ready as fast as possible. In six weeks, I was deployable again.”
Klepper’s segment aired the same week Hegseth delivered a tirade at a military event in Florida, proclaiming, “No more pronouns, no more dudes in dresses. We’re done with that shit.”
Related:Supreme Court allows Trump administration to enforce transgender military ban
Rieckhoff said that while some may find the Pentagon’s new stance appealing, many will choose not to join the armed services.
“You’re going to get more people who are anti-woke and think Pete Hegseth is MacArthur,” Rieckhoff said. “And you get other people who don’t want to be part of a military that becomes more narrow, more male, more white, more right-wing. That’s not the military of 2024. It’s the military of 1864. It looks like the army of the Confederacy, not a modern military that can fight around the world.”
For Rieckhoff, the separations during Pride Month were deliberate. “[Hegseth has] announced that they have till June 6th, which is D-Day—whether that’s some kind of spectacular culture war moment or they just want to be mean,” he said. “But there’s always a component here that politicizes even something like D-Day.”
Related:BREAKING: Pentagon's waiver for transgender troops forces them to deny their identities, court filing shows
Riekhoff warned that the military purge is part of a larger strategy. “Everything they’re doing at the Pentagon and the military is what they want to do for the rest of society,” Rieckhoff said. “They’re just doing it there first because, in part, it’s easier to get the military to do what you want them to do. So they ban books. They’re banning trans people. They’re trying to attack DEI and remove books by Maya Angelou or anything else that they view as unacceptable from the curriculum, from the academic institutions, as a way of cascading down to the rest of society. So watch the Pentagon space—not just because of national security, because it’s the tip of the spear for the total transformation of society that they want to execute.”
Rieckhoff tied the crackdown to Project 2025, a sweeping far-right blueprint for reshaping the federal government. “They fired [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] CQ Brown. They removed all legal opposition. Now they’re transforming the most powerful part of the U.S. government—biggest budget, biggest guns, most employees—and that makes pushing around the rest of the government pretty easy.”
