PK

I left the military in 2017. The Obama administration had lifted the ban on trans service in the military, so I was able to come out and transition on active duty. But shortly after that, Trump was elected and things in the military took a really sharp turn to the right. It became very openly fascist. People who weren’t cishet white men were pulled out of leadership positions and put behind desks. Big portraits of Trump went up on people’s offices walls. It became very openly racist and misogynistic, and transphobic too, of course.

I was being treated very horribly. At that point I was already a socialist and trans. I was just kind of putting my head down and trying to make it to my end of service. But I got sick of pretending to get by. So I started protesting imperialism and the treatment of trans service members by just refusing any orders, refusing to do any work. I stopped wearing the flag on my uniform. Any time an officer told me to do something, I just told them to go fuck themselves.

That didn’t last very long, of course. They ended up imprisoning me. They threw me in their mental health detainment system, which is a cop out. They use it save or retain their “good soldiers.” I’m doing air quotes right now — good soldiers really means white soldiers. It’s a way they can retain the soldiers that they want to retain who commit a crime, by avoiding court marshaling. It’s kind of like a cross between a psych ward and a low-security prison. There are nurses and psychologists there, but there are also armed guards. You’re locked in against your will, and you can’t leave.

Nobody was there because they had mental health issues. Actually, there was one person in there with me who thought he was Jesus. But other than that, they were just all a bunch of white cishet men, soldiers who had beaten their wife or got in a fight with the military police or stolen something from the post exchange. Their chain of command thought they were “good soldiers,” air quotes again, and they wanted to retain them. So they stay in there for a couple months until a psychologist checks off that they’re no longer a threat to themselves or others. And when they’re released, they can go back to their units without getting charged with a crime.

So my company commander did that for me, because I deployed with him back when he was a lieutenant, so I guess he thought he owed me something. I didn’t care what happened to me at that point. But that’s what allowed me to get an honorable discharge. I just stayed in there for two months until my contract ran out and then they discharged me.

I got an honorable discharge, and I came to Oregon and was able to use my GI Bill at Oregon State University. I started organizing with DSA as soon as I hit the ground here in Oregon.