How the Military Became the Country's Largest Employer of Transgender Americans
Male to female transgender people are twice as likely to end up in the military as non-transgender people.
Why?
Most of all because they are led to believe that the military is a place to become “a real man”.
It never works.
Why did Lily Kidd join the Marines?
Ask her about it now and she offers a variety of answers. She needed to escape an unaccepting family. She wanted to experience life outside of Alabama. She was eager for a physical challenge (“I don’t go half in on anything,” she says).
But she also joined the United States Marine Corps because, as a twenty-year-old living in the Deep South with a fiancé, Lily Kidd was still presenting herself to the world as a man.
“When you’re growing up as a boy, feminine traits are pushed away,” explains Kidd, a transgender woman who is now 28 and lives in San Diego. “The Marine Corps—that’s the ultimate way to say, ‘hey, you know what, I’ve got nothing to do with that stuff.’”