A Navy paramedic’s lawyer faced a review board and asked its members a single question: Did they know any transgender sailors?
Every officer on the panel said yes, the paramedic told The New York Times.
“They all said yes,” the paramedic told the paper. “The chief said his liberty buddy in Thailand was transgender and was a phenomenal sailor. The lieutenant commander said her first work center supervisor was transgender, and she learned a lot from her.”
One more officer chimed in.
“The commander said he’d worked with several transgender sailors, and he barbecues with his next-door neighbor, who’s trans,” the paramedic added.
The board approved him to remain in the Navy.
The hearing is one of a dozen the Times examined in a report published October 23.
The newspaper found that review boards in the Navy and Marine Corps are handing down decisions that run against the direction set by Pentagon leadership.
“Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases,” the Times confirmed.
The Army and Air Force have followed a different path. Boards in those two branches have mostly voted to dismiss transgender troops, according to the report.
The boards trace back to a speech by War Secretary Pete Hegseth. At his “State of the Force” address, he laid out a vision for the department’s personnel.
The DOW Rapid Response account on X posted his remarks on September 30.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department… no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdoes, no wimps, no radicals—JUST WARRIORS,” Hegseth said.
After that announcement, the Pentagon set up panels to evaluate the transgender service members still on the rolls.
The Times reported that the instructions given to those panels leaned heavily toward dismissal.
The paper quoted the standard directly: “Under the rules, any evidence of transgender feelings or tendencies — even if there is no formal transition — requires dismissal,”
Marine Staff Sgt. Damien Contreras went through that process.
A logistics specialist, he has served a decade and completed three overseas deployments. He expected the board to end his career.
The board reviewed his file and found him qualified to continue serving.
“I was shocked at first, but when you come down to it, it makes sense,” Contreras told the Times. “You have war fighters looking at war fighters.”
He pointed to his own record as the reason.
“They see I’ve always done my job, I’ve deployed, I’ve mentored other Marines, followed the rules,” he said. “They say, ‘Hey, this is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?’”
The paramedic’s lawyer later took on a second transgender sailor. According to the report, that board’s members had no prior relationships with transgender sailors. They also voted to keep him.
Attorney Steph Kral told the Times he does not see the votes as a statement of politics.
“I don’t think they are trying to make any grand policy statement,” Kral said. “I think they’re just trying to do what’s best for the Navy.”
Others see the boards differently.
Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a former official in President Trump’s first administration, wrote on X that the panels are “defying the chain of command.”
The Times account rests on a small sample. It covers 12 cases across the Navy and Marine Corps, and the Pentagon’s review process is still underway.
The decisions arrived within weeks of Hegseth announcing the department’s new approach to transgender service members.
