GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Well before the Palm Center received its $1.35 million grant in 2013, transgender service members and veterans had been working for years to convince the military to lift its ban. In your Buzzfeed critique, however, you argued [End Page 282] that the campaign to lift the ban did not emerge organically from the trans community. I understand your point that Colonel Pritzker's grant elevated the profile of the military issue, but I have never quite understood your point that the campaign did not emerge from the community.

No doubt, there have always been trans people in the military and there have been some trans vets and service members advocating around trans military participation over the years. My point was not to say that such advocates did not exist. In the Buzzfeed interview I aimed to put that advocacy in context. Since the 1970s at least, there have been important debates in US queer and trans politics about what that politics should stand for. There is a significant divide between a set of strategies and demands focused on accessing key institutions that have defined white citizenship in the US: marriage, military participation, and protection by law enforcement, and a set of strategies and demands aimed at dismantling the role of those institutions in determining life chances. In the 1980s and 1990s, an emerging set of gay and lesbian advocacy organizations and funders focused on inclusion strategies and backing litigation and policy work to build access to same-sex marriage, gay and lesbian military services, and hate crime laws that would include sexual orientation. These strategies were primarily led and forwarded by white gay and lesbian attorneys. Queer and trans people of color, feminists, anti-racists, and antiwar activists have raised concerns about that approach for the last several decades, arguing that inclusion into these institutions creates good PR for those institutions but has limited benefits for efforts to end the worst kinds of harm facing the most vulnerable queer and trans people. Those activists have argued that queer and trans advocacy should be working to separate the things people need to survive, like health care, immigration status, and parental rights, from the institution of marriage, and putting resources into fights like Medicare for all, opposing how family law systems tear apart the families of poor people, people of color and people with disabilities, and opposing immigration enforcement. They have argued that rather than fighting for hate crime laws that give more money and resources to police and prosecutors, queer and trans advocacy should focus on opposing the racist systems of policing and imprisonment and getting to root causes of harm. They have argued that rather than celebrating the military as a job queer and trans people want, our movements should be allied with people around the world against US military imperialism and with vets and communities of color targeted for military recruitment in the US exposing what that job is actually like.

Not surprisingly, the work that aligns with the dominant institutions in the country is more popular with wealthy donors and corporations and the corporate [End Page 283] media than racial and economic justice-centered queer and trans work that seeks to dismantle the institutions that shape our racist, misogynist, antipoor status quo conditions. As a result, the gay and lesbian inclusion agenda is the one that most people today know as gay politics; meanwhile, the grassroots antipoverty, antiracist, anti-imperialist queer and trans work has continued to develop over these decades and remains strong while less visible and less resourced than its more conservative sibling.

In the 1980s and 1990s, and even somewhat in the 2000s, the gay and lesbian organizations that were forwarding the inclusion strategies, which operate on a politics of respectability that says "we are good citizens like you" and tend to represent people whose lives align with the racialized and antipoor norms of US morality, explicitly excluded trans people. After years of trans advocacy, as trans politics mainstreams, we are seeing a growing articulation of a trans inclusion politics that mirrors the gay and lesbian inclusion framework, and an ongoing debate about whether that is the right path. My interview was a part of that debate. As an activist who has been working on issues concerning trans poor people, people of color, people with disabilities, prisoners, foster youth, and immigrants for the last twenty years, I was raising concerns about how a wealthy donor can shape what appears to be trans politics. I was questioning whether the emergence of this issue was proportional to its importance to trans people and trans organizations in the US, or whether we might be cautious about a pro-military politics supported by a right-wing pro-military donor gaining disproportionate visibility and material support, meanwhile the most vital issues to trans survival remain under-resourced and marginalized.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on all of this, and also to ask you, why, from your observations, was the trans ban lifted faster than advocates expected? What political conditions and strategies allowed that to defy expectations?

As to why the trans ban was lifted faster than expected, I would point to a handful of factors: (1) The removal of the ban on women in combat meant that whether or not a service member is qualified to do a job depends on merit, not gender, and that gender transition does not automatically require transgender service members to change jobs. (2) As well, there was a critical symbolic connection between the removal of the combat exclusion rule and the possibility of service by transgender personnel. In particular, the end of gender-based combat exclusion is premised on the notion that job standards should differ by job, not by gender, and that anyone who meets the standards associated with a particular job should be [End Page 284] allowed to do that job. With the elimination of the combat exclusion rule, the Pentagon was compelled to embrace the idea that job standards for men and women should be the same. (3) During Obama's presidency, anti-LGBT leaders declined to oppose the inclusion of transgender personnel, so the issue did not become a new battleground in the culture wars. (4) The repeal of DADT embarrassed opponents who predicted disaster; increased the military's confidence that inclusive policy could be implemented smoothly; discredited the so-called unit cohesion rationale, the primary argument that opponents of inclusion relied on to make their case; and enabled openly gay and lesbian allies throughout the military to support transgender inclusion. DADT repeal provided a strong tailwind pushing toward inclusive policy for trans troops. (5) Finally, effective advocacy strategies humanized the issue for journalists and the public at large, proved that transgender service works, and publicly discredited the primary justification for the ban.

Let me turn for a moment to your reply to my original question. When the Palm Center launched our military project, there were only approximately $5 million in philanthropic support for all trans organizations nationally, and close to $0 of that amount was dedicated to the repeal of the military ban. Advocates who had been working for years to lift the ban had done so without financial support. Five million dollars is a tiny number in the context of what trans organizations needed, but it is also the case that the military is the largest employer of trans people in the US, and part of the reason there wasn't more philanthropic support for trans troops is that the military ban made it hard for them to organize. The Tawani gift of $1.35 million was spread over three years (at $450,000 per year), meaning that as a result of the gift, approximately 10 percent of all trans funding nationally was devoted to the military each year. I understand your points that our grant was disproportionate and didn't reflect community priorities, that a donor was shaping what appears to be trans politics, and that the most vital issues to trans survival have been under-resourced. A parallel truth is that only 10 percent of trans philanthropy was dedicated to the military issue; part of the reason why the community hadn't prioritized the issue is that discrimination had made it difficult for the troops to advocate for themselves; and the donor who provided the funds did not want to support the kind of anti-imperialist queer and trans work you describe. So if the funds had not been used to lift the military ban, the money would not have been available for other trans priorities.

Yes, I agree that Jennifer Pritzker would not be likely to give her money to causes that do not align with her values. She is renowned as the first transgender billionaire. Her family's fortune is wrapped up in exploitative and extractive industries [End Page 285] including hotels, tobacco, and credit reporting. Her philanthropy has been focused on celebrating US military imperialism (TAWANI Foundation n.d.). My concern is not that we should get Pritzker to give her money to other things. It is that very conservative, very wealthy people can help facilitate shifts that co-opt the political work of marginalized groups for processes that recuperate violent institutions. This recuperative move is visible in feminist, queer, and trans politics over the last several decades. As these movements gain ground in exposing the harm, violence, and exclusion faced by marginalized populations, advocacy for and/or achievement of "inclusion" for those groups in large institutions and governments that are facing legitimacy crises provide an opportunity to rebrand those institutions and governments as sites of liberation and progressivism. This is visible in the NYPD's 2016 introduction of rainbow police cars (Tan 2016), the San Diego Police Department's hiring and celebrating of a transgender officer (Chan 2017), the messaging of prosecutors' offices that their work is focused on championing women's safety (National Center for the Prosecution of Violence against Women n.d.), and the Israeli military's continual touring of its trans officer for speaking engagements around the US ("Meet Trans IDF Captain"). During Obama's second term, as he faced criticism for not closing Guantánamo, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deporting more people than any prior president, and his war on whistleblowers, his administration turned to queer and trans issues as a way to associate him with progressivism to cover over the realities of his actions. This strategy, increasingly taken up by corporations (Siddiqui 2017), institutions, and governments, is called "pinkwashing" and is an effective and lucrative PR strategy that obscures conditions of violence and generates support for institutions and strategies that perpetrate harm.

To characterize trans military inclusion as one trans advocacy strategy among many and find that it is neutral and benign to have Pritzker's money support it, since it would not help other trans people anyway, creates equivalencies that concern me. Advocacy for trans people to have housing and advocacy for trans people to serve in the military are not the same. Advocacy for military service aligns with pro-military messaging about how military service is a great job and how the military does great work. This advocacy provides good PR for the US military and US wars, undermining domestic and global opposition to US military imperialism. It is not surprising that it is endorsed and supported by pro-war figures from Pritzker to Obama, and it is concerning that because it is associated with a marginalized, hated group—trans people—who have struggled mightily to create a liberation movement that people see as progressive, it borrows that progressive legitimacy and grants it to US militarism. Advocacy for housing, or against [End Page 286] criminalization and deportation of trans people, on the other hand, is aligned with broader progressive demands that threaten the interests of billionaires of any gender and the policies that make war on poor people and people of color, domestic and international, that maintain their wealth. My argument is that to make these different kinds of advocacy into different "trans issues" competing for funding, rather than to observe why particular issues get lifted into the mainstream, funded, and seized upon by politicians, is to ignore context and become aligned with US military imperialism and the interests of the wealthiest people. Any advocacy about the military that is not antiwar is pro-war and pro-military, and this is clear in looking at the ways that the US military has been portrayed in the trans military advocacy that has emerged in recent years. I would be curious to hear whether you have concerns about the pro-war and pro-military framings that emerge in inclusion advocacy?

I am also curious about the claim that the military is the largest employer of trans people. This has been a talking point in the advocacy for trans military service. In 2016, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (2017) questioned this claim and argued that where trans people are most concentrated is in the criminal system, and that is where advocacy should be focused. I have concerns about how trans people get counted in the emerging literatures that seek to count us (Spade and Rohlfs 2016), and I have doubts about whether this claim is true. My own guess would be that trans people are most represented in underground economies such as the sex trade, and perhaps second to that in the low-wage jobs in food, retail, and beauty industries. As a second part of this question, I wonder if we could discuss what might be concerning, if trans people are overrepresented in the military, about why that is the case. What do you believe causes trans people to join the military in high numbers, if they do? Do you have any concerns about those causes?

I agree that violent institutions and individuals have harnessed LGBT inclusivity to sanitize injuries they inflict on vulnerable populations. Perhaps most prominent in my mind has been the way in which former Justice Kennedy's rulings on marriage equality and sodomy distract from a generation of jurisprudence on mass incarceration, the drug war, voting rights, money in politics, guns, and more.

You ask whether I have concerns about pro-war and pro-military framings that emerge in inclusion advocacy. The answer is that yes, I do. In my published work, I have discussed ways in which the public persuasion campaigns to repeal DADT and the military's trans ban, both of which I helped design and implement, were premised on the explicit claim that inclusion promotes military effectiveness, [End Page 287] and on the implicit suggestion that promoting military effectiveness is good. (I have been inspired on this point by Cynthia Enloe's book Maneuvers [2000].)

To balance and apologize for the militarizing impact of my advocacy, I underscored my concerns in scholarly publications as described above, and Palm provided a $125,000 grant to the Costs of War Project, which used the funds to produce dozens of studies and to generate hundreds of media articles on the costs of American-led violence in the Middle East. (This grant was made with Michael D. Palm Foundation funds, not Pritzker funds.)

However, there are two points that I think provide some context for the critiques that you, Liz Montegary, Jasbir Puar, Sycamore, and others have made of the effort to promote military inclusion for LGBT service members (see, for example, Montegary 2015; Puar 2007; Sycamore 2017).

First, discrimination against LGBT service members is dangerous. Critics sometimes think that the inclusion campaigns were pursued for the sake of the troops, and to a certain extent, that is correct, in that military discrimination destroyed many lives and led to murder, rape, suicide, and more. What prompted me to work on this issue for the past twenty years, however, is not just the welfare of the troops but also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (1990) point that appropriating someone's right to name their own identity is a "consequential seizure," and Janet Halley's (1999) point that if the legal mechanism embedded in DADT had spread to other statutes, that would have been a step along a slippery slope to a totalitarian outcome. (Her reasoning was that the DADT statute brilliantly and insidiously enabled the government to designate evidence of identity ["I am gay . . ."] into evidence of criminal conduct [sodomy].) There's a lot more to be said about that, but the main point is that military discrimination against LGBT people is dangerous, not just because of the impact on the troops. So, not standing up to it was not an option, at least from my point of view.

Second, American culture is so militarized that the campaigns for LGBT inclusion have made, at most, a marginal contribution to the problem. Part of the genius and the structure of American empire and militarism is that as each minority community steps forward to demand equal treatment in the armed forces along with cis heterosexual white men, mainstream organizations representing those communities for the most part decide to defend empire as the price of inclusion. This happened with women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, and Latinos (Belkin 2012). I'm not saying that every organization representing every minority community lined up behind empire. But for the most part, this is the choice that organizations representing the communities have made. As a result, there's a sedimented history in which community after community removes itself [End Page 288] from the pool of potential opposition to empire and militarism. By the time the LGBT community stepped forward in an organized way to demand military inclusion, the culture was already deeply militarized.

The problem is not just that minority communities have militarized themselves/ourselves but that pretty much the entire culture has militarized itself. When I teach militarization to my students, I show them photos of ketchup bottles with pro-war messages, clothing with camouflage patterns, highways named after service members, coloring books that feature fighter planes and so on. It takes just a minute of research to learn that NGOs representing a wide range of causes have harnessed militarism to advance their aims (e.g., a lung cancer NGO that releases a study of smoking rates and cancer among veterans in order to justify funding appeals). And corporations have of course made the same move too.

So while I agree with your point that LGBT advocacy "borrows . . . progressive legitimacy and grants it to US militarism," my question is: how much does that matter, given that the culture is so deeply militarized? You suggest—and I'm sure other critics would agree—that "This advocacy does vital public relations work for the US military and US wars that undermines domestic and global opposition to US military imperialism" and that the advocacy has the effect of "recuperating violent institutions." But is the public relations work really vital, and did advocacy really play that much of a role in recuperation?

I would argue that even if the LGBT community had never mentioned DADT or the trans ban, US culture likely would be almost as militarized today as it was in 1993 and 1994 when DADT was enacted, and there would be almost as much uncritical glorification of the armed forces as we have today. Another way to say this is that the recuperation of empire, war, and the military-as-organization is an ongoing and highly overdetermined project that is much, much bigger than LGBT advocacy.

I could not agree more with the point that we need to overcome empire, war, militarism, and neoliberalism as well as a host of white supremacist and classist structures, institutions, and ideas that have been implicated in so much violence in the US and abroad. I could not agree more with Sycamore's (2017) point that we need to call "attention to the structural conditions that make military service a tragic option for some people desperate to escape, internalize, and ultimately further oppression." I could not agree more that if the military were 90 percent smaller, we would be safer as a nation, and we could use the resources to address inequality. All of this makes sense.

What does not make sense to me is blaming LGBT advocacy for these problems. [End Page 289]

It is helpful to hear how you have navigated these tensions as a person working directly on these issues, and how you think broadly about what role LGBT advocacy organizations and military inclusion advocacy in other moments and movements have played. It makes me wonder if a source of our different perspectives about whether it makes sense to criticize LGBT military inclusion advocacy is actually about how we each believe social change happens.

We agree that US culture is deeply militarized and that, historically, marginalized populations that have been excluded from military service in various ways go through periods where some advocacy groups for those populations use pro-military, pro-imperialism talking points to advocate for and celebrate their inclusion in military service. What I see differently is that in each of those instances, for any marginalized group, there is an important tension and a contest always happening inside social movements. On the one side, there is a desire for liberation that would reach all the members of that group, which would mean having to oppose poverty, racism, sexism, imperialism, ableism and every force that creates intersectional harm in the lives of people from that group. On the other side, there is the pressure toward assimilation and the creation of a narrow reform agenda that props up and conforms to existing conditions and offers minimal relief from the harms that group faces, relief that is usually only available to the elite of that group. When US social movement history is narrated in the mainstream, we usually only get to hear about the groups, strategies, and talking points that were norm-supporting. The frame is usually "equal rights" or a fight for "civil rights," and we are told that what marginalized groups wanted, and the law ultimately delivered, was to be named equal in law and integrated into dominant US institutions. We are taught to believe that Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. only wanted voting rights and an end to the formal apartheid system. MLK's opposition to the war in Vietnam, Parks's tireless work opposing the condoned sexual violence against Black women (McGuire 2011), and King's and Parks's work on poverty is lost from the narration. More broadly, completely lost in the mainstream narration is the work of Black liberation activists who fought for an end to policing and imprisonment, centered their work in solidarity with colonized people all over the world, and openly opposed capitalism and US military imperialism. In fact, the civil rights reforms that were won were minimal concessions to the movement for Black liberation, ones which we can celebrate because of the organizing they required but which we must recognize as far less than what was demanded, even though dominant systems narrate them as the delivery of freedom and the end of oppression. We could trace similar themes through other movement histories, in which the very important tensions within social movements regarding who gets [End Page 290] included and excluded, and how broadly a movement will practice solidarity, get erased in the mainstream narrative.

In my view, those tensions and contests are not incidental. I do not believe that just because other groups excluded from military service have had some advocates who fought for military inclusion and used pro-military advocacy frames, we (trans and queer people) should do so. I do not believe that LGBT advocates' doing so now is inconsequential because other groups have done it and our society is so militarized anyway. To me, that logic is the opposite of Black feminism's call for intersectionality. I do not believe we can opt out of solidarity, choose advocacy strategies without regard to their harm, and operate transactionally, separating out "wins" by ignoring the terms upon which they were won and the systems of meaning and control they reproduced to do so. Black feminists often lift up the example of white birth control advocates using eugenics talking points to advocate for birth control access (Ross 2006). I would argue that doing so was neither acceptable nor inconsequential, even though the US was steeped in eugenics frameworks at the time, and many different kinds of advocacy used eugenics arguments.

I want an actually different world, not just capitalism where a few marginalized people get to be added as "junior partners" (Wilderson 2007) among the predominantly white male ruling class, or where marginalized groups get to serve in militaries that build empires for those same elites, and where harmful institutions declare themselves havens of equality while material inequality and state violence continue to worsen. In order to build actual liberation, we fight for solidarity. We say that LGBT politics must be antiracist. We say that poverty and criminalization are queer and trans issues. We push back when the most well-funded lesbian and gay groups back politicians who are antichoice or antipoor, or accept funding from corporations that harm workers and the planet. I insist that it actually matters every time we choose not to build a politics of "pragmatism" within an oppressive system that tells us we can "win" something if we align with the very forces of violence that we mean to dismantle. That approach is not actually pragmatic at all, since it strengthens the very systems of harm we need to tear down and further divides us from each other along lines of race, indigeneity, gender, class, disability, and immigration status.

Criticism of pro-military LGBT advocacy is not a matter of "blaming," it is a matter of holding ourselves and each other accountable for solidarity and justice and having discernment about what and who we are fighting for. In studying the histories of antiwar and anti-imperialist Black liberation, indigenous resistance, and feminist resistance, I have observed how frequently visionary activists were at odds with other people in their own movements who were fighting for military [End Page 291] inclusion or other assimilationist or institution-supporting reforms. None of those debates end just because the inclusion reform in question happens. The rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with its critique of "respectability politics," is a powerful example of how Black liberation activists are still pushing back on the limits of a narrow "equality" framework. The rise of the #Not1More deportation movement, with its critique of the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration reform—both of which strengthen border enforcement and divide migrants into categories of "deserving" and "undeserving" of immigration relief—also speaks to these ongoing movement divides regarding what justice is and should be. As these contemporary examples show, it matters whether we shape our struggles to fit the norms of violent institutions that make many in our communities disposable, or whether we fight for justice for the most vulnerable people in our communities and in the world. It matters because it will determine what we get as we fight and because our politics is always in formation.

Our advocacy educates not only people who know little about us but also our own communities about the stakes of our fight and what kinds of political positions we can stand for. When I was coming out in the mid-1990s, the conservative version of gay and lesbian politics was coming into its own, with same-sex marriage, military service, and hate crime laws being articulated by a relatively new set of DC-based national organizations using new kinds of communications strategies to articulate a national (and nationalist, I would argue) gay and lesbian agenda that was pro-military, pro-police, and pro-marriage. Some of my first inquiries into what it meant to be queer led me to these organizations, whose progress I followed closely and in whose activities I sometimes participated. I was of two minds. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly accepted the conservative gay agenda because it used analogies to the civil rights movement that I had been trained by white schooling to respond to with particular emotions, and because I wanted to be part of queerness and this was the version I could see, since it could afford flashy communications strategies. On the other hand, I had been raised on welfare by an immigrant single mother and then by foster parents, and I was aware that these same organizations were not standing up against Clinton's welfare and immigration reform policies. This concerned me, and I was not sure how to think about it when those advocates (usually my supervisors at the internships I had at those gay organizations) told me welfare and immigration were "not gay issues." Thankfully, I found radical grassroots queer organizations that showed me that there was another queer politics that I could be part of, one that was harder to find because it did not have corporate funding. Many people do not get access to solidarity-based, racial and economic justice-centered queer and trans politics [End Page 292] because of how media mainstreams any movement's most norm-affirming strains. That is, disruptive actions that expose the conflicts—like when queer and trans people of color block pride parades (Thrasher 2017) to oppose pro-police messaging, or when queer activists protest at national gay conferences (Pasch 2016) that are colluding with Israel advocacy groups to shut out critiques of Israeli apartheid against Palestinians—are important. These conflicts are about what we are fighting for and what we can win.

I appreciate your sharing your own dilemmas about how the advocacy you have engaged in about LGBT military service has reproduced pro-militarism themes. I find your story about making that generous grant to work to oppose militarism, and then finding that grant mostly unmatched, that work mostly unfunded, heartbreaking, and revealing. It brings to mind the women of color feminist analysis of the limits of the nonprofit form (INCITE! 2017). As social movements have shifted to the nonprofit form, philanthropic institutions have been able to control the agendas and tactics of movements by funding work that aligns with elite interests and not funding work that threatens those interests. Your story rings with these concerns. Pro-militarism work will, of course, be better funded than anti-militarism work in the context of US imperialism. Funders fund tactics and frames that endorse institutions that benefit them. Luckily, the work that can be accomplished by advocacy tactics based in nonprofit think tanks and other elite-centered strategies, while it sometimes has a role, is not central to eliminating capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Systems that benefit elites and harm most people in the world through extraction and oppression can only be upended by grassroots efforts based in large numbers of people fighting back in their local contexts in solidarity with one another across borders and oceans. Work opposing US militarism has a long history, since the US has been at war since it has existed and before (Han 2006). From Okinawa to Hawai'i to Guam to the Marshall Islands to Puerto Rico to the Bronx to Oklahoma to the Salish Sea, the work to resist US colonialism and imperialism continues. We are living through a difficult time, with a record-breaking defense budget and sustained or escalating harm at the hands of the US military all over the world. We are facing climate disaster, and the US military is the largest polluter in the world (Webb 2017). We could have the attitude that it is not worth fighting and that those of us who could gain short-term benefits should throw our lot in with US militarism, but I do not think either of us believes that is ethical.

When I was reading your last response, I wondered whether you have considered advocacy that is anti-military to address the harms that LGBT people face in the US military (NPR 2013; Cohen 2018; Democracy Now! 2013). It seems to [End Page 293] me that doing queer and trans advocacy that cares about people who are in or were in the military, and is explicitly critical of militarism and the treatment people in the military experience, is entirely possible, and already being undertaken.

Your response is so thoughtful, and I'm learning so much from this exchange. I wouldn't quite say that I disagree with your analysis, but there are a few points that I would flag.

I'd like to hear what you have to say about my point that the stakes of exclusion are (far) higher than is sometimes recognized, in that exclusion is dangerous for everyone, not just LGBT service members or even just the LGBT community. Folks on the other side of the military debate have included some of the most frightening and dangerous culture warriors on the far right, folks such as Mike Pence, Frank Gaffney, Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, and Ryan Anderson. Their emphasis on military policy isn't really about keeping LGBT service members out of the armed forces. More broadly, their effort is to hijack military policy so as to be able to use it to reinforce their ideas about deviance and normativity and then use the state to allocate rewards and privileges on the basis of those ideas. In such a heavily militarized society, their analysis (which I agree with) is that excluding LGBT people from the military has powerful ripple effects across society. I grant your points about the costs of an emphasis on inclusion, and I share your concerns in general about the politics of respectability. But (again, setting aside the question of the well-being of the troops), I just can't wrap my mind around giving these culture warriors a free pass. The stakes of these struggles far exceed the question of assimilation.

You mention that part of what's at stake as we decide whether to pursue an idealistic/radical politics as opposed to a more narrow/incremental approach is that "it matters because it will determine what we get as we fight." But I'm not so sure about that, because I'm pessimistic about the potential for radical change. You outline an alternative advocacy option at the end of your last reply that could have substituted for efforts to repeal DADT and the trans ban, focusing instead on exposing the racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that LGBT people face in the US military. That is a worthy project, but I believe strongly that such an emphasis would not have sufficed for getting rid of DADT or the trans ban. When I started working on DADT in 1998, the community's emphasis was along the lines you suggest, focusing in particular on homophobia that people face in the military (although, significantly, there was not an intersectional analysis of racism, sexism, or transphobia). My analysis was that focusing on homophobia and the well-being of the troops would never suffice as long as the other side could, with a straight [End Page 294] face, make the claim that repealing the ban would undermine unit cohesion and readiness. When Barry Winchell was murdered with a baseball bat, the former commandant of the Marine Corps published a New York Times op-ed in which he basically said that he was sorry about the death, but too bad for the gays, because DADT was necessary to preserve unit cohesion, and military effectiveness was more important than fairness of the well-being of gay and lesbian troops (Mundy 1999).

My focus for more than a decade was to flip that narrative on its head in the court of public opinion and to make it impossible for anyone making the cohesion/ readiness argument to be taken seriously (Belkin 2011). Despite its costs in militarizing the community, the strategy worked, and it opened up a space for grassroots activists, lobbyists, and litigators to get rid of DADT and then the trans ban. In turn, if DADT had not been repealed, I do not believe that the Windsor or Obergefell decisions could have been as expansive as they were, because the state would have had an ongoing interest in marriage discrimination (among the ranks). If we had pursued the intersectional approach you're suggesting, I believe that DADT would still be the law of the land, and trans people would be banned from the military as well. All of this is counterfactual and unknowable, but it is my best sense. To the extent that the analysis is correct, and circling back to your point about determining what we get as we fight, I would want to know more about the potential of a more visionary approach before choosing that advocacy path. Here's a thought experiment to illustrate the point. What if we could rerun history and go back to 1993 and forgo the effort to repeal DADT and then the trans ban, and focus instead for the next twenty-five years on the approach you suggest, addressing how racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia harm the troops. What if, in that hypothetical world, twenty-five years of advocacy had not succeeded in reducing militarism, racism, homophobia, or transphobia in the military or beyond, but DADT and the trans ban were still in effect. Which path should be chosen? Maybe the visionary path is the better path because a long-term radical emphasis can, at some future point, lead to radical change. I'm just not sure.

I'd like to focus for a minute on your point about "holding ourselves and each other accountable for solidarity." This is a beautiful vision, and I like it. Puar has been adamant that the homonational critique is not about distinguishing between good gays and bad gays, and you mention that criticism of pro-military LGBT advocacy is not a matter of blaming. But these disavowals don't quite seem straightforward to me. I don't quite understand how the critiques that the advocacy is associated with a racist logic or is murderous, et cetera, is not blaming, and I guess I'm still not understanding why, among the LGBT activists and scholars who [End Page 295] focus on militarism/militarization, there seems a disinclination to acknowledge that the stakes that the pro-military LGBT advocates have been fighting for are important.

Finally, you refer to the "minimal relief from harms that LGBT people have received, relief that is usually only available to the elite." I can't emphasize enough that I agree with your analysis of the costs of the incremental/pragmatic approach, and I also agree that the repeal of DADT and the trans ban and the achievement of marriage equality don't really help a homeless trans person of color. But I wouldn't say that the relief from harms has only been available to the elite. Consider the question of reassignment surgery. There are 163,000 transgender veterans in the US, but the VA does not include reassignment surgery in its medical benefits package. Once the military decided to lift its ban and provide all medically necessary care, the VA quickly followed suit and was almost certainly on the verge of announcing a policy change in the winter of 2016. Immediately after Donald Trump won the election, the VA announced that it would not, after all, provide reassignment surgery. But the conversation is not over, and I am confident that once inclusive military policy is restored and locked in, the VA will follow. This may take a while, but in the end, we will prevail. And this ripple effect of VA policy following military policy is just one of many positive ripple effects of lifting the bans, both DADT and the transgender ban. Acknowledging that inclusive policy does not benefit all marginalized people does not mean that inclusion only benefits elites. I don't think that it is much of a stretch, empirically, to argue that inclusive military policy has yielded benefits for a large swath of the LGBT community and beyond.

I think one difference in our analysis is related to our differing senses of the timespans of struggles for change. In the radical lineages that I study and participate in, we understand the struggles we are a part of as quite long. The goal, within those struggles, is to win changes along the way that align with the big transformation we are looking to in the future. A good example is the struggle to abolish police, prisons, and borders. This abolitionist goal is very significant and long term. It took hundreds of years to create a sophisticated, high-tech system of militarized policing, caging, and borders. This process required changing society so that these ways of seeing and treating each other as disposable are acceptable and normal, producing whole new industries, producing whole new areas of research and knowledge production to support these activities, building the infrastructures of courts and administrative systems and laws, and of course the buildings and cages and fences and tanks and guns and tasers and paddy [End Page 296] wagons and the rest. Abolitionists believe that just as these things emerged, they can be dismantled. We center our work around three key strategies: dismantling the current system, providing direct support to people targeted by it, and building the new systems we need to live in a world without police, prisons, and borders. There is much room for immediate work for people's well-being in this: prison letter writing programs, court support programs, criminal defense, jailhouse lawyering support, reentry programs, prison education programs, supporting families of prisoners and detainees, support for compassionate release, parole, and commutation, and more. There is also room for a wide variety of reforms focused on dismantling, such as decriminalizing anything currently criminalized (panhandling, drugs, and sex work are common targets for decriminalization right now), sentencing reform, campaigns to stop jail and detention-center building projects, campaigns to stop increased hiring or arming of police, campaigns to get precincts closed or reduce funding to police, research and knowledge production that shows the harmful impacts of punitive systems, and more. At the same time that abolitionist work offers a huge menu of actions we can take right now along our path to this giant transformation, abolitionism also helps us discern what kinds of advocacy we will not take up. We refuse to do advocacy that expands or legitimizes prisons or policing, even though such advocacy will often be offered by systems as they are pressured to reform. For example, in the advocacy work I have been involved in regarding the immense violence that trans people face in prison, we have rejected the proposal that the system should create trans prisons. We don't want more prisons of any kind, we don't want special prisons, we don't want prisons that promise to be safer or more humane. Our understanding of the history of prison reform reveals that such reforms only expand the system's reach, causing more imprisonment of more people. We do not believe that a "safe" prison can be built, for trans people or anyone, because of the entire history of purportedly humanitarian reforms to prisons, and because putting humans in cages is fundamentally harmful and violent. Similarly, in the conversation about police violence, we reject proposals that aim to fix policing by adding more technology to policing, such as body cameras and "less-lethal" weapons (Prison Culture 2014; Critical Resistance n.d.; Mijente 2018; Davis 2003). This kind of discernment is central to being part of a struggle that has a long time horizon, and it is unwilling to accept short-term (false) victories that affirm the most brutal systems in our society, offering concessions of "recognition" and "inclusion."

So, to take your example asking what if the twenty-five years of advocacy for LGBT military inclusion had instead been focused differently, I think I need to make two adjustments to the hypothetical. First, I would not redirect all of that [End Page 297] advocacy solely to, for example, working on homophobia faced by military personnel. I would instead be asking, what if we redirected all of that time, energy, and money toward a broad queer/trans anti-militarism strategy, which might include: direct work to support LGBT vets and current military personnel, with a prioritization of those facing intersectional harm (people with disabilities, people of color, women, poor people, indigenous people, immigrants); queer/trans engagement with the US antiwar movement; queer/trans internationalist engagement with global struggles against US militarism; queer/trans economic justice work focused on the US budgets (federal, state, and local) and how much goes to "security" of all kinds instead of human needs; queer/trans work targeting the weapons and security industries for exposure and boycott; et cetera. We could add other items to that list, but I am offering these examples of actual work that intersectional queer activists have been doing throughout those twenty-five years (Hobson 2016) but that has been drastically less visible in the corporate media, and less funded, than the military inclusion work. If we had had a more leftist, anti-military LGBT formation during those twenty-five years and that work had happened in the ways I am suggesting, I do not think we would have resolved it all by now and be living in a US with no military. However, I do think that the rise of a pro-military, pro-marriage, pro-policing gay and lesbian rights formation (that later marginally included bi and trans people and issues) was a boon to the general rightward shift of the last four decades. The most violent and harmful institutions in our society, which faced a legitimacy crisis in the wake of the domestic and global antiwar, anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, got a makeover as they were cast as sites of liberation and inclusion for gay and lesbian people. Queer and trans people are associated with progressivism, freedom, and equality. Believing that we should "get to" join the military, call the police or be cops, and marry provided a path for emotional reinvestment in these institutions—hearts (of straights and gays alike) warmed to images of gay weddings, gay service members kissing, and rainbow police cars. So to do the thought experiment you suggest, we would need to imagine a robust set of strategies that queer and trans advocates and organizations might take up that are aligned against US imperialism (not just supporting service members), and we would have to account for the ways that a pro-military advocacy strategy has participated in the recuperation of the public image of the military in this period and the reduction in antiwar sentiment. In order to understand how I think about this, my arguments also have to be contextualized in long trajectories that radical movements use to imagine change, as well as in the ways we use both incrementalism and clear discernment to choose reforms that align with our long-term goals and do not undermine them. [End Page 298]

You mention above that you are skeptical about radical change. I often encounter skepticism when I talk to people about prison and border abolition, ending capitalism, ending US imperialism, and other big transformations that radical movements are fighting for. For me, the choice to fight for narrower, shorter-term victories is ultimately a choice to participate in violence and leave the most vulnerable people behind. In every struggle I have studied or participated in where this kind of choice was or is being faced, it is a choice about cutting out part of the harmed group and accepting or even propping up the systems doing harm. This is the choice being debated in migrant justice movements between just seeking reforms for "deserving" immigrants versus seeking to end deportation for all. This is the choice that, as I mentioned above, Black feminists critique when they see how white feminists engaged eugenics arguments to win the concessions they wanted, for white women to have more access to birth control (Ross 2006). This is the choice that trans advocates make between celebrating that trans people can join some police forces now and aligning with movements that say all policing is a threat to safety, especially the safety of queer and trans people of color. The choice is about whether to grab for system-affirming reforms that rely on respectability and portray the targeted group as "deserving rights," or whether to pursue system-disrupting efforts that work to delegitimize harm and violence and prioritize the experiences of the people facing the worst conditions. It is a decision about whether people of color, people with disabilities, people with criminal records, immigrants, trans people, indigenous people, and poor people are disposable. Doing work intersectionally and radically, meaning that we want to get to the root causes and that we care about the most directly intersectionally impacted, means we cannot celebrate "victories" that make limited reforms, available only to the less intersectionally impacted.

You asked about this specifically, when I said that "elites" are the ones who benefit from such limited reforms. What I mean is that the reforms toward inclusion in dominant institutions that have been popular in the most well-funded LGBT advocacy—marriage, military service, antidiscrimination laws, hate crime laws—have greater benefits for people with more status and capital in the current system. People who have citizenship can share immigration status with those they marry, but if neither partner has status, it doesn't help to get married. People who have wealth to share can share it more easily with a spouse if they can marry, but poor people overall in the US marry less because marriage has fewer benefits if you don't have property to share (Picchi 2017). White people's ability to marry may help them protect their parenting rights in the family law system, but the foster care system targets Black and native families for dissolution, married or not [End Page 299] (Roberts 2006; Barry 2018; Verass 2018; Roberts 1993). White people may feel more comfortable calling the police if there is a hate crime law on the books or a gay cop on the force, but people of color are likely to experience harm from the police regardless of these reforms. Antidiscrimination laws are generally almost impossible to enforce but are particularly useless for people working in low-wage and underground economies or facing intersectional discrimination (Jaffe 2016). LGBT inclusion in the military, similarly, will likely be of more benefit to those who already do the best in the military—get to the highest ranks, are least likely to be less-than-honorably discharged, are less likely to be sexually assaulted, are more likely to be able to afford care needed even if the VA fails them after service. Race, class, gender, immigration status, and disability mitigate access to formal rights severely, so the more elite you are, the more likely inclusion in dominant institutions yields benefits. This dynamic crosses social movements and has led to the robust critiques of rights-focused reforms in movements for disability justice, reproductive justice, racial justice, indigenous sovereignty, economic justice, environmental justice, and more. People from more targeted populations benefit more from transforming conditions of distribution and dismantling state violence than from the achievement of formal recognition through legal reforms that only minimally alter the overarching conditions of maldistribution.

The faith that I can sense you have in the value of changing the military's official rules about LGBT people, and the hope that it relates to changing other official rules, is one that I do not share. I believe that we should direct resources toward material conditions and dismantling dominant systems of violence, rather than getting included in them, in order to build justice and liberation. This relates to Sycamore's point about there being more trans people in prison than in the military, or my suggestion that more trans people are in low-wage and underground economies than in the military. Focusing resources on the conditions faced by those people, and doing anti-military work for people suffering harm in the military as well as antirecruitment work and broad work against militarism, would yield more benefits than trying to battle the culture wars with the right wing about whether LGBT people are good soldiers. There are many histories that contribute to my perspective on this, but one is the history of prison reform work. The many "victories" won in lawsuits challenging prison conditions in the 1970s did not result in increased well-being for criminalized populations (Dayan 2013). The period since those victories saw not only a drastic growth in imprisonment overall but also adjustments by prison systems to make the forms of torture that were challenged in those lawsuits routine rather than exceptional. For example, when courts found that prisoners were entitled to a due-process hearing before [End Page 300] being put in solitary confinement for increased punishment, prisons created the category "administrative segregation" so that they could use solitary confinement more broadly and without any extra process. Scholars and movement activists trace many similar histories in US law that indicate that winning changes often does not change material conditions. Many point out that the end of Jim Crow and school segregation did not desegregate the US, and that schools are more segregated now than they were at the time of Brown v. Board of Education, and that school funding schemes continue to ensure that children of color attend schools with the lowest resources (Orfield et al. 2014). I have very little faith that winning legal changes toward inclusion and recognition results in material changes for those facing the worst conditions of maldistribution and violence. I do, however, observe that winning inclusion "victories" provides a makeover for dominant systems and bolsters narratives that we are in a "postracial" or otherwise equal society and that those who are on the bottom deserve to be there and should not complain.

I am not suggesting that people who make the choice to pursue narrower reforms intentionally or consciously are choosing strategies that cut out vulnerable people and affirm harmful systems. I think that dominant accounts of how change happens, such as the myth that it trickles down and the myth that changing laws to reflect formal legal equality changes material conditions for targeted populations, obscure the significance of these choices. Philanthropic influence, professionalization of social movements that puts white people with professional degrees in leadership, experiences of privilege, popular mythologies about social movements, and many other things cause people who make this choice to think they are just being practical, if they even know there was a choice made.

The value of solidarity, the belief that all our struggles are tied together and that our communities are all intersectional (queer and trans people exist in every racial group, across class experiences, across ability experiences, inside and outside prisons, with and without immigration status, inside the military and killed by the military, et cetera), grounds the need to demand a deeper transformation of current conditions, so that we don't leave each other behind. For people who want transformation that actually reaches everyone instead of just lifting up a few people on the top of the impacted group, having the ability to imagine a long struggle is essential. For us, hope about the future and faith in the possibility of change is not something that comes easy; it is an active practice based in our principles of winning deep, transformative change rather than system-affirming false victories.

When I read about your limited faith in radical change, I relate it to a message I frequently hear from students when they first study social movements that have big demands and imagine a drastically different world. They often say "that [End Page 301] is not possible." In response, I tell them about how the message that "there is no alternative" (Flanders 2013) is an active fiction of neoliberalism, and one that we must fight in ourselves and in the world if we are interested in ending poverty, racism, heteropatriarchy, war, and colonialism. We are made to feel that our deepest desires are impossible and our only option is to sell out more vulnerable people in our communities and abandon our own principles. We are denied access to the histories of social movements and prior social relations that would show us that there is nothing but alternatives to the current systems, since the level of investment in militarism, policing, border enforcement, and imprisonment, as well as the concentration of wealth, are currently breaking records ("Global Wealth Inequality" 2013). The emotional and material conditions of neoliberalism (including philanthropic control over nonprofit agendas) take people who are passionate about justice, make them believe they must fight for something less than the justice they crave, and then encourage them to deny and avoid the actual consequences of advocacy strategies that they have been coerced into pursuing.

You ask whether "blaming" is the right way to discuss the racism and militarism that I am arguing neoliberal gay advocacy promotes. In white supremacy, people are encouraged to think of racism as something bad people, "racists," do. Through this individualized lens, if racism is named, it is understood as an accusation, and the person being accused often feels attacked and defensive. I do not see racism in this way, so I do not see naming the racism of these advocacy strategies as a question of "blaming" you or others who have enacted this advocacy. I see racism as pervasive, white supremacy as shaping us and our conditions. We all participate in white supremacy daily, and as white people we benefit from it. Identifying the ways that white supremacy shapes advocacy strategies and drafts people into things like pro-militarism advocacy framed as LGBT liberation is not about blaming individuals, it is about identifying patterns so that we can continually build our discernment and strategy for dismantling white supremacy and militarism. When someone points out the racist implications or impacts of our strategies, it can feel like being blamed, but it can be more productive to understand it as a learning opportunity for contemplating what our principles are and how we want to practice them. When people in my social movement communities point out the ways that my practices reproduce white supremacy, I try to see it as an invitation and a gift. The ongoing work of being accountable to my own principles and the principles of the movements I am part of means being open to learning about what I have not noticed about my work, and being more interested in aligning my work with my values than in being right or not feeling bad about things I have done. One of the things I admire about this exchange with you is your frankness [End Page 302] about your concerns about how military inclusion advocacy can be pro-military, and the honesty with which you have connected that to your feelings of hopelessness about radical change. One of my goals when I interact with young people is to make sure they know that they can pursue the most radical visions they have; they do not have to accept a role (even if it would bring recognition and remuneration) that undermines their principles. They can study social movements to learn about what tactics have worked and are working that align with what they believe in. They can change their minds as they try things and learn that it is not working or it is having an impact they did not anticipate. None of us has the recipe for global liberation and peace, but our job as social movement participants is to be honest with ourselves and each other about limitations and harms of particular strategies and rigorous about our ethics as we explore and experiment.

In June 2018 a group of antiwar queer and trans activists I am part of launched the queertranswarban.com website, which offers a toolkit for queer and trans antiwar activism. We did this to cultivate a counternarrative to the pro-military messaging emerging around the trans military inclusion debate, which often casts Trump's transphobia on one side and proud trans military service on the other, with no room for antiwar positions. Our toolkit includes a handout for queer and trans people and women considering joining the military. It aims to dispel myths and lies told by recruiters, so that people can know the facts before signing up. I wonder, do you ever worry that the military inclusion advocacy has been part of a changing cultural narrative that might cause more young LGBT people to join the military? Knowing all you do about war, and about what happens to people in the military, do you worry about those people?

In direct response to your last question, yes, I'm concerned about the well-being of every individual who serves in uniform in the US and abroad, whether or not they are LGBT. We don't have data to determine whether inclusive policy led to an increase in LGBT enlistment, but this is certainly possible. It is also the case that many LGBT troops were serving prior to repeal (approximately seventy thousand gays and lesbians, fifteen thousand trans personnel, and an unknown number of bisexuals) and that inclusive policy made it a little easier for those already serving in uniform to serve openly.

Although I'm inspired by the way you open up your students to the possibility of visionary change, I'm a little troubled by the implication that my pessimism about revolutionary transformation is a manifestation of false consciousness that is derivative of neoliberalism. Your argument that "the message that 'there is no alternative' is an active fiction of neoliberalism" is compelling, but I'd also like to [End Page 303] take some ownership of my conclusion, and to say that from my point of view, my skepticism emerges from analysis, not willful ignorance.

My overall impression is that our conversation is structured by a contradiction, in that I am persuaded by some of your arguments, but I would suggest that there is a parallel and important countervailing truth: (1) Because we are a highly militarized society, anti-LGBT discrimination—especially in the military and especially when codified in law and regulation—was extremely dangerous, not just for the LGBT community. I don't think you grappled with that point or with what it would have meant to give the advocates of discrimination a free pass. (2) I believe that you have (far) overestimated the contribution of the repeal campaigns to militarism. The US was a highly militarized society in the late 1980s, well before the campaigns to repeal DADT and the transgender ban. The military was not facing a legitimacy crisis and did not need to be rebranded when the repeal campaigns kicked into high gear. Yes, the repeal campaigns contributed slightly to the militarization of American culture. But militarization has been overdetermined in modern American history, and even if LGBT advocates had not pressed for repeal over the past generation, US culture would almost certainly be highly militarized today. (3) Finally, I believe that you have underestimated the benefits of repeal, not just for the LGBT community but for American society more broadly. Inclusive policy has had positive ripple effects that benefit millions of Americans. As I argue above, acknowledging that inclusive policy does not benefit all marginalized people does not preclude that it has yielded important benefits for a large swath of the LGBT community and beyond.

Although there may not be a way to reconcile our positions, this dialogue has been a pleasure, and perhaps it makes sense to end with a question rather than a conclusion, keeping the conversation open for readers and ourselves. If Joe Biden becomes president, the military will restore inclusive policy and provide transition-related medical care for transgender troops. The Pentagon, however, will not allow nonbinary troops to serve honestly and will continue to require service members to declare themselves—and be managed as—men or women. In a highly militarized society such as the US, civilians often take cues from the armed forces, so changing Pentagon policy on nonbinary troops could have the critically important effect of inspiring nonmilitary institutions to loosen commitments to the gender binary somewhat. However, a campaign targeting military policy would implicate concerns you underscore in our dialogue. Should the Palm Center pursue a campaign to encourage the armed forces to allow nonbinary troops to serve openly and honestly? [End Page 304]