LeAnne Withrow, a civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard, says she believes it's never the wrong time to do the right thing.
Trudy Ring at The Advocate:
LeAnne Withrow always wanted to be in the military, like her father and grandfather, and she fulfilled that ambition by serving as a soldier in the Illinois National Guard from 2010 to 2023, receiving many honors for her work. Now she’s a civilian employee of the Guard, still being recognized for outstanding service, but a Trump administration policy is making her life difficult by restricting where she can perform basic bodily functions. Withrow is transgender, having come out about a decade ago, and until recently, she could use the women’s restrooms at Camp Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, where she is stationed, and the 12 other Guard facilities she visits as part of her job as lead military and family readiness specialist. That all changed when Donald Trump issued his executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which, among other thing,s directs federal agencies to exclude trans and intersex people from single-sex spaces that align with their gender identity. Withrow filed a class action lawsuit in November against the Trump administration in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, contending that the exclusionary restroom policy violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace. In its 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, the U.S. Supreme Court found that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. It names as defendants numerous administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. She is represented by Democracy Forward, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of D.C., and the ACLU of Illinois. She filed the suit after receiving no resolution from the complaints she filed with the Army National Guard Bureau Equal Opportunity Office and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She didn’t really expect satisfaction from those agencies, given that they’re under the Trump administration.
[...] She’s “one of those oddballs” who didn’t join the military in order to get money for college or because she needed a job, Withrow says. “I really, truly wanted to give back to the United States and to my community, and the National Guard seemed like the best way to do that,” she explains. “I always wanted to serve, and it was the privilege of a lifetime to be able to serve in the National Guard for 13 years and do the things that I got to do there, meet the people that I met. But really, it was about service to others, which I think is an important thing for all of us to keep in mind and something we should dedicate a little bit of our time to every day.”
When Withrow took the military’s aptitude test, she scored in the 99th percentile, and the recruiter told her she could be an astronaut. But she chose to enter as a cook, “because it’s sort of the definition of serving others, right?” she says. Then she moved into public affairs and was a military photojournalist, and she eventually rose to the rank of staff sergeant and chief public affairs officer. She participated in military exercises in South Korea, Jordan, Alaska, and elsewhere. She served at the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in 2016. She helped with flood duty in 2019 with Operation Ready Response, with civil disturbance missions in Chicago, and COVID-related operations at the height of the pandemic.
LeAnne Withrow, a trans Illinois National Guard employee, sues the Trump Regime over its policies banning trans people from using restrooms aligned with their gender identity.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: Trans military worker barely eats or drinks to avoid work bathrooms. She’s suing the Trump admin.
