The first time Nicolas Talbott heard the word “transgender,” he was 12 years old.
He was in Australia, at a restaurant in Sydney, when a fellow student who had gotten to know him over two weeks of travel told Talbott she was pretty sure he was transgender.
Was it an insult? Was she trying to help him? Talbott wasn’t sure. When he got home to Ohio, he looked the word up. It was a “light bulb epiphany moment,” he said. All of a sudden, the pieces fell into place.
As a toddler, Talbott had tried to pull out his long hair; he’s since worn it short. As a young child putting on costumes, he dressed up as his grandfather — complete with a sidewalk-chalk moustache and tattoos — and not his female relatives. He hit it off better with his male cousins, considered himself a tomboy and would pray on his knees to wake up as a boy. While Talbott was assigned female at birth, it never felt as though he was in the right body.
“We all saw that I was supposed to be a little boy,” Talbott said.
Now 31, Talbott, who lives in Akron, has long since transitioned to male. Last year, after a grueling process that lasted nearly a decade, he achieved a long-held goal and joined the Army.
But less than a year after he was sworn in, and weeks after he graduated from officer candidate school in January, Talbott is worried that he and thousands of others could be kicked out of the armed forces. President Donald Trump, on Jan. 27, signed an executive order that seeks to bar transgender individuals from serving.
The order states that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
“Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved,” it continues, “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
Even before the order was signed, Talbott was gearing up to fight it. Talbott v. Trump was filed the next day, on Jan. 28, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia with backing from prominent LGBTQ+ organizations and seven other plaintiffs.
The suit, which also names Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth and others, seeks confirmation that the president’s “categorical exclusion” of transgender people from military service is unconstitutional and asks that the court grant an injunction prohibiting transgender people from being excluded from serving. It also seeks to protect those people who are fighting it, like Talbott, from adverse treatment in their roles because they are transgender.
A motion for a preliminary injunction against the order was filed Monday.
“I just worked so hard to land my dream job, and I might get kicked out of my dream job,” Talbott said. “Nothing should preclude us from service.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense declined to comment on the executive order. In a statement, a DOD official said the department “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives.”
Ups and downs on the way to serving
Talbott began the process of medically transitioning when he left his family’s farm in Lisbon, Ohio, to begin his undergraduate degree at Kent State University in 2012; he finished the process in 2021.
Each step made him feel more like himself. He started to grow peach fuzz. His voice began to drop. Eventually, the sidewalk-chalk moustache was replaced by a real one; he still sports it, along with a short-trimmed beard.
Talbott’s grandfather had served in the Army; his grandmother’s brothers had also been in the service. The military was always something he was drawn to, he said, an interest that also formed in part because of his second grade memories of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“It’s so awful that so many people are being hurt,” he recalled thinking. “What can I do when I grow up to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
There were recruiters at Talbott’s high school, but a quick search taught him that, at the time, he couldn’t be transgender and be a member of the military. He let the dream go, studying sociology and criminal justice in college instead.
In his last semester of college, a professor suggested he would be an asset to his country if he were to enlist. When he told her it was an impossibility, the professor told him he needed to do something about that. Just a few months later, in the summer of 2016, then-President Barack Obama’s administration ended the ban on transgender troops.
It would take time for a policy to be written and people to be able to sign up, but, for the first time, Talbott saw a path to his goal. He started to look for a recruiter who would be comfortable working with a transgender candidate. But after months of work on Talbott’s end, filling out forms and amending them, Trump tweeted in July 2017 that the “United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military.”
“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” he wrote.
It set Talbott back tremendously.
He joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Kent State University in 2018, which promised a commission at the end and seemed like a pathway for entering the service during a period of legal uncertainty. But Talbott elected to leave after the commanding officer told him he was in support of banning transgender people from serving. He called it “one of the most disappointing moments of my life.”
Hoping that there was still a way to serve, he joined a legal challenge to the earlier ban. Every court that heard the case on its merits decided that it was unconstitutional, said Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who represented Talbott then and now.
But the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the decisions, keeping the status quo while litigation continued. Because the military was still working to create rules following the Obama administration’s order at the time of Trump’s tweets, that meant that transgender people who were already serving continued to do so, but there wasn’t a path for new people to join.
The case wasn’t resolved before Joe Biden was elected president; in his own executive order in 2021, Biden lifted the ban on transgender troops. That opened the door for Talbott and others to join up.
Discrimination ‘rarely stops’ at one group
At the time joining the military became an option, Talbott was in graduate school and settling his grandmother’s estate, including dealing with the family farm.
Finally, after graduating with his master’s degree in criminology in 2021, Talbott again started looking for a recruiter. He found one, only to learn months later that that person had never submitted his paperwork. In December 2023 he started the process anew, and in March of 2024 was finally sworn in. He went to basic training and then officer candidate school as a member of the Army Reserve.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited for anything in my life,” Talbott recalled thinking. He wiped tears away as he described the process he went through. “It’s literally everything I hoped it would be.”
Talbott is a second lieutenant with an Army Reserve military police unit based in Pennsylvania. He’s still able to train with his unit while legal challenges are pending, but he said that, since completing training in January, there was no time to revel in his accomplishments before the challenge began again.
“I’m still excited, but I didn’t get to enjoy one drill before I have to fight to stay in the uniform,” he said. “I’m not ready to take off the uniform. I’m holding on to the belief that I will not have to take off the uniform any time soon.”
Minter, the attorney, said this ban went further than Trump’s first one — that one prohibited transgender people from joining the military; this one would kick out people who have already joined. There’s no solid accounting of how many people that would affect, but Minter said he thought it would be thousands.
This order gave military leaders 30 days to come up with an implementation plan and 60 days to execute it; the lawsuit is meant to halt that plan before anyone is harmed, Minter said.
“It’s just unprecedented and such a slap in the face to every service member in the country, every one,” Minter said. “You made the sacrifice, you’re meeting the standard, and on a political whim, you can be yanked from your position.”
Both he and Talbott said the long-term goal is to ensure that people’s jobs and livelihoods won’t be at risk with each election. Minter said there’s no evidence that having transgender people in the Army is detrimental to defense aims; after all, they have to meet the exact same standards for deployment as everyone else.
To target transgender people, he said, is harmful to the morale of all service members, who then have to worry if they could be the next to “arbitrarily be kicked out.”
“Once you go down this road, it’s a slippery slope,” Minter said. “If there’s blatant discrimination of one group, it rarely stops there.”
Talbott’s discipline makes him a prime candidate for service
Hedi Nasheri didn’t know Talbott was transgender when she first talked to him about joining the Army, said the professor of global security at Kent State University and the co-director of the cybercriminology program.
Nasheri, who had Talbott in both undergraduate and graduate classes, said she often pitches students on the idea of joining the U.S. government. Talbott’s analytical skills and discipline would make him a prime candidate to do so, she said.
She said she has not followed the issue of having transgender people in the Army, but she said her recommendation for Talbott to join up was based on his abilities as a student, and his gender identity wouldn’t have any bearing on his ability to do the job.
“If he’s prevented from employment based on private preferences, it’s a shame,” she said. “If it’s based on qualifications, he meets the qualifications.”
Talbott went to “such great lengths” on his way to joining the Army Reserve, Minter said, calling his “an iconic American story.”
He said that Talbott’s transgender identity has no bearing on his ability to serve his country and do so admirably, noting that Talbott was singled out for awards during his training.
“I wish every single person in this country could meet Nic Talbott. Our problems would be over,” Minter said. “He’s so obviously a good person. … He contributes so much everywhere he goes.”