Staff Sergeant Cathrine Schmid has served in the US Army for 12 years, and has served as openly trans for three.
Staff Sergeant Cathrine Schmid has served in the US Army for 12 years, and has served as a woman since 2014. Lambda Legal

A coalition of human rights groups and individuals, including a staff sergeant stationed in Lakewood's Joint Base Lewis-McChord, are suing the Trump administration over its new policy banning transgender people from serving in the military.

The lawsuit, filed this morning in US District Court in Seattle, forcefully argues that the federal government's ban unconstitutionally legalizes discrimination against trans individuals.

"Dripping with animus, the Ban and the current accessions bar violate the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment and the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment," the complaint reads. "They are unsupported by any compelling, important, or even rational justification."

The military lifted a preexisting ban on transgender people serving openly in June of 2016, but in July of 2017, the day after the House of Representatives approved sanctions against Russia in the midst of President Trump's Russian election meddling scandal, Trump tweeted that the military's new policy would be reversed. As the new complaint notes, the Department of Defense's decision to lift the ban on transgender soldiers arrived after years of research concluding that the case for such a ban was weak.

A 2014 commission convened by the Palm Center research institute to study the issue—one that included a former US Surgeon General, doctors, psychologists, a retired brigadier general, and a retired rear admiral—found, for example, that there was "no compelling medical rationale" for banning trans military members. And in 2015, a Department of Defense-commissioned study from RAND found that, contrary to myths about transitioning in the military, allowing trans members to serve openly would have a minuscule impact on health care costs and a "negligible" impact on readiness. Foreign armies had already successfully allowed trans soldiers to serve openly, the report noted. And not all transgender soldiers would even seek treatment related to their gender.

The RAND study estimated that, if the ban was lifted, just 10 to 130 service members a year might have reduced deployability because of healthcare treatment. That number makes up less than a tenth of a percentage point of the 102,500 non-deployable soldiers the Army employed in 2015.

Among those suing the president and the Secretary of Defense is US Army Staff Sergeant Cathrine Schmid, an intelligence analyst stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord outside of Tacoma. Schmid has been serving in the military for more than a decade and started living openly as a woman in 2014. Schmid applied to become a specialized Army warrant officer in intelligence in June of this year, and while her application was initially approved, it was put on hold in July.

Schmid, who was born on an Air Force base and deployed to Iraq in 2013, told ELLE Magazine shortly after Trump's tweets that she would stay in the Army until she was kicked out.

"I love being in the Army, and my record shows that I'm good at it," Schmid told ELLE. "I would hate to see the military divided or have it lose a significant amount of qualified soldiers. I deeply care about the mission."

Aside from the Human Rights Campaign and the Seattle-based trans rights group Gender Justice League, the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Ryan Karnoski, a 22-year-old transgender man from Seattle, and Drew Layne, a transgender high school student from Texas. Both Karnoski and Layne want to serve in the military. According to the complaint, Layne had been communicating with an Air Force recruiter in early July, but when he told the recruiter he was trans, the recruiter stopped communicating with him.



“This ban is disrespectful and dishonorable to the thousands of transgender men and women who are boldly and bravely serving our country,” Sasha Buchert, a transgender military veteran and staff attorney at Lambda Legal, one of the firms representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “It deprives our armed forces of those wanting to serve at a time when the military is already facing threats on multiple fronts. It also is disrespectful to the leadership at the Department of Defense who worked to develop and implement the current policy allowing open service, which has been operating successfully for more than a year.”

Read the complaint, which includes a stellar breakdown on gender identity, here.