When Stehlik relieves, an army student, he left as a transgender woman in the spring of 2017, said he was nervous about how his colleagues and other soldiers would react, especially because he is physiotherapist.
“You have to physically touch most of your patients, and initially had some nerves that people would feel uncomfortable,” he said. However, in the eight years since he left, he said he has been “overwhelmingly, pleasantly surprised in each shift.”
“My bosses, the people I have worked with, the people who have worked for me, my patients, nobody cares that I am trans,” he added. “They simply see me as the greatest Stehlik or Dr. Stehlik. That’s all.”
“Our service should not depend on who possesses political power at that time.”
Nicolas Talbott army reservations lieutenant
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday that prohibits trans people to serve openly and enlist in the army. Politics argues that medical and mental health care that some trans people need to treat gender dysphoria, the medical term for anguish caused by a misalignment between gender identity and sex at birth, is inconsistent with high standards of the military for “preparation for troops., lethality and cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity and integrity.”
It is not clear exactly how the order will affect the thousands of trans service members such as Stehlik. Unlike a similar policy that Trump issued in 2017 during his first mandate, this order says that being fundamentally “conflict with the commitment of a soldier with an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in the personal life of one”.
“The affirmation of a man that she is a woman, and her requirement that others honor this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and the required disinterest of a service member,” says the order.
NBC News spoke with the members of the trans service that could be affected by the order, and all communicated a similar action plan: they will continue doing their job and plan to combat the order.
“I am resolved,” said Stehlik, who is parked in Fort Campbell on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, when asked how he felt since Trump signed the order on Monday. Stehlik was commissioned as an officer after graduating from West Point in 2008.
In the summer of 2018, just after she left, Stehlik was deployed to treat soldiers in Afghanistan for nine months. She said the experience, combined with patches she uses in her uniform that shows that she went to specialized combat training schools, helps her patients trust her and make her good in her work.
“Trans people are as lists and as drop -down as any other person,” he said. “We have to comply with the same physical standards of physical aptitude, the same medical standards to be deployable. And even while we talk, there are members of the trans service deployed worldwide, since they have already met those standards to deploy. “
Six trans service members and two trans people who wish to enlist filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump administration on the executive order.
Nicolas Talbott, a second lieutenant who has served in army reserves for almost a year, said he joined the demand because he fears the worst case: that Trump’s executive order will completely expel all members of the trans service completely of the military.
“That will have a great impact, not only on myself personally, where I would face losing my job, losing my future career, losing all the benefits of being a member of the army, which includes my health insurance, but this would be a great impact on The United States Army, “he said, added that eliminating thousands of Trans Service members would damage preparation in general.

Talbott was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Trump’s prohibition of 2017, which prevented Talbott from getting ready at that time. He said he decided to join the lawsuit filed on Tuesday because “it is the right thing.”
“The ultimate goal is that we do not want trans people or any other minority member of the army to have to face this every time a new politician is chosen in office,” he said. “Our service should not depend on who possesses political power at that time.”
Like Talbott, this is not CMDR of the Navy. Emily Shilling’s first round with a trans prohibition. Shilling, who emphasized that he was not talking on behalf of the Navy or the Pentagon, came out in 2019, two days after Trump’s first prohibition came into force. As a result of the ban, he told NBC News in 2021, he was forced to live a double life: he lived as a trans woman in her personal life, but at work she had to continue serving as birth sex.
After Biden signed an executive order in 2021 allowing trans people to serve openly, he began to prosper, he said. She was promoted to Commander, and fought and won her medical authorization to fly the high performance planes again, which said she established a precedent that allowed other members of the trans service to do the same.

Since Monday, he said, he feels as if he were in a mission. In addition to serving for almost two decades, she is also president of Sparta, a defense organization for trans members of the military and veterans. She said she would like to have conversations with Pentagon officials or the White House about how the true American trans and service members are.
“We have served openly for almost a decade, and we have been able to demonstrate that all the original arguments of why the transgender service should not be open are simply false,” he said. “Our medical costs are minimal. Our fallen time is minimal, and the effect on the cohesion of unity, morals, is non -existent. ”
Since last week, Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at trans rights. Hours after its inauguration, it signed an order that declared that the United States government will recognize only two sexes, men and women, and that “these sexes are not changing and are based on a fundamental and incontrovertible reality”, resulting in The State Department that freezes the entire passport applications that request a change of sex marker.