In a recent Boston Globe Opinion piece, Grace Park, a Belfer Young Leader Student Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, looks back at how former US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who died in late October, made a major difference in Park’s life, and so many others’, by overturning the ban against transgender people serving in the US military.
Writes Park:
Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter died this week. I never got to thank him for changing my life.
Before I became a Belfer Young Leader in the fellowship Secretary Carter founded at Harvard Kennedy School, before I became his student in technology and public policy, I was an Army ROTC cadet, hoping to join his chain of command at the Department of Defense. The only problem? I was female and nonbinary, and it was 2014.
At the time, the US military’s transgender ban and combat ban on female service members precluded me from military service. I had naively joined ROTC without realizing I was not eligible to commission as an Army officer. When I finally learned about these bans, I was crushed. Even if I did commission, I would have had to do so in secrecy, knowing there would be severe limits to my career.
Everything changed when Secretary Carter took over the Department of Defense. Amid angry dissent within the ranks, he overturned these sexist and transphobic policies in 2015 and 2016, respectively. On the heel of these historic changes, I proudly commissioned as an Army officer in 2016.
Read Park’s complete Boston Globe piece here.
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