The Trump administration has defended restrictions on transgender military service as necessary for readiness. Drawing on your experience as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, how do you view the changes under Pete Hegseth, and what do you think is missing from the public debate?

The President in his executive order, and the Secretary of Defense in his direction to the force, made assertions that people identifying as transgender were less capable of doing the jobs required of them, simply because they identify as transgender. Normally, in the policy process, deciding who is eligible to do jobs is based on facts and standards. You look at those people as individuals and judge whether they meet the criteria to serve. Many military jobs have different specific requirements for people. They are tested regularly for certain professions, such as flying, driving armored vehicles, or infantry work. You have to be part of a crew that meets all of its training goals, like hitting a target a certain number of times. You have to maintain a certain level of physical fitness and pass certain qualification tests. Then, when it comes time to deploy, every person is looked at based on a very specific set of standards with regard to their mental and physical health. And what the president directed Secretary Hegseth to do had no basis in whether or not those people can actually do their jobs. All these people were serving as transgender Americans, and had already been deployed, even multiple times over the past ten years, when the first people were allowed to gender transition while serving.

There were, I believe, just over 4,000 people serving when the current president directed Secretary Hegseth to remove transgender people from the military on the basis that they were unfit and dangerous. But meanwhile, some of them had been serving for 10 years. All of them had been promoted at least once. Many of them had been promoted two or three times.

Many of them also deployed with their units, whether on a ship, in an aircraft squadron, or in an army formation. They have been proving for at least a decade that they were qualified to do those jobs.

So, the administration made a lot of assertions about the inadequacies or the failures of transgender Americans in general, which make them unable to serve in the military and be successful. They didn’t present any data. But there are data to analyze on their performance, because these people have been monitored, promoted, and given qualifications. The data do not show that these people are failing any more than a typical group of young Americans. I find difficulty with the assertion that they are dangerous or that they are incapable.

You served for about 20 years in the Navy before becoming a civilian government leader. How did your understanding of gender and leadership change across those experiences? Was there a particular moment that challenged your earlier assumptions?

As a freshman in college, I began ROTC in 1984. I started on active duty in the Navy in 1988. But through the entire experience, I had ROTC classmates who were women. They weren't allowed at that time to do the same things that I did. The available occupational specialties for officers were different for women. They couldn't serve on combat warships, but they still wanted to join the Navy. They couldn't fly combat airplanes, which was my desire. They could fly airplanes, though, but only in training situations. They could become flight instructors. They could fly an aircraft that would only support training of other Navy assets, but they could not deploy in the case of a conflict at that time. They met the same academic standards I did, and they had their own fitness standards to meet.

I didn't start to work with women as colleagues doing the same work which I did until 1998, because it was only in 1993 that the rules were changed to allow women to fly in combat aircraft. In 1994, I became an instructor in my aircraft, a combat aircraft, a fleet aircraft, not a training airplane. And because the policy had changed about a year before, women were starting to show up to get trained in the aircraft for the fleet. I was one of the first instructors for my airplane, teaching women how to fly that airplane.

There used to be a committee in the military called the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It was started decades earlier. A member of that committee said to me, "Lieutenant, you're young; you're in the fleet. What do you think about women someday gaining the chance to do what you do?” I had been with women all the time until I got to the fleet. I said that I didn’t know of anything that I do that a woman can't do. Women just have to be given the opportunity. The only question was whether they would be given a fair chance at the training. In 1994 I started instructing women, and therefore I only saw them in an instructor-student capacity. But still, they were just as good as anybody else.

We had women enlisted sailors who were aircraft maintainers and other enlisted specialties. The squadron was just as capable as ever. They were officers. They were aviators. They were sailors. They were maintenance professionals fixing the airplane that was going to keep me alive. All I cared about was whether people would do their job.

Is it a different dynamic? Yes, as an all-male organization, there was a different way of talking, of doing things, of socializing that was pretty male-based. The military had a culture then of a lot of alcohol being involved in social organizations. It basically was a locker room in many respects. The introduction of women challenged that because you weren't going to talk about women with women in the room the way that you did when they were not, especially in the 1980s and in the 1990s. So, it challenged people. We had to remember that we were there to do a job, and the people that are here have been found to be qualified for this job. So, let's do this job, and maybe let's be a little bit smarter and more collegial while doing it.

Later, in my last job as a senior official in the Pentagon, I served with two of the earliest women fighter pilots from the Navy and the Air Force. They were in uniform as a two-star general and a three-star admiral. They were outstanding military aviators who became senior leaders, the same as my friends from my era that rose up to command aircraft carriers, make admiral, and more. They were no different. They just happened to be women.

One thing I do know is that the generation I came from, the women had to work harder and cross more barriers than I did, because they were not given an expectation that they were going to be good enough until they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were. I had a lot of respect for that.

But I got to see those women come up, women infantry officers and the like, who got the opportunity to prove themselves and progress. They were outstanding professionals.

The thing that matters most for a leader is making sure everyone is supported, so they get the best chance and the fairest chance to be their best self and help get the job done. If someone is having a difficult time getting the job done, there are rules and regulations on dealing with that. But it has to start with finding that opportunity for people to do the thing they signed up to do.

The only questions to be considered are: are we both good at our jobs, and are we going to get through this together? Can I count on you? Can you count on me? That's what matters.

In your essay "Transphobia and National Security," published by CSIS, you argued that excluding transgender Americans from military service has consequences beyond the armed forces. How has your own experience shaped your understanding of the connections between military service and acceptance in American society?

The military protects not just the country and our borders, but our democracy and way of life. For the past 55 years or so, all those people have been volunteers who signed up to do it. It can ask hard things of people.

Veterans have a great deal of respect. They're often considered to be some of the best in America. Trans Americans being excluded from military service means that those people, by definition, can't become a part of the group of people whom the average American respects the most. I don't think serving necessarily makes you a better person. It's a path you decided to take. It's public service. You're doing something for every American.

In the Second World War, Japanese Americans were being held essentially in prison camps in the Western United States, and some of them were fighting for the right to fight for this country still, and they put them into all-Japanese units. They were some of the best army units we had in World War II, and they earned some of the highest decorations for heroism. In other words, even those people who we, as Americans, were afraid of and put in prison camps became some of our greatest warriors in the country’s time of incredible need.

It's about who gets to be seen as American. There can be a whole debate as to whether the esteem for a veteran is disproportionately high when compared to other people who serve our country. The average civil servant, the ordinary person who volunteers in the community, perhaps should get more love. That's my personal opinion because it takes all of it. We're not Sparta. We're not some other country where the only institution, or vocation or profession, that matters is the profession of arms.

The military exists to protect all of the other good things that go on. The larger country needs the military. When you start to exclude people from serving, you are pushing them to the fringes of society.

If you serve, you earn respect. Over time, you become more accepted. Trying to exclude trans people from the military is a deliberate attempt to keep them from being seen as valuable members of society. It’s dangerous for the health of a country when you can determine that a group of people within your country, who are legitimate, law-abiding citizens, capable and wanting to volunteer to help other people, should be excluded because you don't like them. The question becomes then: who's next? It is a definite canary in the coal mine because people who identify as trans form one of the smallest groups of people out there. Somewhere about 1% of adults identify as trans, depending upon the study you use.

They're found everywhere. Trans people are spread across the American demographic. So, to say that just because they're trans means they can't serve means that there will be somebody next who cannot. It's not given. You have to volunteer, but then you also have to prove yourself. To say that Americans can't prove themselves by serving other Americans is the start of a slippery slope.

Drawing on your experience in the Asia Pacific, how did working with regional partners shape your understanding of the United States' role in the region? Is there a lesson from that time that you think American leaders should keep in mind today?

When I was there, we had just invaded Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. And what I learned from that experience in relation to your question was, historically, for a long time after World War II, the United States of America was the guarantor of freedom and the opportunity for democracy. Especially in the early Cold War, the US was keeping communism at bay. That had some pluses and minuses in how it was done. But countries look for us first to help maintain stability. They're looking for reliable partners more than anything else. Can I trust you? Are you going to do what you say? Are you going to be there when we need you to be there?

China is a big country, getting bigger and economically and militarily more powerful by the day. We have to be able to rely upon the U.S. to be our friend. We can't be with you. We're not going to go to Iraq with you. We're not going to do things like that with you. We can't. We don't believe in that. But we also believe that you can help us maintain our independence and our ability to make the decisions we want to make for our people. You need to be reliable. Don't leave us hanging.

It takes years and decades to build the trust you need for when times are tough. And you can break that trust in a minute. That goes for personal relations and professional relationships of any kind.

Institutional trust, trust between organizations, trust within large parts of organizations, are built over time, and they can be lost in a second if you're not careful and if you don't value them. You might have to make a decision which breaks trust or breaks a prior agreement, but you must realize how long that trust could be lost for, and how much damage could be done.

So, when I think about what I learned in that time, it was about being reliable, predictable, and as candid as you can be with a partner and a friend, though sometimes you can't share everything that you are feeling.