The military used to be at the tip of the spear instead of cutting the spear off.
As she came to realize her true gender as a woman, Jennifer Peace knew she needed to have two difficult conversations.
The first would be with her wife, Deborah.
The second would be with the Army.
Until then, she was known as a male intelligence officer with a bright future who’d just returned from a second combat deployment.
Almost three years later, Capt. Peace is happier than ever with her wife and three children.
But she’s still waiting to find out what the Army has in store for her.
“It’s excruciating,” said Peace, 30, a Spanaway resident who works as an intelligence officer at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
She’s a soldier not-so-patiently waiting for a new Pentagon policy she’s almost certain will repeal the Defense Department’s ban on transgender military service members.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter has signaled the policy change repeatedly in the last year. He convened a working group tasked with figuring out how to integrate transgender troops into ground-level units.
So far, Carter has made clear that the Defense Department won’t discharge transgender military service members. Kicking someone out of the Armed Forces for that reason now requires approval from an assistant secretary of defense.
But until Carter’s group finishes its assignment, the Army has no guidelines on how to process and promote transgender soldiers who until March faced a summary discharge because of who they are.
“There’s a collective holding your breath,” said Sue Fulton, a former Army officer who is president of a transgender military advocacy group called SPARTA.
“There is joy in knowing that change is coming and that you’ll be able to live as your authentic self and continue to serve honorably,” Fulton said, “but at the same time that isn’t happening today, that’s a few months down the road.”
For now, Peace and other service members are left in a sort of limbo.
Although she’s spent more than $50,000 on her transformation, legally changed her name and been known to her commanders as a woman for nearly a year, her peers are still under formal orders to refer to her as a man.