 Welcome, everybody. We're fortunate to be able to kick off this set of conversations about such a critical issue to United States society, politics, and the world. I think that the experiences of individuals in the military tends to stay with them for a long time and provide an important touchstone not only while they're in the service or serving in a war, but also afterwards as well. And understanding the full range of those experiences is a big part of what conversations like the ones this is kicking off here can do. The experiences you'll hear tonight from the panelists come from those who have studied these issues in the military, who have influenced the progress of LGBT rights and human rights in the military, and who have lived that experience in the service and then after serving. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to our first speaker, Zoe Dunning, who will talk to you about her experience in and around and after the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the US military. Thank you, Dean Hillman. When I entered the military, the policy was simply, you just can't be gay. And they would actively investigate you and witch hunts. And I became active in the issue when President-elect Clinton declared that he was going to change the policy on gays in the military. I came out publicly in support of him. And as a result, went through my discharge proceedings and was this weird exception and was allowed to continue to serve openly in the military. But I think when we talk about LGBTQ issues around the military and for veterans, one of the things that I think is really unique is that military experience. I do a lot of public speaking at American Legion posts and veterans organizations. And someone may have only served one or two years in the military or three years, but it is that common experience that sort of binds them together. And it becomes their primary social circle. It just becomes a really critical part of your existence and your identity and who you are. So when you have policies around gays and lesbians in the military, it's almost a different plane than just regular employment or regular schools or whatever it might be. I heard an expression once that I really liked and resonated with me. It said that a veteran is someone who, at one point in their life, walks into a recruiter's office and signs a blank check to the American people payable up to and including their own life. And that's a pretty severe commitment. That's a pretty serious obligation that people who enter the military give. And so I think we really owe people who serve as well as veterans. We owe them something for that commitment, for that service. And so that's why it's very important to me. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a critical period of time for the LGBT movement. I think where the military goes, society goes. I think we've seen that time and again when it comes to battling discrimination, whether it's African-Americans or opportunities for women. I mean, the military can be that sort of head of the spear that opens things up. And I think we've seen it in terms of LGBT rights. Once Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed, suddenly a lot more states, marriage rights and DOMA and all of these other things kind of fell into place because again, how we treat our military oftentimes has ripple effects throughout society. So to me it's very interesting to continue to study the military and how it evolves because I think it is a precursor to society at large. Thank you. So now we'll ask Aaron Belkin to talk to us about some of his most recent work which involves transgender rights in the military. Thank you so much and thank you to the audience and the other panelists. It's really an honor to serve with you on the panel. So in terms of the question of transgender service in the military, Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a statute, a congressional law that didn't address gender identity. And so when Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed by Congress, the regulations that prohibit transgender individuals from serving remained in place. But those rules are just that, they're rules, they're not laws. And so the president as commander in chief could get rid of those rules with a stroke of the pen. On the one hand, you can make some really smart arguments that again, we're pushing against a brick wall and it's gonna take years and years and years to change the policy. But I think the better evidence lines up behind the idea that we may actually be pushing against a house of cards and for the 14,500 transgender troops who are serving now, I think there's a very good chance that the Pentagon will update its policies relatively sooner rather than relatively later. The opponents to openly gay service, they lied about, they lied about, well they lied about everything. They just lied all over the place. And one thing they lied about is that in many cases, their motives were really ground in whatever you wanna call it, homophobia, moral animus, intolerance, what have you. But they couldn't admit in public that their support for federal law was ground in personal animus. And so they came up with a phony argument about unit cohesion that if gays were allowed to serve openly, that would prevent the troops from bonding with each other and the military would fall apart. Seriously. The transgender policies, unlike Don't Ask, Don't Tell, are articulated in medical regulations. There's a psychological piece of the transgender ban and a physical piece. So you're not allowed to have a transgender identity and you're not allowed to change your genitals. So there are two pieces to the ban. But they're justified by medical arguments that suggest that providing healthcare to transgender troops would just be beyond the military's competence. Those arguments, just like the Don't Ask, Don't Tell arguments are lies, but they're medical lies. They're not lies about military performance. So we can talk more in Q and A about how to get rid of this policy, but that's kind of where we are for now. Thanks, Aaron. Jeff. Got involved with OutServe, which before the merger of the two organizations did have a little input into the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. They realized that the active duty military did not have a voice in trying to get the repeal to happen because if we said something, then we'd no longer be active duty. And today our focus turns a little bit from the advocacy piece. We are still working, there are still some issues that we can get into later that we need to kind of address, but there are still LGBT military members out there actively serving, and they go through all stages of life. They go through all stages of needing support that is different than their straight counterparts. Are they coming out or are they coming out to their commanders? Do they have certain issues that they need to be addressed? And so there is still a need for a social support network. And I think what it comes down to, and one of the ways that we can kind of roll this all together to really move things forward is education. You know, we think of pride, we think of, okay, let's have the parade, let's have all the fun that goes with that. That's not what's happening. It's programs, it's local chapter leaders with an out-serve SLDN going to their base leadership and saying, I wanna put something together. They're doing 5K fun runs there. They're doing an hour long educational seminar to educate base leadership or just people in general about still the issues that are facing LGBT military members. And so this education piece, as we can educate commanders, we can educate those that still believe the lies that are out there, is I think what's gonna continue to change the hearts and minds. And so that's a lot of the work that we're trying to focus on right now as an organization to continue that education piece so that people really understand. It's not a big deal. Thank you. I'm gonna start with a question that Aaron reminded me of here. He mentioned medical lies. I always thought there were three kinds of lies, right? Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Now we have to add medical lies to that. But let's go back to number three on statistics because we are in the era of big data and the numbers are a lot of the truth for many of us now and how things get presented. And Aaron, since you started with a number out there, 14,500 transgender service members serving today. Many Americans aren't aware that there are any transgender service members. And so to talk about 14,500 people serving loyally, not being able to access healthcare, being subject to discharge if they tell the truth about who they are, not being able to report abuse when they're abused because they could get discovered as transgender to know that there are 14,500 people in that situation I think is very compelling. Other ideas about numbers? So you brought up the sexual assault and I mean it might sound cliche but one sexual assault is one too many and while I think numbers like Aaron said kind of bring awareness to where we're at, having just gone through our annual sexual assault prevention response training within the Air Force, they threw the slide up there of how many cases there were last year compared to the year before. And those numbers don't do any good because as there's more awareness risen to this topic, the numbers are gonna increase. So what do you do with that? Part of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was that the Department of Defense was not going to track in any way, shape, or form sexual orientation and of course by default, gender identity. So numbers can help but again, I'm gonna go back to the education and trying to correct the problem as opposed to just pushing numbers out there to try to get to where we need to be with it. And I would just say that one of the statistics that I often cite, a lot of people at the time thought that Clinton's compromise around Don't Ask, Don't Tell was sort of a step forward or it was a partial solution or it was an improvement of some sort. And in reality actually it was worse because it shined a light on LGBT service members, LGBT service members and caused a lot of investigations and things like that. So the number I often cite is 13,000. So during the course of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, over 13,000 service members were discharged. And the other thing that was interesting is that the number of discharges increased every single year from 1994, I believe is when it was actually implemented, up until 2001 and then we started the war. And guess what? Suddenly the discharges went down every year once we went to war because they started to look the other way and we need qualified troops and when that happens we're not so aggressive in investigating and discharging people. So I have a question for you about how these changes have come to be and what made a difference in changing things because it did take a long time to undo Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And Erin, you mentioned that toppling that unit cohesion argument made a difference in this. What are the external factors, the things that really mattered and what are the barriers now that we have to look ahead to get around or to get over in order to get to the next level here? That's a really tough question to answer because so many people and groups were doing so many things to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And the way I think about it is that there were kind of five strategic baskets or sets of activities that different groups were pursuing. We didn't always have coordination among our groups but as a movement I think we did about as well as any activist community could be expected to do and I was really proud of the whole community for that. So moving forward on transgender, I think it's gonna take the same strategies. And we talk about non-discrimination and knowing that gender identity and sexual orientation are still not written to the Department of Defense's equal opportunity non-discrimination clauses. How many of you knew the Department of Defense has a human rights charter? They do and it was just updated. And it's a charter signed by the Secretary of Defense and the update was to include sexual orientation. Great step forward. It should include gender identity as well but what does that mean? What does that do? You know, we're having a conversation kind of beforehand. It's not a directive. It's not an instruction. It's really not enforceable. Great step forward. It's part of a strategy to kind of get there but my next step would be great. Let's update the non-discrimination clause. I'll just add. So I sometimes do these panels and my friends joke about like, you know, you're a professional lesbian and I was like, well, if only I got paid for it. So a lot of the stuff I do kind of, you know, volunteerism and trying to spread the word. My paid job is that I actually do what's called change management consulting. And involves, you know, stakeholder engagement and communication and training and impact assessment and things like that. And I look at the way the Obama administration actually carried out the repeal of don't ask, don't tell. And it hits like every single change management principle you can imagine. And it's almost like the exact opposite of what Clinton did. You know, Clinton was just kind of like sort of forced it upon folks. And it obviously, as you can tell, didn't work out very well. But the way the Obama administration did it, you know, in terms of getting the most senior leadership of the Pentagon on board before trying to push it forward anymore. Trying to do an assessment of what the impact was. So they did a survey of all the troops before they did it to understand where the attitudes were, what the issues were, what the concerns were. They did a lot of communication within the military to help them understand what it was gonna happen and when it was gonna happen, how it was gonna happen. And then there was a training. And so every single member of the military, and I think you went through it, had to go through training about, you know, what it meant to serve alongside gays even though they were all- Face-to-face training. It wasn't an online thing. It had to be like in-person training about like, you know, you're gonna be serving alongside gays now. And it's like, well, no, I already am serving alongside gays. I just, you know, know it now for a fact, as opposed to a hunch. So, and really what most of the training ended up being was just about respect. That's all it really was. It was like, you know, if you're gonna serve alongside someone, you know, leadership is about respect. It's about respecting individuals, respecting people. And if we treat them with respect, then you've got nothing really to worry about in the implementation of don't ask, don't tell. So I think that that was really key in the implementation. And I think the lessons that we learned from that will be useful, I think, as we try to address things like benefits or transgender integration, well, recognition of and ability for transgender troops to join and stay in the service. So I wonder, where do we stand with service members, active duty service members, access to benefits and where do we stand with veterans access to equality in terms of benefits? So speaking for active duty service members, it's from a benefits perspective of what you get is a legally married same sex couple. It is exactly the same from the perspective of if you are a legally married same sex couple, you get access to absolutely everything that legally married straight couples get. Where a little bit of the difference is, is that LGBT people can't get married in every single state across the country. So there's a little bit of a discrepancy there. The way the department handled that was to create a policy that became very vague and did not include sexual orientation in it. Obviously gender identity is not a player in this because it's still a bar to service. Anybody, if you could not get legally married in the state in which you lived, you could get non-chargeable leave so you wouldn't have to take vacation to go get married somewhere. Veterans benefits are a whole separate ball of wax. Unfortunately, the Department of Veterans Affairs has not come out with a sweeping policy as to how to address LGBT veterans benefits and they are not being handled equally across states, across where people go. We are slowly getting there but the department obviously has other issues to deal with not that this is not important but there are other things that they need to focus on. Well, there are other things they are dealing with and we're slowly starting to see veterans benefits roll in for LGBT service veterans. There are still claims that are being denied for whatever benefit that they're trying to get to and that's one thing that we're trying to work to equalize that because it's not fair that it's not happening across the board. So one thing, Jeff mentioned the leave that's been allocated for service members who are in places where they can't legally get married. The Army used to say that if they wanted you to have a wife, they would issue you one. So not long ago you could not have done this. Now you're actually outspoken on an issue. That's an unusual profile for a military officer to take to be outspoken on a public issue that still generates significant political fire. Likewise, commander Dunning, unusual to be an officer, a serving military officer who has been outspoken on an issue that remains not only not unresolved but resolved against you actually sort of in policy and law at the time. So how did that affect you and how do you anticipate that affecting you as you go forward? It was interesting. I mean, I think when I first came out publicly and I went to my, I was a reservist and so I was stationed at Naval Air Station Alameda, came out publicly, it was in the paper, I reported for duty the next weekend and they informed me that legal wanted to see me. Thank surprise, right? But what I found interesting is that my colleagues, it wasn't so much, just once I'd like to come out to someone and have them go, no, not you. So, it wasn't like it was a huge surprise, I think, to my unit members, but I think they felt almost like I was being disloyal to the organization, I was being disloyal to the military. The fact that I hadn't gone through my chain of command, the fact that I had been public about it, they felt like I was trying to shame the military and really what I was trying to do was shame a policy that I felt was making the military weaker. So it wasn't like I was trying to make the military weaker and shame it, I was trying to make it stronger by shaming this policy that I felt was undermining it. And so, their reaction was really very much more about like why would you risk your career, why are you trying to shame the military? And once I sat down and I got like on your fitness report, it goes from, it isn't just like ABCD, it goes down to like FGH, I mean they use like half the alphabet in terms of the grades that you can get on your fitness reports. And I got like an F or a G in judgment shortly after I came out. And I knew that that would be a career killer, I knew that if that ever went into my record that I'd never advance. So I went to the commanding officer and I kind of explained to him, I sat down one on one with him and I explained why I came out, what it was like to be gay under the policy. And he understood and he went back and did a corrective letter and ended up giving me an A in judgment. And in fact, he actually testified on my behalf at my discharge hearing. I don't know how many of you remember 93 in that whole year, first year of Clinton's office when this was like such a big issue. And all the media was like men, showers, showers, men, men, showers, men, showers, men, showers. That's like all they cared about. And I was like, the lesbians must be dry-cleaned because there's never a mention of women in this entire debate. So that was another part of my impetus is to sort of bring a female voice to the conversation. You know, it was like the L, G, B, T. And so anyway, I would just say it's challenging. You get sort of a group like, why are you doing this? But then when you talk one on one with people, they tend to get it. They were a little nervous about it and they were nervous about my career. They were nervous that I was trying to shame the military, but overall, I think the reception was pretty good. So from my perspective, I mentioned earlier, it's no big deal. So my intention on repeal day was just to show up to work and the weight was lifted off my shoulders. That's kind of the way I wanted it to happen. It didn't so much go that way and looking back, I'm glad and here's the story. So because of my work with Outserve, I was asked to do a bunch of interviews that would run on repeal day. I actually had done an interview prior to the repeal within Colorado Springs where my face was blacked out on a local TV station. And so I did a follow-up interview with that and then also the Denver Post interviewed me. And so my colonel at the time got wind of it, it got to him and he was actually geographically separated in Alabama and he went and called my civilian boss who was a government civilian and Colonel Mitchell was asking, Frank, Frank did you know about this? And Frank was one of the individuals I had confided in before the repeal and Frank said, well, yes, sir, I did and kind of the way Zoe said, Colonel Mitchell got all in a huff and said, well, Frank, why didn't you tell me about this? I need to know about this stuff. And Frank kind of said, sir, don't know what you don't get about. Don't ask, don't tell. So in one of my feedback sessions, he actually kind of brought it up and he said, oh, Jeff, I know this is a sticky topic. And I'm like, well, no, sir, it's not. And he wanted to make sure everything was going well and it was. Thank you. I don't know if you all have any questions for us, but if you do, you should write them on those cards and we'll be happy to try to answer them. While we're pulling those up, let me just ask Aaron to talk about what these last few weeks have been for the transgender rights movement in the military because things have happened very fast recently. Yeah, I think we're at the beginning of the end of this policy. All of a sudden, the president's spokesperson in the White House said not only is the Secretary of Defense in favor of open to a review, but the president is open to a review as well. So that doesn't mean the policy is gonna change tomorrow, but once the White House says that it's open to reviewing the policy, that's the policies going out the door. Until the person in the White House changes. Well, said it might take a long time, President Obama might not be the president to do it and you might get a Republican president, so this certainly might be a very drawn out process. And actually you could also get a statutory backlash in Congress depending on who's in control of what, which will set the clock back potentially decades. But that having been said for now, with a favorable administration and a regulation that the administration is open to reviewing, that's a big, big change. So where to go? Where should one go to get legal guidance on changing of military records or upgrading a discharge, especially for veterans who served during World War II? Right, actually this is right after World War II, 1946 to 1949 on this. www.outserved-sldn.org and click on legal assistance. In all honesty, yes, so one of the arms that our organization, after the merger that we have kept, is providing legal assistance to veterans that wanna get their discharges upgraded and other kind of issues that they're dealing with. We have hired a team of lawyers that look at this, that push the discharge upgrades. There's a specific discharge upgrade form on our website that you put in all the information and they open your case and then they go ahead and start their proceedings. And there are discharge upgrades, but there's also, you may not be aware that if you get kicked out for being gay, your DD214, which is your record of service, will actually show the reason for discharge and it'll say right on there, homosexuality. And so a lot of people who are kicked out for being gay now have this, anytime they apply for a job, sometimes they ask for this evidence of service and you're essentially outing yourself every time you apply for a job. So it's not only the upgrade of the characterization of discharge, like from dishonorable to honorable or whatever, but also you can get a new DD214 that does not have homosexuality written out and big letters on your paperwork as to your reason for discharge. Another question here. To what degree do you think a generational change in LGBT acceptance and awareness contributed to the change in the military's policy on LGBT and LT service members? Just anecdotally, like huge. I mean, I think even the survey that they did, the Pentagon did of troops, they showed the level of acceptance and resistance by age band and it was a direct correlation, sort of like the older they were, the more resistant and the younger, the more like whatever. And you had poll after poll after poll coming out showing between 70 and 80% of the public in favor of gay serving openly. With the question of transgender military service, especially if the change happened sooner rather than later, there's a chance that the military could proceed a lot of the attitudinal shifts that are just now happening and that are gonna happen more and more over the next number of years. And so there's a way in which it could really have pretty profound implications for gender in America, for the military to stop discriminating. Another really quick observation on that is as well as it becomes more accepted, I see that the service members care less about it as an issue and there's not, they don't feel it's normal to them. 18 year old soldiers that signed up six months ago never knew what Commander Dunning had to deal with. This, so maybe I'll ask one more question here. Do any of you have pressing issues we haven't resolved that you'd like to raise before I do that? Yes. Okay, Erin's up for our question here. Well, so this, but you wanted to ask a last question as well. No, I see the floor here, go ahead. I think we do need to talk about the militarization of the gay and the queer community. And I feel like there's a way in which our kind of, I will use the word uncritical, veneration of veterans and warriors does a lot of work to kind of push off the table some pretty important points about militarism and militarism of the queer community. And I feel like, yes, Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal was a very important moment and I fought personally very hard for it, but what impact did that have on kind of pushing aside other voices in the gay community and as we move forward with transgender inclusion, what effect will that have, for example, on gender queer people who will not be accepted in the military right away or gender neutral people? And this is just not something that we've talked about yet. Any last questions from you all or issues you wanna raise? I'll just close by asking you to comment on the military's in a drawdown now. Generally minority groups have made inroads in equality and opportunity in the armed forces and elsewhere in society at times when the demand for services was so high that there wasn't the will to continue to discriminate. So are we at risk? Maybe I'm an eternal optimist, but it would seem to me that the train is going so fast right now that we almost could increase the work that we're doing because now we really are trying to take a look at, okay, if we're gonna have a leaner, better force, it really needs to be a leaner, better, more educated force. And so it would be a great opportunity, again, my optimistic side. But I think we can do that where we're gonna focus more on education, we're gonna focus more on making sure that everybody has equal rights and understands what's going on because we're all gonna be, there's gonna be less of us and we're gonna have to work as a better team to get to where we need to go and the only way we can do that is if we have equality. It feels like at least for now, even in a drawdown, they're still keeping a kind of broad embrace of diversity. There's always room for improvement, obviously, but I haven't seen that suddenly these programs are being kind of ignored because we don't need to recruit as aggressively. Okay, I wanna thank everybody for coming tonight. I wanna thank Alicia and Karen and Louise for setting this up, the Cal Humanities, UC Humanities Research Institute, the Cal State Library, the San Francisco Public Library and everybody here who came and let's have a round of applause for our panelists. Thank you.