The United States Air Force Academy hosted a male service member claiming to be a woman to discuss inclusion for fellow self-described homosexuals and transgenders in the military.
Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram, an astronautical engineer in the United States Space Force, participated in a leadership summit last week at the Air Force Academy and delivered a talk entitled “From Firsts to the Future: Why Inclusion Matters.” Fram was introduced at the conference as “one of the highest-ranking ‘out’ transgender officers in the United States military” and wore a rainbow patch on his uniform for the duration of the speech.
“Inclusion requires asking. Inclusion requires understanding, and it is more work: it is a lot more work for a leader, but I need you to be willing to do it,” Fram told the audience. “In the future, we are going to fight and win wars with brain power, and if those brains happen to be in a trans body, or in any other body, you should want them serving alongside you. Because they might be the ones that revolutionize the way we fight in space, in cyber, or in any other domain of war.”
Fram says on his website that he leads the “Department of the Air Force LGBTQ+ Initiatives Team” and served as board president of a nonprofit that “educates about transgender military service.” The official, who is stationed at the Pentagon to lead space acquisition policy development, “came out publicly as transgender on the day the transgender ban in the military was dropped” under President Barack Obama and “transitioned while in a command position.”
Fram lauded President Joe Biden during the speech for reversing the transgender ban implemented by President Donald Trump between 2019 and 2021, noting that he was “invited to ‘Pride’ at the White House” shortly after the ban was again overturned.
The Defense Department under the Biden administration has drawn criticism for advancing leftist ideologies in the military: the agency garnered backlash for featuring another man who claims to be a woman in a “Pride Month” article which detailed how he was “depressed and suicidal” during his deployment and “privately came out” despite the Trump transgender ban.
Trump observed in his policy reinstituting the ban that “persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria” require “substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery” that disrupt their service. Biden claimed that “transgender service has had no significant impact on operational effectiveness or unit cohesion” when he reversed the order.
The public support of homosexuality and transgenderism from senior administration officials and military leadership occurs even as the Defense Department struggles to recruit new service members, falling short of recruitment objectives by 41,000 individuals in fiscal year 2023.
