For now, it appears they will. Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said in a statement, “At this time, there are no plans to change the DOD policy on the DD-214.” The Pentagon’s legal team is also sending the same message. In response to the LGBT Bar Association’s written request that official policy guidance be sent to the separate boards that govern DD-214s, the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel said that wasn’t necessary.

“The Department of Defense may issue guidance to the Boards when necessary to address a change in the law, or to ensure consistency in the application of Department policy across Services,” wrote the Defense Department’s deputy general counsel, Paul Koffsky, on Jan. 20, 2015. “The relief being granted to transgender veterans in amending their DD-214s, however, makes consideration of issuing such guidance unnecessary.”

That rejection was a couple years in the making. Kemnitz first met with a Pentagon lawyer on the matter in July of 2013. The idea for addressing the policy came from a brainstorming session among members of the LGBT Bar Association who realized that the DD-214 form most veterans simply present as proof of their service had become a stumbling block for trans veterans.

As Neira explains, “I’ve had to share personal and medical information with people who would have otherwise never had access to that information. It’s like outing myself to my civilian coworkers.”

In fact, Neira had one job offer immediately rescinded after she told a prospective employer what they would find when they ran a background check on her. She also applied for two government positions—one at FEMA and another at the Department of Justice—where preferences are given to military veterans after they submit their DD-214. Despite having both a nursing and a law degree, she never got contacted for interviews at either agency. Neira now works as a nurse educator at a hospital in Maryland—a job she has had for seven years.

But rescinded job offers are exactly the type of situation that led the LGBT Bar Association to produce a white paper laying out the legal arguments for a formal change in the DD-214 policy. The Air Force was already issuing name-change approvals to transgender veterans as a matter of course based on a 2004 ruling from the body that oversees such requests, the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records. That decision concluded that one vet's original DD-214 presented “a hindrance to the applicant should she be required to provide documents to a servicing facility for her needs, such as insurance companies, hospitals, places of employment, etc.”

Once the LGBT Bar Association completed its white paper on the policy in October of 2013, they shared it widely and it became the basis for the legal arguments the ACLU advanced last year on behalf of two transgender Army veterans from New Jersey seeking a DD-214 name change. Those applications were initially denied on Nov. 6 by the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, but the decision was overruled on Nov. 20 by the deputy assistant secretary of the Army Review Boards, Francine Blackmon.

The unofficial shift in the handling of DD-214s by the Army and Navy (and by extension, the Marine Corps.), plus the Air Force’s formalized policy, has raised hopes in some circles that the military might review the medial regulations that still prevent transgender individuals from serving. In fact, U.S. service members have already served alongside transgender personnel from other countries that allow transgender service, such as Great Britain and Australia.

But Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Christensen simply reiterated that transgender service continues to be barred “based upon medical standards for military service.”

Neira calls the day she decided to leave the Navy for good “the hardest decision I ever had to make. I had to sacrifice my calling—and I view military service as a calling that's my calling—in order to be who I am,” she says.

But Neira’s main reason for wanting the name correction on her DD-214 was so that she can have her ashes put in the Columbarium at Arlington Cemetery, where both of her parents are buried.

“I want my true name on my headstone,” she says. “Now my partner and my friends won’t have to fight some bureaucrat who would insist on putting my former name on my tombstone because that was the name that was on my DD-214.”

With the approval of her proper name, she says, “When I die, I will finally get back to the Navy.”