Akira Wyatt may be the face of the U.S. military’s social policy evolution during the past five years.

× Transgender corpsman part of new military frontier

Wyatt, a 24-year-old Navy corpsman at Camp Pendleton, enlisted as a straight man and then soon after came out as gay following the September 2011 repeal of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” guidelines.

Now, Wyatt is publicly acknowledging her status as a transgender person after the Pentagon on June 30 announced that it would immediately stop discharging transgender troops. In addition, Wyatt plans to officially change her gender to female when the Navy allows it starting in October.


“I need to do this. This is me,” she said. “I never hid my flamboyancy. When I found out that being transgender was an automatic discharge, I identified myself as a gay man. That was my cover because I still couldn’t medically transition and say I was transgender.”

An estimated 2,500 of the nation’s 1.3 million active-duty troops are transgender, along with 1,500 among the 825,000 people in the reserves, according to the Pentagon. Other estimates run as high as 12,800 active-duty and reserve personnel.

Going forward, these troops will be able to get medical treatment for transgender issues, including hormone treatment and surgery for gender reassignment if a doctor signs off.

After July 2017, recruits who are transgender will be accepted — as long as they have completed the related medical treatment and a physician has confirmed that they have been “stable” in their new gender for at least 18 months.


The Pentagon also said it will add gender identity to its equal-opportunity non-discrimination policy.

Transgender troops are just a fraction of the people affected when the ban on openly gay service members was lifted. But to critics and supporters alike, the issues are just as profound.

In making the transgender-policy announcement last month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said it’s important for the all-volunteer force to be able to draw from the largest pool of talent. Also, he billed it as a fairness issue.

“Americans who want to serve and can meet our standards should be afforded the opportunity to compete to do so,” Carter said in a speech from the Pentagon. “After all, our all-volunteer force is built upon having the most qualified Americans, and the profession of arms is based on honor and trust.”


The Center for Military Readiness decries the Defense Department’s move as social engineering.

The conservative public policy organization in Michigan also opposed the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the recent opening of combat roles to women. It argues that these moves distract from the task of maintaining a strong military. In a recent policy paper, it described being transgender as a psychological problem.

“There is no good reason for the military to normalize psychopathology as normal behavior for military service,” the group said. “These policies could force out of the military personnel who question delusions that are now official policy. None of this will improve readiness, discipline, or morale in America’s over-stressed all-volunteer force.”

Public opinion has largely mirrored the changes taking place in the American military.


In 2008, Military Times found that 35 percent of the active-duty troops it surveyed said gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in uniform. Five years later, the figure jumped to 60 percent.

Some see the Defense Department as late to adapt, as the federal government has long allowed open service of gays and provides family benefits to same-sex couples. Carter pointed out in his announcement that over a third of Fortune 500 companies — including CVS and Ford — offer employee health insurance plans with transgender-inclusive coverage.

Of course, the U.S. military is not a retail chain or a manufacturer of sedans.

Wyatt, who was born in the Philippines to a father who had been a U.S. Marine, had experimented with dressing in drag since 2012, though she didn’t know much about transgender people.


She decided to accept her gender identity in October 2014. That’s when a Marine lance corporal on deployment with her was arrested for killing a woman in the Philippines after discovering she was transgender.

“After catching a glimpse of that guy, looking in his eyes ... I felt very scared. And I felt that I needed to do something. And it occurred to me that that was my sister. I am her,” she said.

“That’s when I decided if my life was going to end with one of my Marines’ hands, then so be it, I’m going to do this.”

Wyatt has served with two all-male Camp Pendleton infantry units as their “doc” or medic, including a deployment to Okinawa, Japan with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.


The Marine Corps was the service that warned most loudly about possible ramifications of the Pentagon’s social policy changes, including the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and combat jobs being opened to women.

Her comrades in arms have largely been supportive of her path, Wyatt said last week.

That’s because it wasn’t a surprise when then-Clark Wyatt came out as gay, and later transgender, she said.

“With Marines and corpsmen, there’s a degree of attachment, a degree of brotherhood. And I was a part of that,” Wyatt said. “They were like, ‘Oh, I knew it all along.’ But it was for me to come to terms with.”


A few fellow troops have given her pushback — “side eye,” as Wyatt calls it — but it has never turned physical.

The corpsman notified the Navy about her situation in September 2015 — roughly two months after the defense secretary convened a working group to examine the status of transgender troops with an eye toward normalizing their service.

Now Wyatt plans to make the Navy a career. It’s a path that was not open to her before June 30.

She wants to again serve with Marine infantry units, which is, ironically, something that a woman couldn’t do until recently with the end of gender restrictions on combat jobs.


“If definitely will be a bit of a challenge,” Wyatt said. “But that’s where I grew up. That’s kind of my world.”

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com