The Same Boots, The Same Mud…

And Still Not Good Enough

On Trump’s transgender military ban, ancient fears, and what I learned about prejudice in the Royal Air Force Police

Editor’s Note: I write this as an ex-serviceman and am fully aware of the inequalities that I witnessed over forty years ago during my military service…and in a time when I thought people had moved beyond these biases.

Let me take you back to somewhere around 1986. RAF Gütersloh, West Germany. The Cold War is doing its low-level hum in the background, like a boiler that might one day explode, and the IRA are unleashing terrorist attacks, often focused on service personnel and or their families. I’m a young Royal Air Force Policeman, doing what RAF Policemen do… which mostly involves standing in the cold, looking serious, and pretending we’re not utterly bored.

And into this scene walks a female RAF Police officer. Newly posted. Fully trained. Exactly the same basic training as the rest of us, the same fitness tests, the same law papers, the same gruelling weeks at RAF Swinderby and RAF Newton that had already broken a fair few blokes who thought they were harder than they turned out to be.

You’d think that would have settled it, wouldn’t you?

It didn’t.

I watched grown men, men who were supposed to be disciplined professionals, genuinely lose their minds over the idea of being paired with a female colleague for a patrol. The grumbling was extraordinary. She won’t be able to handle it if it kicks off. She’ll slow me down. What if something happens?

What if something happens?

I used to sit with that phrase and turn it over. What exactly did they think was going to happen that a trained law enforcement officer couldn’t handle? What specific catastrophe required a Y chromosome to resolve?

Nobody had a clean answer. They never do.

Fast Forward To Today, And Nothing Has Changed

Here we are in 2026, and a divided panel of federal appeals court judges has just ruled that Donald Trump’s transgender military ban is illegal. The majority opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholds a ruling from March 2025 by District Judge Ana Reyes, who concluded that Trump’s executive order likely violates the constitutional rights of transgender service members.

The executive order itself, signed in January 2025, contains language that would be almost funny if it weren’t so grotesque. It claims that the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

Read that again slowly.

An honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.

This from a man whose personal life would give a soap opera writer pause. But let’s not go there, because this isn’t really about Trump’s hypocrisy… we’d be here until next Tuesday if we started cataloguing that. This is about something older and more stubborn. This is about the deep, irrational terror certain people have always had about anyone who doesn’t conform to their neat little boxes stepping into spaces they’ve decided belong to them.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth went even further, asserting that people with gender dysphoria lacked the “honesty, humility, and integrity” required of service members. The judge reviewing the case noted that the government offered precisely zero evidence to support that claim. Not a study. Not a statistic. Not so much as an anecdote that would survive ten minutes of scrutiny.

Nothing.

Because there is nothing. There is only the feeling. And the feeling, when you strip it back, is the same feeling those blokes had on the flight line in Gütersloh in the 80s when they didn’t want to be partnered with a woman. It’s not logic. It’s not evidence. It’s visceral discomfort dressed up in the language of operational necessity.

What The Numbers Actually Say

Here’s what we do know. As of late 2024, an estimated 4,200 troops had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Roughly 1,900 active-duty military members received gender-affirming care from the Defence Department between January 2016 and May 2021. These are people who went through recruitment, training, deployment… who served, often with distinction. Who passed the same tests, wore the same uniform, stood the same watches.

The same boots. The same mud.

Judge Wilkins, writing the majority opinion, was rather pointed about what the policy actually does. He wrote that Hegseth’s policy “does not classify whether persons are eligible to serve in the military in a reasonable and evenhanded manner.” The court found it was driven by what legal minds call “animus,” which is a polite way of saying… they just don’t like these people, and they built a policy around the disliking.

I know that pattern. I watched it operate for years in the services.

The “Readiness” Argument, Or: The Excuse That Never Goes Away

Every single time a group of people has sought inclusion in the military, someone has rolled out the readiness argument. Every. Single. Time.

Women in the RAF Police? Readiness. Black officers in combat roles? Readiness. Gay and lesbian service members? Readiness. And now transgender troops? Same song, different verse.

The argument has a seductive logic to it on the surface. The military exists to fight and win. Anything that degrades that capacity is a legitimate concern. Fine. I accept the premise entirely.

What I reject is the repeated failure to produce any actual evidence that the group currently being excluded degrades anything at all… beyond the comfort levels of people who already decided they didn’t want them there.

When they finally allowed women into the RAF Police in meaningful numbers, the sky didn’t fall. Operational effectiveness didn’t collapse. What did happen was that some very competent officers joined the force, and some of the men who’d been most vocally resistant had to quietly recalibrate their worldview. Which is always a slightly enjoyable thing to witness, even if they’d never admit the recalibration was happening.

The same thing happened, largely, when the blanket ban on gay and lesbian service personnel was lifted in the UK in 2000, after a protracted and frankly embarrassing legal battle. There was no operational catastrophe. There was just… service. People serving.

The Language Matters

One thing that strikes me about Trump’s executive order is how carefully worded the prejudice is. It doesn’t say “we don’t like transgender people” (though that’s clearly the spirit). It wraps itself in the language of values. Honourable. Truthful. Disciplined.

This is a very old trick.

When they didn’t want women in the police, they talked about emotional resilience. When they didn’t want gay officers, they talked about unit cohesion. The surface language changes. The underneath stays exactly the same: we have decided you are not really one of us, and we will find the vocabulary to make that sound principled.

Gender dysphoria is, as the medical community will tell you, a recognised condition associated with significant psychological distress… the distress that arises when who you know yourself to be doesn’t match what the world insists you must be. It has been linked to depression and, heartbreakingly, suicidal ideation. These are not signs of weakness or dishonesty. They are the signs of someone navigating extraordinary difficulty, often while simultaneously doing an extraordinarily demanding job.

To then turn that struggle around and use it as evidence of moral deficiency is… well, it’s cruel. That’s the honest word for it. It’s cruel, and it’s cowardly, and it is entirely in keeping with the long tradition of finding ways to tell people who are already under pressure that they are, by their very nature, not good enough.

What The RAF Taught Me

I want to be careful here not to romanticise my service years, because the RAF in the 1980s was not some haven of enlightened thinking. It had its share of casual prejudice, its share of institutional blind spots, its share of people whose idea of banter would make a modern HR department faint clean away.

But here’s what it also had: a mission. A shared purpose that, when you got down to it, cut through a remarkable amount of nonsense.

When something kicked off… a breach of the perimeter, an incident on the flight line, a situation that required actual police work… nobody was standing around asking about anyone’s background. You relied on the person next to you because they’d been through the same training, because they knew the protocols, because they’d demonstrated under pressure that they could do the job. Full stop.

The female officers who came through didn’t ask for a reduction in standards. They met the standards. Some of them exceeded the standards. And the men who’d been so certain that their presence would be a liability? Most of them came around, eventually. Quietly. Without fanfare. Because reality, when you actually have to live in it, tends to be more persuasive than prejudice.

That’s the thing about serving alongside someone. You learn who they are by what they do, not by what you assumed about them before you met them.

What This Court Ruling Actually Means

The ruling this week is important, but it’s partial. The injunction has been narrowed to protect the plaintiffs who are currently serving… the six active-duty transgender service members at the heart of the case. Those seeking to enlist still face the ban. The Supreme Court had already allowed the ban to go into effect last year while litigation continued, and the appeals court has put its own ruling on hold pending further appeals.

So the fight is far from over. In practical terms, the military can still bar new transgender recruits. The battlefield is legal, slow, and grinding.

But the principle matters enormously. The court found that the policy was “both arbitrary and based upon animus.” That’s not a technical ruling about process. That’s a finding that this was prejudice wearing a policy suit. It’s the legal equivalent of someone finally saying out loud what the rest of us could see perfectly well.

I hope the people affected by this ban… the troops who’ve served with distinction, who’ve deployed, who’ve come home carrying the same weight that any service member carries… hear that finding and understand what it means. It means the system, imperfectly and slowly and with all its maddening delays, is capable of recognising what they always knew: that they are good enough. They were always good enough.

Why This Still Matters Beyond America

We should be careful, sitting here in Spain as a UK expat, about viewing this purely as an American problem. The instinct that drives this kind of exclusion doesn’t respect geography. It lives in institutions, in cultures, in the quiet assumptions people make about who belongs and who doesn’t.

I’ve spent enough time in enough environments to know that these battles don’t stay won. They require tending. Every generation has to decide, again, whether it believes that worth is measured by what a person can do… or by how comfortable they make the people already in the room.

The RAF taught me, eventually, that the discomfort people feel about difference is almost always about them. Their assumptions. Their sense of what the world should look like. It’s not operational data. It’s not evidence. It’s just… feeling. And feeling, however strongly held, does not constitute a qualification for discrimination.

The same boots. The same mud. The same training regime that breaks the weak and builds the capable, regardless of everything else.

That used to be enough.

It should still be enough now.

If this piece sparked something in you, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Whether you served, whether you’ve faced exclusion somewhere, or whether you just have a strong opinion… you know where to find me.

Until Next Time