“Staff sergeant Cathrine Schmid was prepping for physical training at Joint Base Lewis-McChord when Donald Trump sent the 6am tweets that would herald a drastic change in her career.
The country “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military,” read Schmid, 33, via Google alert on that morning in late July 2017. But it’s a run day, she thought. So she ran four miles.
“It’s not like I’m the kind of person to let fear get in the way of doing my job,” says Schmid, a signals intelligence analyst and transgender woman. A month later, she became a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed by Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN challenging the ban, which becomes effective March 23, 2018.”
Carnival of Souls 