For more than a year, Captain Katie Benn has been on administrative absence from the U.S. Army, pulled from her deployment after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender individuals from serving in the military.
When faced with the decision last spring to voluntarily leave the military with an honorable discharge and about $60,000 in separation pay, Benn, a decorated air defense artillery officer and honor graduate of captain’s training, decided to fight to keep serving in the military, inspired by the “Warrior Ethos” of “never quit.”
“It's been a bumpy road,” Benn, 41, told Raw Story. “I struggled with a lot of loneliness because the Army has been my family since I enlisted, and being separated from my Army family was a difficult thing for me.”
Benn, who enlisted in 2012 and became a commissioned officer in 2021, applied for a waiver to stay in the military before the ban took effect, but said she has had no response in the past year.
Now, “it’s a moot issue,” Benn said, as she’s entering into what she says is an involuntary medical retirement come October.
“I did not want to end my career yet,” Benn said. “I would have much preferred to have kept going. I love the Army. I love my country. I love serving. I love my soldiers.”
While on leave, Benn has been living in Clarksville, Tennessee, near where she’s been stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and has received medical treatment for a combat-related injury.
“I probably would not be ending my career this year if it had not been for the ban,” Benn said.
The Pentagon estimated that 4,200 transgender service members were serving in the military as of last year, which reflects the number of transgender service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria and excludes “thousands that are stealth, in the closet or non-binary," said Kara Corcoran, executive director of SPARTA Pride, a nonpartisan nonprofit supporting transgender service members and veterans.
Transgender service members who chose to stay and fight the ban were typically placed on administrative absences as continuing to serve would require them to be assigned the wrong gender marker, Corcoran said.
“The rarity is the people who have not been put on administrative absence,” said Corcoran, a transgender Army Infantry Major who began the involuntarily separation process from the military last year after 18 years of service.
"It's just an unfortunate situation.”
A federal court recently granted a motion to extend to all transgender service members protections granted in a June 1 ruling to plaintiffs in Talbott v. USA that declared the Pentagon’s transgender military ban to be unconstitutional.
But Corcoran has encouraged transgender service members to remember that the Talbott case is still ongoing and to not make “rash” decisions given various unknowns about how the policies will play out.
“I, much like everyone else, feel stabbed in the back and a sense of betrayal by my country when we go through being banned when we didn't do anything wrong,” Corcoran said.
“A significant portion of service members will definitely feel this distress and pain that we're going through, and everyone has different ways to cope with it and go through it.”
Benn said she fought the medical retirement as she did not want to stop serving, but the Talbott ruling is too late to help her.
“She's the kind of person that would have served for 19, 20, 25 years with broken knees, broken back, broken mind,” said Priya Rashid, Benn’s attorney, the legal director of the Trans Representation Project at the National Institute of Military Justice and a military reservist.
“When we deploy, we deploy when we're younger. We get injuries when we're younger. Our body gets beaten up, but we want to serve, so they forced her into the medical retirement because she would have just kept on serving injured, and that's what you'll see with a lot of the transgender service members like Logan Ireland.”
Ireland, an Air Force master sergeant, was kicked out of the military after getting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, now a medical condition that the Pentagon says disqualifies people from military service, NPR reported.
Service members — transgender or not — often still serve with injuries, Benn said.
“There's sort of this idea of like suck it up and drive on,” Benn said. “There’s this idea of like ‘I'm hurt, but there's a job, and there's a mission. I have people counting on me, and I'm going to charge ahead and keep doing the job.’”
Benn has come to terms with the medical retirement related to the injuries sustained in a combat zone between June 2023 and October 2024.
“At the end of the day, the doctors make the choice, and the doctor said, 'It's time to hang up your boots,’” Benn said. “If the doctors step in and say, ‘Hey, you've done your job, and it's time to move on,’ then it's time to move on.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday a new screening program to test the testosterone levels of all service members 30 and over, offering voluntary hormone treatment for those with low testosterone.
“The foundation of that new policy is to optimize performance and make sure that people are mentally and physically fit to serve. That is all that the transgender service members ever wanted to do through their transition, and that's what we did,” Corcoran said.
“We went through the process to live authentically, optimize our performance to continue to serve as the most effective and lethal warfighter that we can be to our country, and to see the new policy … goes to further reinforce the point that the ban on transgender service members has no evidence and is fully rooted in nothing but discrimination towards the transgender community who have honorably served for the past decade.”
Last week Hegseth was reported to have blocked promotions for female officers, marking the first time in more than a decade that no female active-duty naval officers will likely receive promotions to admiral this year.
After returning from overseas and completing the Captain’s Career Course, Benn said she volunteered to join a deploying battalion, becoming the first soldier to get medically cleared to go.
But, then she got pulled from deployment, causing her to miss a year of fighting, training and command experience.
“That meant I wasn't going over there with my soldiers. It meant I was not going to take command again, and it meant that what I have spent years of my career building towards, suddenly just isn't there,” Benn said.
“This would have had a permanent detrimental effect on my career.”
Ideally, the military “should be a meritocracy where we look at you and say you will be promoted, or not, based off of your accomplishments, capabilities and potential,” Benn said.
“Any time decisions are made for reasons other than that, it harms the military.”
Benn has been recognized as one of the first transgender military officers to command in a combat zone and is “proud” of her decision not to voluntarily leave the Army.
“A transgender military officer went overseas, commanded in a combat zone, did the job well. Her team saved lives, and I'm proud of that, and nobody and nothing can take that away,” Benn said. “I sincerely believe that there will be a day when somebody else can come along and pick up the torch and keep going.”
While the environment in the military has become “inhospitable” for transgender service members at times, Benn said she hopes opportunities will open back up again.
“We just want to live our lives. We want to serve. We want to be part of American society. We want to be accepted. We want to live and work and pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, just like everybody else. It really is that simple,” Benn said.
“I just hope to demystify it a little bit and help people see us just like any other American.”
The Pentagon declined to comment on ongoing litigation and referred Raw Story to the Army.
The Army acknowledged Raw Story's questions but did not respond by the time of publication.
