VA to Provide Services to Veterans With ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Discharges

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has issued a new policy statement to help ensure that active-duty service members who were discharged for their sexual orientation under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy will be able to receive full VA benefits.

“[A] great injustice was remedied and a tremendous weight was finally lifted off the shoulders of tens of thousands of dedicated American service members,” President Biden said on September 20 as the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that barred lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) service members from serving openly.

Prior to DADT, if active-duty service members spoke out about their sexual orientation, they ran the risk of being hounded, shunned, in some cases assaulted, and discharged. If they kept it a secret, they felt they were living a lie, unable to be their whole selves. More than 100,000 were discharged because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a “compromise” law that purposed to protect them, LGBTQ+ service members were still at risk for harassment and abuse. Nor did the law protect them from discharge. Some 14,000 LGBTQ+ service members were discharged while DADT was in effect. And those who received “other than honorable” (OTH) discharges could be excluded from receiving services and benefits.

The 2011 repeal followed a “hard-fought battle,” said a release from the Human Rights Campaign, which led a coalition of members, supporters, elected officials, 70+ organizations, and 20,000 veterans to get the law overturned. HRC staff coordinated grassroots efforts and sent 19 million e-mails to members and supporters, in turn generating an “unprecedented” 625,000 e-mails and 50,000 handwritten letters to members of Congress.

After the repeal, the VA began the long process of inclusion for LGBTQ+ veterans. “At VA, we continuously work not only to meet the needs of LGBTQ+ veterans, but also to address ongoing issues that LGBTQ+ veterans face as a result of the military’s decades-long official policy of homophobia and transphobia,” Kayla Williams, assistant secretary for public affairs in VA’s Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs wrote in the Secretary’s blog.