TAMPA — Back in the mid-1980s, while serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, Daniel Jones would sometimes put on a dress in the confines of his off-base apartment.
“But I would never go outside in a dress,” said Jones, 63, who now lives in Tampa as Nancy Jones and is transitioning to become a woman. “It wasn’t a question of not wanting to. It was a question of not daring to.”
Jones, who retired as a master sergeant in 1991 after 20 years with the Air Force, feared being discovered within the tight-knit military community around the base.
Jones said she hopes that kind of fear will eventually dissipate with Monday’s announcement by Defense Secretary Ash Carter that the Pentagon is working toward ending its ban on transgender troops.
“I think it will be great for the community,” Jones said Tuesday. “I think it will be a positive step. There are a lot of transgendered who want to serve and obviously a lot in the military at the moment.”
Carter announced that the Pentagon is working toward eliminating the ban because “we have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines — real, patriotic Americans — who I know are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that’s contrary to our value of service and individual merit.”
Under a regulation known as Department of Defense Instruction 6130.03, anyone with a “Current or history of psychosexual conditions … including but not limited to transsexualism, exhibitionism, transvestism, voyeurism …” is precluded from serving.
Monday afternoon, Carter announced he is creating a working group that will spend the next six months studying the policy and the implications for military readiness of welcoming transgender persons to serve openly. Carter also announced that all administrative discharges over gender identity issues will be reviewed by Brad Carson, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
Jones volunteers at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender support group and has won a Bronze Award for the past three years from the White House for her volunteerism.
She said Carter’s moves “are a good first step” and welcome news for what she estimates are more than three dozen transgender veterans living in the Tampa area. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates there are about 15,000 transgender service members on active duty.
“It will bring forth the transgender issue more,” Jones said. “Right now it is a very back burner type of issue.”
In particular, Jones, who works at AT&T, lauds the new requirement that a high-ranking official must decide whether a service member is kicked out on gender identity grounds.
“To move it to the undersecretary for personnel to discharge someone for being transgendered pretty much makes it impossible,” Jones said. “That’s a good move. A good start. But it will take time of course, for things to change so that everyone can serve openly.”
Jones points to elimination of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” preclusions, used in determining whether to discharge gays and lesbians in the military, as a sign that attitudes can and do change.
“I think it will be pretty much like ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ — a non-issue,” she said.
Changing the rules on transgender personnel is particularly important, Jones said, because “the dropping of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was great for lesbians and gays, but it did absolutely nothing for transgendered personnel, though a lot of people thought it did.”
Jones, an application production support specialist at AT&T, said she has been working with the Haley LGBT group for the past several years.
The group was formed in May 2013, Haley spokeswoman Karen Collins said. Including one or two staff, the monthly meetings are attended by about a half dozen people. About half of them are transgender veterans. A second LGBT support group has been approved for the VA’s Lakeland clinic and will begin meeting in September, Collins said. Three of the five veterans interested in the group are transgender.
The C.W. Bill Young VA Medical Center in St. Petersburg recently started a similar group, said spokesman Jason Dangel.
Both hospitals have been recognized two years in a row as a “Leader in LGBT Healthcare Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the country’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization.
PHOTO: Nancy Jones, who retired from the Air Force in 1991 as Daniel Jones, says the Pentagon’s move to accommodate transgendered service members is a step in the right direction. CHRIS URSO/STAFF