The VA can protect women’s spaces and transgender vets — here’s how

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) should create clinics or spaces specifically for transgender people within their existing facilities. This is because genetic women do deserve their own safe spaces. So do transgender people. We all need to respect each other’s spaces.

There are those in my community who oppose this, arguing, in effect, “We are who we say we are.” But this is the realistic compromise that will benefit everyone.

As a transgender person, I believe that if you have not taken steps to fully live as, present as and respect the gender you claim you are, then you should not go into those spaces where genetic women expect privacy. Don’t expose yourself in locker rooms, restrooms, the spa or the White House.

A transgender woman who has gone through male puberty should also not compete against genetic women. It’s not about the influence of sex hormones on a person’s body, but rather the appearance of unfairness regardless of any such advantage. As a result of the failure to respect the obvious, we have allowed far-right activists led by The Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 to control this narrative.

As three VA psychologists recently wrote in The Hill, many veterans have been subjected to military sexual trauma (MST). This is a sufficient reason for the VA to segregate by sex. Genetic women need to feel safe, respected and seen. However, so do transgender veterans, which is sufficient reason for the VA to segregate by gender.

While statistically most perpetrators of sexual assault are biologically male, studies show that transgender people are sexually assaulted at very high rates, and that the “fear of possible repeat victimization” is very real. The overall group that scientists call “sexual and gender minorities” (SGM), which includes male-to-female transgender persons, are overall 10 times as likely to be victims of sexual assault as non-SGM men and women.

I believe that transgender people harm our cause when we try to force others, including Veterans Affairs staff, to accept us within our identified genders as if gender and sex were the same. Transgender veterans may get immediate satisfaction by shoving VA policy in the face of offending persons, but they will lose the long-term narrative by being jerks.

We should not be forcing others to accept our beliefs about who we are. All Americans have the right to believe as they wish, but if we are serious about recognizing diversity and being inclusive, we should admit that ideologically diverse perspectives create more sustainable long-term outcomes. 

If you refuse to use my name or pronouns, that’s on you. I don’t care. I’m secure in who I am and do not need your validation to be me. It is not my place to force you to accept me.

But that is a two-way street. You don’t have the right to force me to agree with you or to force me to assimilate into your ideology either. Gender is no more an ideology than are the ideologies that dictate I must act a certain way because of my genetic sex or my anatomy.

No transgender veterans I know deny their genetic sex. I know that I am genetically a male with X and Y chromosomes. But my anatomical sex is female, and so is my gender. Those three terms are important to distinguish from each other.

Gender and sexual orientation are also different. In my own experience, I was never interested in men until I had all my procedures to be the woman I know that I am. Now I am just a straight woman. I don’t care how that works, and neither do my four children, my eight grandchildren, my ex-wife or many of my Naval Academy classmates.

Health care must be determined by one’s genetic sex. So transgender veterans would do well to provide the VA with a body-parts inventory. You don’t want them treating you for ovarian cancer when it’s your prostate that is the real problem. 

For most people, genetic sex, anatomical sex and gender match each other, but I believe these categories are not strictly deterministic. They are probabilistic, with a distribution skewed heavily toward alignment. Based on this highly skewed distribution, most people say that human sex expression is strictly dimorphic. But in reality, there is a fuzzy cloud of probability around human sexual dimorphism. Understanding the role of how these three things drive the health care one gets is crucial to our health and wellbeing.

In other words, we ignore our genetic sex to our detriment.

Cassandra Williamson is executive director of Transgender and Diverse Veterans of America.