By JT Santana
I have lived long enough to remember when the United States government did not bother pretending LGBTQ+ Americans were equal citizens. I remember when being gay could destroy a career, fracture a family, end military service, invite violence, or turn someone into a convenient political target. I remember politicians debating our humanity as though our lives were another line item awaiting a vote.
I remember something darker, too. I remember the AIDS years, when fear, ignorance, homophobia, and government indifference collided while people were dying. I remember when AIDS was still being called GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency—and when the stigma attached to homosexuality could become inseparable from the stigma attached to illness. I remember accompanying people through segregated hospital entrances to infectious-disease care and learning, long before I should have needed to learn it, what institutional rejection looks like when it is happening to actual human beings rather than appearing later in a history book.
Those memories change how I read legislation like Section 708 of the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. I cannot look at a federal law singling out transgender children and see an isolated health-insurance provision. I see it against a much longer American history in which government has repeatedly discovered that politically vulnerable minorities make useful targets.
For decades, LGBTQ+ Americans fought our way out of that history. We fought criminalization, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, marriage bans, employment discrimination, family discrimination, and the proposition that our relationships and families deserved less legal dignity than everyone else’s. People lost jobs, families, homes, churches, friendships, careers, and sometimes their lives during those battles.
Then, in December 2024, Congress crossed a line LGBTQ+ Americans had spent nearly three decades hoping the federal government had finally learned not to cross.
The FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act included Section 708, which amended federal law governing TRICARE to prohibit coverage for certain medical interventions for gender dysphoria for beneficiaries younger than eighteen when those interventions could result in sterilization (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2025). President Joe Biden signed the legislation on December 23, 2024. The Human Rights Campaign characterized the provision as the first anti-LGBTQ+ federal law enacted since the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 (Human Rights Campaign [HRC], 2024).
The American Civil Liberties Union likewise describes the measure as the first anti-LGBTQ legislation passed by Congress in nearly thirty years (American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], n.d.). That historical distinction deserves considerably more attention than it received.
For nearly three decades, Congress had not enacted another federal law that LGBTQ+ civil-rights organizations characterized in those terms. Then the barrier broke, a president who had publicly championed LGBTQ+ equality signed the legislation, and Washington demonstrated that targeting part of the LGBTQ+ community through federal statute was politically possible again.
That should scare the hell out of us, and it should make us furious.
Do Not Tell Me This Is Merely a Health-Care Rule
Defenders of Section 708 can surround it with clinical terminology, insurance terminology, and arguments about pediatric medicine. They can call it narrow, limited, cautious, protective, or concerned with one controversial category of treatment. None of those descriptions erases what Congress actually did.
The Congressional Research Service states that Section 708 amended 10 U.S.C. § 1079(a) to prohibit TRICARE from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for beneficiaries under eighteen (CRS, 2025). That is the statutory reality, stripped of campaign rhetoric.
The ACLU identified an even more revealing feature during the congressional debate. Hormone therapy and puberty-suppressing medications could remain covered by TRICARE for medical purposes other than treating gender dysphoria, meaning the federal restriction turned partly upon why the treatment was being prescribed (ACLU, 2024a).
Think about what that means.
The medicine itself did not suddenly become the political problem. The identity and diagnosis associated with the patient did.
Congress did not discover puberty blockers in 2024. It did not discover hormone therapy, endocrinology, pediatric medicine, or complicated questions involving adolescents and health care. Those existed long before Speaker Mike Johnson and congressional Republicans turned transgender youth into one of America’s favorite political punching bags.
Congress discovered something else: transgender children had become politically profitable targets.
That distinction changes the entire character of the argument. Once the government says a treatment can remain available for one medical purpose but federal coverage disappears when it is connected to gender dysphoria, the claim that this is merely neutral health policy becomes much harder to sustain.
This is targeted federal policy.
Say what it is.
These Are the Children of People We Ask to Defend Us
There is another part of this that I find particularly revolting. These are not hypothetical families invented for some congressional hearing or cable-news argument. Section 708 reaches children connected to military families.
We ask servicemembers to move their families repeatedly, sometimes across the country and sometimes across the planet. We ask them to leave spouses behind, miss birthdays and graduations, spend months separated from their children, accept disruptions to careers and relationships, and live with the possibility that deployment may end in catastrophic injury or death.
Military children make sacrifices too. They change schools, lose friends, rebuild social networks, watch parents leave for deployments, and live with anxieties most children never encounter. Their families structure enormous portions of their lives around the demands of the United States government.
Then Congress looked at some of those families and decided that transgender children presented a problem requiring federal intervention.
What an extraordinary way to say thank you for your service.
The obscenity becomes clearer when we consider the legislation carrying this provision. This was the National Defense Authorization Act, the massive annual bill responsible for authorizing American military programs and policy.
China exists. Russia exists. Nuclear proliferation exists. Cyberwarfare exists. Terrorism exists. Military recruitment and retention challenges exist. Servicemember suicide exists. Sexual assault within the military exists. Housing problems exist. Military families struggle with childcare, food insecurity, repeated relocation, health-care access, and deployment stress.
Against that enormous catalogue of legitimate national-security responsibilities, Congress decided transgender children warranted federal statutory attention.
A kid sitting in a medical office with a parent became part of America’s national-defense debate.
That is not military strategy. That is culture-war politics wearing camouflage.
I Remember When Stigma Was Government Policy
There is a quieter reason I cannot dismiss any of this.
Long before marriage equality, before LGBTQ+ characters appeared routinely on television, before Pride merchandise showed up in suburban shopping centers, and before corporations discovered rainbow logos every June, there were people living through a very different America. I knew some of them.
During the early AIDS years, fear could enter a room before the patient did. People were frightened of blood, frightened of touch, frightened of gay men, frightened of something medicine itself was still struggling to explain. Rumor traveled faster than science, and stigma could transform a sick person into somebody others believed they had permission to avoid.
I remember hospital environments where separation communicated something even when nobody said the words aloud. I remember escorting people through segregated entrances to infectious-disease care. A door can communicate a social judgment just as effectively as a statute can, and you learn that quickly when you are standing beside someone being told, physically and institutionally, that he enters somewhere different from everyone else.
Those experiences taught me something I have never forgotten. Government discrimination does not remain confined to government.
Law teaches.
Policy teaches.
Official language teaches.
When government identifies a group as exceptional, suspicious, dangerous, inappropriate, or undeserving of the same treatment as everyone else, ordinary people receive the message. Some resist it, some ignore it, and some enthusiastically run with it.
That is one reason Section 708 troubles me far beyond TRICARE reimbursement. Congress did something culturally significant when it returned anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination to federal statute after nearly three decades.
It told America that such legislation was politically possible again.
Discrimination Usually Starts With Someone Easier to Sacrifice
People sometimes imagine civil-rights regression as a dramatic event. They picture a government suddenly revoking decades of progress in one sweeping action, creating such an obvious crisis that everyone immediately recognizes what has happened.
History is rarely so considerate.
Regression often begins with exceptions. Government identifies the person whom society is least likely to defend, creates a special rule for that person, waits for everyone to become accustomed to the exception, then discovers another group or another circumstance requiring another exception.
The political vocabulary is remarkably predictable. Someone is always protecting children, families, morality, taxpayers, military readiness, religious liberty, women’s safety, parental rights, or traditional values. The person losing something gradually disappears beneath the abstraction.
LGBTQ+ Americans have heard variations of those arguments for generations. Gay teachers supposedly endangered children. Gay servicemembers supposedly endangered military cohesion. Same-sex marriage supposedly endangered heterosexual marriage. Gay adoption supposedly endangered families. LGBTQ+ books supposedly endangered students.
Now transgender people have inherited the role of America’s designated cultural emergency. Bathrooms, sports, pronouns, classrooms, identification documents, military service, medical care, and nearly every other aspect of transgender existence have been converted into political battlegrounds.
The target has changed.
The strategy has not changed nearly enough.
The Most Dangerous Part May Be the Precedent
The precise boundaries of Section 708 deserve scrutiny, yet the precedent deserves equal attention. Congress learned that an explicitly LGBTQ+-directed restriction could be attached to one of the country’s most politically difficult bills to oppose, survive negotiations, pass both chambers, reach the president, become law, and remain law.
That lesson is politically valuable.
Legislators now know the barrier can be crossed.
The ACLU warned Congress before passage that Section 708 discriminated against transgender children of servicemembers and urged members to reject the NDAA over its inclusion (ACLU, 2024b). HRC warned that enactment would represent the first anti-LGBTQ+ federal law since DOMA (HRC, 2024).
Those warnings were not theoretical predictions about something that might occur decades later. The legislation passed anyway.
Once a political system demonstrates that something previously considered beyond the boundary is possible, the debate changes. The question stops being whether the boundary can be crossed and becomes how much further politicians can move it.
That is why minorities cannot afford to judge discriminatory policy solely by the number of people affected during its first year. A precedent can matter long after the original provision has been amended, repealed, litigated, or forgotten.
The precedent here is brutally simple: Congress can once again write federal law that LGBTQ+ civil-rights organizations identify as expressly discriminatory against part of our community.
That should never become normal.
Gay and Lesbian Americans Should Not Fool Ourselves
I want to speak directly to gay and lesbian Americans who may be tempted to look at transgender policy and decide this is someone else’s fight. Same-sex marriage remains legal, gay people serve openly throughout American society, and discrimination based on sexual orientation carries far less political legitimacy than it did when many of us were young.
That can create a dangerous illusion of permanent security.
Some people may sincerely disagree with aspects of transgender policy. They may have questions about youth medicine, athletics, schools, parental authority, prisons, identification documents, or other subjects. Civil-rights solidarity does not require pretending every public-policy dispute has an effortless answer.
It requires recognizing the difference between debating policy and deciding a politically vulnerable minority deserves diminished treatment under government.
Gay Americans should recognize that distinction immediately, since we spent generations on the receiving end of it.
Politicians once insisted they had nothing against gay people but simply wanted to protect marriage. Others supposedly respected gay adults but worried about children, military cohesion, schools, adoption, religious values, or public morality.
There was always a qualification between alleged tolerance and actual equality.
There was always a reason why this particular restriction was supposedly different.
There was always somebody telling us we were overreacting.
We were told the closet was not discrimination but discretion. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was sold as compromise. DOMA was sold as protecting marriage. Sodomy laws were defended as expressions of morality.
History has been remarkably unkind to many of those rationalizations.
I refuse to watch transgender Americans become the testing ground where America reconstructs an architecture of minority discrimination that gay and lesbian Americans spent decades fighting to dismantle.
Do Not Assume the Political Appetite Stops With Transgender People
The greatest mistake gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans could make right now is believing political acceptance functions like tenure. We have reached a certain point, the thinking goes, and nobody can seriously take us backward from here.
Ask older Americans how many supposedly settled political questions remained settled forever.
Rights survive through law, institutions, culture, public support, litigation, political participation, and people willing to defend them. None arrives with an eternal guarantee attached.
The movement currently directed at transgender Americans has increasingly used language about biological sex, parental rights, traditional family structures, religious liberty, sexuality, and children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ identities. Several of those arguments overlap with rhetoric historically used against gay and lesbian people.
That does not prove every transgender restriction will inevitably lead to a rollback of gay rights. Serious analysis should resist pretending inevitability where evidence supports risk.
The risk itself is sufficient.
When a political coalition learns that attacking one LGBTQ+ population produces electoral rewards, fundraising, media attention, or ideological victories, there is no rational reason for the rest of us to assume that coalition will voluntarily limit itself forever.
History counsels vigilance, not panic.
It certainly does not counsel complacency.
I Am Done Being Grateful for Being Left Alone
One of the most corrosive consequences of political regression is what it does to the expectations of minorities. People gradually stop asking whether government treats them equally and start asking whether government will leave them alone for another year.
Is my marriage safe?
Is my job safe?
Can my child talk about having two fathers at school?
Can this book remain in the library?
Can that teacher mention her wife?
Can transgender Americans serve?
Can somebody receive medical care?
Will my identification still be recognized?
What happens after the next election?
That is a miserable way to experience citizenship.
I am not interested in spending the rest of my life thanking politicians for allowing me to retain rights that generations of LGBTQ+ Americans fought to secure. I am equally uninterested in bargaining away somebody else’s equality in exchange for temporary assurance that mine will remain untouched.
I am an American citizen, and so are transgender Americans. So are lesbians, bisexual people, nonbinary people, queer teenagers, LGBTQ+ veterans, LGBTQ+ farmers, LGBTQ+ teachers, LGBTQ+ Christians, LGBTQ+ atheists, LGBTQ+ Republicans, LGBTQ+ Democrats, LGBTQ+ independents, and millions of people who would prefer government simply stop making their existence into campaign material.
Citizenship cannot mean full participation for people the majority currently approves of and conditional participation for everybody else.
That is not equality.
That is permission.
President Biden Should Not Escape Accountability
There is another uncomfortable part of this history, and avoiding it would make the argument weaker.
Joe Biden signed the bill.
That fact cannot be buried beneath partisan convenience.
The administration had an extensive record of supporting LGBTQ+ rights, and Biden publicly described the transgender provision as wrong. Yet he signed the NDAA containing it.
The political explanation is obvious. The NDAA is enormous, consequential legislation containing military pay, programs, authorizations, and national-security provisions. Presidents face immense pressure to sign it.
That explains the decision.
It does not erase it.
LGBTQ+ equality cannot mean condemning discriminatory legislation only when the opposing political party signs it. If we expect Republicans to answer for anti-LGBTQ+ provisions they champion, Democrats must answer when they permit those provisions to become law.
History should record both.
Speaker Mike Johnson and the lawmakers who pushed the provision deserve scrutiny for putting it there. Members who voted for the final legislation deserve scrutiny for accepting it. President Biden deserves scrutiny for signing it.
Civil rights become partisan accessories when accountability stops at party lines.
Mine does not.
Do Not Call This National Defense
There is something almost grotesque about the title of the legislation through which this occurred.
The National Defense Authorization Act is supposed to concern defense of the United States and the people who serve it. Yet transgender military families found themselves needing protection from a provision Congress inserted into the defense legislation itself.
The NDAA’s status as must-pass legislation makes the tactic particularly troubling. Members opposing one provision must weigh that objection against military pay, readiness, programs, procurement, personnel policies, and hundreds of other matters bundled into the same legislative vehicle.
That structure creates political cover.
If Congress believes restricting transgender health care is sound national policy, introduce the restriction openly. Hold hearings. Call medical experts from competing perspectives. Hear directly from transgender people. Hear from military parents. Examine longitudinal evidence. Debate costs. Debate ethics. Permit amendments. Make legislators defend their positions before the public.
Then hold a clean vote.
Do not bury a civil-rights dispute inside legislation carrying the defense of the United States and pretend that represents democratic courage.
Yes, This Is Personal
I take this personally, and I make no apology for that. I have lived through too much LGBTQ+ history to view the return of anti-LGBTQ+ federal statutory policy as an academic exercise occurring somewhere far away in Washington.
I remember when government hostility toward LGBTQ+ people was ordinary. I remember how prejudice learned to speak the language of policy, morality, medicine, public safety, family values, and administrative necessity.
I remember how slowly things changed.
I remember people who never got to see them change.
That history leaves me incapable of shrugging when someone says the current restriction is limited to transgender children and does not affect me personally.
What exactly am I supposed to do with that reassurance?
Celebrate that somebody else’s child went first?
Feel fortunate that Congress did not choose gay men this time?
Tell transgender people that I sympathize but cannot risk making their fight mine?
No.
I have been around far too long for that.
If there is one moral lesson LGBTQ+ history should have burned permanently into us, it is that the safest person in a minority community has an obligation to care what happens to the person standing closest to the fire.
Today, transgender Americans are standing closest.
That makes their defense my concern.
We Have Won Impossible Fights Before
Anger should not become despair. LGBTQ+ history contains far too much evidence against hopelessness.
There was a time when sodomy laws appeared permanent. There was a time when openly gay military service sounded politically impossible. There was a time when same-sex marriage was treated as a fringe demand that serious politicians avoided.
America changed.
It changed partly through litigation and legislation, but those formal victories came after millions of smaller acts of courage. People came out to parents, employers, neighbors, congregations, coworkers, and friends. People organized organizations that barely had enough money to keep the lights on. People cared for dying friends when families and institutions abandoned them.
People marched when marching could identify them publicly as gay.
People testified when doing so meant telling strangers intensely personal details about their lives.
People sued.
People voted.
People wrote.
People refused to disappear.
That history gives me reason for something stronger than optimism. It gives me evidence that political regression can be resisted when people recognize it early enough and refuse to normalize it.
Section 708 deserves that resistance.
I Am Not Going Back
I refuse to return politically, culturally, or legally to an America where LGBTQ+ people survive at the pleasure of whoever controls government. I refuse to accept transgender Americans as sacrifices offered up so the rest of us can preserve whatever political comfort we have accumulated.
I will not pretend Section 708 was insignificant merely since its immediate reach was limited. I will not pretend a federal law singled out by major LGBTQ+ civil-rights organizations as the first anti-LGBTQ+ federal enactment since DOMA carries no broader significance.
It does.
Every vote belongs in the historical record. Every amendment belongs there, every lawmaker who fought the provision belongs there, every lawmaker who supported it belongs there, and the president who signed it belongs there.
Future LGBTQ+ Americans deserve an accurate account of what happened during this period. If somebody eventually attempts to rewrite this history and claim nobody recognized the warning signs, the record should prove otherwise.
Some of us recognized them immediately.
We recognized them since we have seen versions of them before.
To My LGBTQ+ Brothers, Sisters, and Siblings
This is not the moment to divide ourselves into politically convenient categories. Gay versus transgender, lesbian versus bisexual, older LGBTQ+ Americans versus younger queer people, or yesterday’s activists versus today’s activists are divisions that benefit people searching for the easiest member of our community to isolate.
Our experiences differ, and our opinions sometimes differ sharply. That is normal within any population numbering millions of people.
One principle should remain nonnegotiable: the political vulnerability of a minority does not grant government permission to treat that minority as less deserving of equal citizenship.
You do not need to understand every transgender experience to defend transgender Americans from discriminatory government policy. You do not need to endorse every position taken by every LGBTQ+ organization, and you certainly do not need to agree with me about every political question.
You need to recognize what happens when government discovers that stripping something from an unpopular minority is politically inexpensive.
The price rarely remains inexpensive forever.
I have seen what institutional stigma can do to people. I have watched fear turn human beings into abstractions, and I have seen government policy reinforce the idea that some people may be treated differently without requiring society to confront the human cost.
I refuse to accept that lesson again.
We did not survive decades of LGBTQ+ history so another generation could inherit a federal government relearning how to discriminate against us. We did not bury friends, march, organize, sue, vote, protest, educate, come out, lose families, rebuild families, confront politicians, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, defeat DOMA, win marriage equality, and force this country to recognize our humanity merely to watch Washington begin carving exceptions into equality again.
Congress broke a barrier that had stood for nearly thirty years.
The first people hit were transgender children in military families.
History will judge what Congress did.
It will judge what the president accepted.
It will judge the people who engineered the restriction and the people who resisted it.
It may judge the rest of us too.
When government decided that one small and politically vulnerable part of the LGBTQ+ community could be singled out again under federal law, did the rest of us decide they were somebody else’s problem?
Or did we remember?
I remember.
That is precisely why I refuse to be quiet now.
We are still here. We have fought government-sanctioned discrimination before, we know the cost of allowing it to become ordinary, and we know what solidarity requires when one part of our community is placed directly in the crosshairs.
None of us is disposable.
References
American Civil Liberties Union. (n.d.). 100+ years fighting for veterans, servicemembers, and their families. https://www.aclu.org/100-years-fighting-for-veterans-servicemembers-families
American Civil Liberties Union. (2024a, December 9). Military families of transgender youth under attack in defense bill. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/military-families-of-transgender-youth-under-attack-in-defense-bill
American Civil Liberties Union. (2024b, December 9). ACLU urges NO vote on National Defense Authorization Act: Includes provision attacking the health and wellbeing of transgender children of servicemembers. https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2024/12/ACLU-Urges-NO-Vote-on-National-Defense-Authorization-Act.pdf
Congressional Research Service. (2025). FY2025 NDAA: TRICARE coverage of gender-affirming care (CRS Insight IN12401). Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN12401/IN12401.4.pdf
Human Rights Campaign. (2024, December 24). President Biden signs defense bill blocking health care for trans military children, first anti-LGBTQ+ federal law enacted since Defense of Marriage Act. https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/president-biden-signs-defense-bill-blocking-health-care-for-trans-military-children-first-anti-lgbtq-federal-law-enacted-since-defense-of-marriage-act
