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But that wasn’t always the attitude of the Department of Defense, as Lauderback well knows. He joined the Air Force the same year the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Say” came into force. “I know firsthand what it means to work in an inclusive environment, and sometimes I would personally find it frustrating, challenging, and underestimated,” he said. “I put the desire to serve the nation above the desire to live a normal life.”
A few years later, when President Barack Obama repealed “Don’t ask, don’t say,” Lauderback wasted no time. “There was no hiding at that moment,” he said earlier in the month in a storyteller organized by the Air Force. “I’d tell whoever asked.” The removal of the policy gave him confidence because he was not technically it doesn’t matter if the listener went with his identity. “Someone had my back to me if it wasn’t really someone against me or agreeing with me,” he continued.
But these paper policies have not been so easily played out over the last decade. In 2020 Report in Sexuality Research and Social Policies, Researchers from the Department of Defense-funded Military Acceptance Project analyzed the results of 37 in-depth interviews with base personnel around the world. “Half of the participants feared that the military environment, at the institutional level and among the people, is not yet LGBT,” the authors wrote.
Another one examination published in the project Journal of Traumatic Stress, surveyed a larger group and found that about 56% of civilians in the service are sexually harassed. But about 80% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual service members do so, as do 84% of transgender people.
Lauderback said he didn’t fully realize the challenges his LGBTQ colleagues were facing, as he was able to get outside and experience outside. But when others gave him advice about their departure, he realized something: “They were still scared,” he said. And he started thinking, “Maybe this isn’t as good as it was for me. And so I wanted to see if there was a need for the team.” Last fall, he started doing soundings and this spring, LIT was launched.
INET was born at the same time. “We want all aircraft and tutors to feel a sense of belonging,” Adams says. “And that requires work.”
Some of the hardest work LIT will do is to address the concerns of its various members. “They’re very different groups, and we think of them as a homogeneous group,” says Carl Castro of the University of Southern California, who helped lead the Military Admission Project. “Mostly, the members of the LGB service are doing pretty well,” Castro continues. “They can do better, but they don’t do that badly.” Things are more difficult and different for trans people, for example, they now need the permission of a commander to start the transition, says Castro.
The military has a special interest in doing so all they feel welcome in these groups. “Their top priority is to be prepared and ready to act at any time,” says Jeremy Goldbach of the University of Southern California, who is also the head of the Military Admissions Project. “And when you have communities that are marginalized, marginalized, and treated differently, it makes it harder for people to feel able to act in one unit.”
LGBTQ service members don’t exactly want to be treated differently. According to his research, Goldbach says, “the measure of their equity was this:“ Judge me for the work I do. ”Or, he said, people told him,“ The reason I support my unit is not an issue. ”
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