The Transgender Man At The Center Of Donald Trump’s Military Ban Is Speaking Out

During the early days of his basic training for the U.S. Army, there came a time when Nicolas Talbott stood with 64 other men preparing to answer questions from a superior who had arrived to inspect their quarters. As inspections ended, everyone was asked why they joined the military.

Until that moment, Talbott had only told a few fellow trainees that he was transgender.

“My strategy was to blend in and be judged solely on my performance,” he said.

But that day, after inspections, the words came tumbling out for all to hear when it came time for him to answer why he was there.

“I said, ‘I wanted to prove that transgender people like me can do this and we have something to contribute,’” Talbott recalled saying in an interview with HuffPost on Wednesday.

After that moment, Talbott said fellow trainees came up to him in a “big huddle.”

“They said, ‘Nic, we had no idea. We never would have known. We don’t think any less of you,’” he said.

One person approached and said they thought even more of him, knowing that Talbott had this “extra layer of substance” on his plate, he recalled. In January, shortly after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning people with gender dysphoria from military service, Talbott, along with six other trans service members, sued the administration under the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection provision.

After a series of hearings, a federal judge overseeing his case in Washington, D.C., grilled government attorneys over whether Trump’s order was discriminatory on its face. She found it was, and a tug-of-war in the courts between Talbott and the now 32 trans service members who have joined his lawsuit has continued up to the appellate level.

So when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated a ban on transgender military service on Wednesday, as other litigation played out in a separate but similar case, it took only a few hours before the phone calls started rolling in.

“People I went to basic with reached out and said, ‘Sir, I know I’m just a private, but is there anything I can do? What can I do? How are you doing?’” Talbott said.

Today, Talbott is a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, and being open about who he is as he has pursued a career in the U.S. military has “created a gateway” to new conversations. It has helped answer questions among fellow service members. And this, Talbott said, is something he believes has only improved his and fellow soldiers’ capacity to serve the United States military — and each other — to the best of their ability.

“I received tremendous amounts of support all across the board. It’s been a very positive and enlightening experience,” Talbott said.

That acceptance and a shared belief among service members that they should be judged for their actions — and not who or what they identify as — stands in profound contrast to the position the Trump administration has taken toward trans service members of late and historically.

In January, via executive order, Trump claimed that “radical gender ideology” had permeated the military and harmed its readiness. During his first administration, Trump tried to ban transgender troops — they had only been allowed to serve openly since 2016 — and he had some degree of success doing it. The Supreme Court in 2019 agreed to uphold the ban while litigation against it ensued.

It wasn’t until 2021 that then-President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s ban.

Trump’s executive order this January conspicuously did not use the word “transgender.” Instead, it focused on “gender dysphoria” and banned from service anyone expressing a “false gender identity” different from their sex assigned at birth. Within a month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a policy echoing Trump’s order banning troops with gender dysphoria. (Gender dysphoria is the distress one feels when a person’s gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth don’t align.)

Hegseth’s memo did not explain how or why the Defense Department had concluded that people diagnosed with gender dysphoria were unfit or a liability. He only stated that they did not meet the military’s “high standards for service member readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.”

The ban sparked a series of lawsuits in multiple venues, including Washington state and the District of Columbia.

The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday was a direct response to the Washington state challenge brought by Emily Shilling, a Naval commander with 20 years of experience who is also a transgender woman. Shilling’s case, while similar, is still distinct from Talbott’s lawsuit, and the result for Shilling does not mean Talbott’s case is decided or over.

Talbott’s case went before the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., last month after the Trump administration pushed to have U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes’s injunction on the ban lifted.

Reyes had found the ban was “soaked in animus” towards Talbott and other trans service members. To that end, Reyes blasted the government for being unable to point to data that supported its claims that trans members were less honest or capable, or posed a danger to military readiness, or were prohibitively expensive to take care of.

Nicolas Talbott, second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, said being open about who he is as he has pursued a career in the military has “created a gateway” to new conversations.

Nic Talbott

While scrutinizing the administration’s claims that care for trans troops was uniquely harmful, Reyes pointed out that the U.S. military spent $42 million on Viagra in 2024 versus just $5.2 million that same year on gender affirming care for trans soldiers.

The military considers Viagra a treatment for depression and post-traumatic stress, and as Reyes noted, gender affirming care has been found to ease depression, too. The stats gave the judge pause as she pondered aloud in court this spring: If the ban was about improving military readiness, how was the military more ready by denying troops the care they need to perform at their highest level?

The judge over Shilling’s case in Washington state, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, did not rule on whether the policy was based on animus. Shannon Minter, Talbott’s attorney, told HuffPost on Wednesday that this distinction between the cases is crucial.

While the Supreme Court’s decision “puts an enormous amount of pressure” on the appellate court, it is not bound by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shilling.

“They can issue their own decision and are supposed to make their own independent assessment,” Minter said.

The D.C. Appeals Court seemed dubious about arguments from Justice Department lawyers who claimed the ban wasn’t discriminatory. The government’s position that transgender people can still serve so long as they haven’t been diagnosed with dysphoria or are living in a sex or gender different from their own prompted one appellate judge to remark in seeming disbelief. “Your argument that this is not a ban on transgender service is that you can serve as a transgender person so long as you don’t serve as a transgender person? Is that right?” Judge Cornelia Pilard said.

The Justice Department insisted then and now that the ban isn’t discriminatory because gender dysphoria amounts to a medical condition that requires medical treatments, which they say is disruptive to military service.

But being transgender or being diagnosed with gender dysphoria never stopped Talbott from being the best the military would demand of him, he said.

He was diagnosed with gender dysphoria a full nine years before he joined the Army.

“I received my diagnosis back in 2011, when I was still in high school. Being able to go through the process of transitioning, I’ve become a better version of myself every single day since I began that process,” Talbott said. “I have so much more confidence and clarity than I did when I first began. Some of that can be attributed to being 31 years old versus 18 at the time, and that comes with life experience and growing older. But it has been proven by my performance that my being transgender has had no impact on military service.”

Talbott was an honor graduate at basic combat training, a distinction that typically occurs when a person is recognized for stepping up into leadership roles even when not called to do so.

He also completed officer candidate school, which required intense interviews with officer boards before finally being accepted into a 12-week-long rigorous training program. Talbott recalled traveling 14 hours to officer training school after basic training was done.

While there, he said he was taught how to run military operations and “how to make quick split-second decisions in super high-pressure situations and do so with little to no sleep or resources.”

He said he also learned how to “lead young people into what might be the worst day of their lives,” and how to do it effectively.

His hard work paid off: Talbott was eventually made a platoon leader for a military police unit.

“The U.S. military is something I’ve always had an interest in. Starting from playing Army on the playground, going into high school marching band and learning Veterans Day is the most important performance I’ll ever give… or going to college for an undergraduate degree and having my criminology and counterterrorism professor tell me I would be an incredible asset to the U.S. military,” he said. “This is something I have spent most of my adult life working toward.”

Today, as a member of the Army Reserve, Talbott says he still has a civilian job that provides an income, but the ban has left him “in limbo otherwise.”

He’ll “feel the heat,” he said, of losing his military income as well as the stress of simply being in this situation.

But it wasn’t just himself he was worried about, he said.

“I also have concerns for my unit and what this is going to look like for them. There’s a human side to this. This impacts more than just we trans service members, it impacts our families and the people we serve with. So many of us have so many years of experience in our units. This has been our livelihood for so long, it’s going to have a huge impact operationally and emotionally,” he said.

“I went in as someone who had fully transitioned, and it is so mind-blowing to me that we’re even questioning whether or not I should be allowed to continue to serve. I was serving without an issue. Why are they trying to make an issue where none existed previously?” Talbott said.

People who have transitioned or are transitioning while in service are still subject to medical evaluations and are assessed on an individualized basis, he emphasized.

“If any of us could not perform our duty, we would be separated as individuals. There’s no reason to do this mass exodus,” Talbott said.

And in addition to the financial catastrophe that can come for people who will lose their jobs, Minter emphasized other financial penalties that ousted trans service members face, too, including the repayment of sign-on bonuses.

“This is designed to be punitive,” Minter said. “It is designed not just to kick people out but to harm them. It is utterly baffling.”

Minter represented Talbott when he sued the Trump administration over the first ban. And though many years have passed since then, Minter’s shock and horror at the administration is no less potent.

The Trump administration’s likening of trans people as individuals inherently incapable of honesty or integrity is deeply discriminatory and offensive, Minter said.

“If this policy were applied verbatim to any other group, it would be immediately struck down, and the Supreme Court wouldn’t have issued that stay,” he said. “It’s an egregious double standard and just an indication that, unfortunately, we still live in a time when it is considered OK to demean and discriminate against transgender people. Shame on us for that, and shame on the Supreme Court.”