In December, seven months before President Trump announced his intention to ban transgender people from serving in the military, I attended one of Trump’s postelection victory rallies, in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a Trump supporter named Jayne Locke. As it happened, Locke was a transgender veteran. This was not one of those journalistic exercises in deliberate expectation-thwarting; it had happened more or less by chance. On my way to Grand Rapids, I had been canvassing Facebook looking for Trump supporters who were going to the rally, and Locke was the one who wrote me back. When she did, she was quick to note something that was not readily apparent from her Facebook page: “I’m not sure if you are aware of this or not, but I am not only a Trump supporter but also a transsexual woman Trump supporter.”

When I found Locke the following afternoon at the DeltaPlex Arena, she was dressed in a mauve turtleneck sweater and a cap that said VIETNAM VETERAN; she served in the Air Force, at a Strategic Air Command base in North Dakota. “I’m very much a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal,” she told me as we waited in our seats, a dozen rows up from the floor of the arena, for the show to start. She was a lifelong libertarian and an intermittently active Republican. She worked in engine development for Ford for 29 years, she told me, until the program she worked on was scuttled. A year later, her job was, too. This was 2006, which was also the year that Locke decided to transition; she began hormone therapy the next year. “Your entire life, you look at yourself, and you don’t see the person that everybody else sees,” she told me. “It’s very disconcerting. It’s not something you can talk to anyone about. You don’t even want to admit it to yourself.”

Since then, Locke had been self-employed. After Ford, she interviewed for some full-time positions but never got them, and she could not shake the suspicion, even if she couldn’t prove it, that it had to do with the transition. “Everybody says, ‘We can’t wait to bring you on board, but we have to do a background check.’ And then I don’t hear from them ever again.” At church, where she played bass in the ensemble that performed at worship services, “I was told that they couldn’t allow someone like me to represent the church — as if I’m doing something sinful, or I’m evil. And that crushed my soul.”

When Trump gave his speech announcing his candidacy, Locke told me, “I listened to that, and I was drawn to Trump immediately.” She liked what he had to say about regulations, border security, immigration. When he came to Michigan, she went to the rallies and phone-banked for him. She pulled out her phone to show me a picture she took of him at one of the rallies, a view from the crowd, the glare from the spotlights giving him a slightly apparitional quality. “I was standing front and center,” she said. “Trump, when he came out, saw my hat, and he looked at me and said: ‘Thank you for your service.’ Ted Nugent” — he was the opening act — “saluted me.”