“The only way I could deal with [being forced to keep my gender identity a secret while serving] was to deeply suppress it, so I could concentrate on being the best leader and the best commander, to take care of my soldiers. And that’s exactly what I did. For very infrequent periods, I would go out and purchase female clothing and wear them for a couple hours or maybe a day, and then end up purging them as the guilt set in because I wasn't exhibiting the behavior expected of a male. So, it was pretty taxing. I kept my secret to myself for five-plus decades. I finally shared it with my last spouse — I've been married multiple times, but my marriages were probably doomed from the start because living inauthentically does little to foster personal relationships — and moved forward from there.

"I don’t know that three tweets a policy make, and I don’t think anybody knows right now what this means. [But] I was shocked, surprised, disappointed — a lot of emotions, and I had those emotions because I could not believe the commander-in-chief of all of our military folks would turn his back on 15,000 individuals that serve on a daily basis to help to keep our country free and safe.

"I often wonder how much better an officer I would have been had I been allowed to serve authentically while in uniform. Transgender soldiers in the marines serving today are able to focus — at least until yesterday — on their jobs. And any time you focus fully on [your] job without that being-in-the-closet thing hanging over your head [and the] fear of being discovered [or] losing your job, your individual performance gets better. Your individual readiness gets better and, as a result, the unit readiness gets better as well. So people [who] say this detracts from readiness really don’t have an understanding of what makes up readiness."

Blake Dremann, 36, Navy lieutenant commander, who has been serving for 11 years.

"I’m female to male and I was one of the first women to integrate submarines... You learn to compartmentalize [when serving in the closet]. You have to, because there's a mission that needs to be done. So you have to compartmentalize it and do the dual-life thing, which is stressful — but at the same time, there are bigger things going on than my identity.