FORT DRUM, N.Y.>> Maj. Erica Vandal had just finished briefing 200 soldiers on her brigade’s plan to employ artillery fire in a big combat training exercise. She exited the cavernous warehouse where the troops had gathered and was headed to the bathroom between sessions when her phone reconnected to the network and began pinging.

Dozens of new messages flashed across her screen. One was from her mother.

“Just heard about the Supreme Court ruling,” it read. “That totally stinks! How are you doing?”

The other texts confirmed what she already assumed. The justices had ruled that President Donald Trump could begin expelling transgender troops from the military immediately. Vandal, 36, and thousands of others would be forced out.

It didn’t seem real. She found it hard to conceive of a life outside the Army. The daughter of a three-star general, she had grown up on bases around the world and thought of them collectively as home. She had been a West Point cadet, an artillery officer and a Bronze Star recipient for her service in Afghanistan.

In combat, she had taken cover in concrete bunkers from incoming Taliban rockets and, alongside her troops, fired back at the enemy. She had found meaning and purpose in placing her soldiers’ needs ahead of her own.

“Supreme Court just ruled,” she texted her wife. “I’m out.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling meant that the ban could remain in place while court challenges moved forward. Vandal’s legal team, which was representing more than a dozen plaintiffs challenging the transgender ban in court, would keep fighting. But her lawyer told her the chances of a reversal in the next year or so were small.

Vandal began driving to her house on the other side of Fort Drum, N.Y., where her wife and two children were waiting. The Trump administration was offering transgender troops extra money if they didn’t contest their dismissals. Vandal, an officer for 14 years, knew she stood to get an additional $160,000, which she could use to restart her life or help secure her children’s future.

Should she take it, or stand on principle and fight?

Vandal’s first sense that she was living in the wrong body had come when she was 6 and playing with friends on an Army base in Texas.

“I wish I was a girl,” she recalled telling them. She said they stared at her in disbelief. In a military community that prized conformity and conservative values, she quickly learned that it was not acceptable, and even shameful, to be different.

In the years that followed, she tried to fit in by emulating her father, a former Army general.

“The best man I’ve ever known,” she called him. He was happy, well-liked and successful. Maybe she could be, too, if she followed his path?

She attended West Point and was commissioned as an artillery officer, like him. Later in her career, she would live in South Korea near the Lt. Gen. Thomas S. Vandal Training Complex, named for him.

Vandal was at West Point in 2009 when a classmate connected her with the woman, Janelle, who would become her wife. They got to know each other mostly by texts and then phone calls. For their first date, Janelle flew to the academy for a dance.

Janelle was funny, caring and outgoing. “She just had this beautiful personality,” Vandal recalled. Vandal, who was still closeted at the time, was more introverted and analytical, her sense of humor more wry. They married shortly after she was commissioned as a lieutenant and reported to Fort Sill, Okla., the same base where her parents had started their military life in 1982.

Vandal was building a successful career as she moved with Janelle from Oklahoma to Hawaii to Colorado.

By 2018, Vandal’s father was battling pancreatic cancer, just as she was readying her artillery battery for an Afghanistan deployment. She sat with him at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center but did not share her secret, which she assumed she would take to “the grave,” she said.

She tried to manage her struggle by putting in long hours at work and leaning into masculinity. She bulked up in the gym, hoping her outward toughness would hide her inner torment.

She was on a one-year assignment to South Korea when a military doctor diagnosed her with gender dysphoria, defined as the distress people feel when their gender identity is different from their gender assigned at birth. She initially kept the diagnosis a secret from her wife, who was living with their son and daughter outside Fort Carson.

Vandal told her commander that she was transgender and was starting her transition but asked him not to tell others in the unit. “I would like to keep this all under wraps to the greatest extent possible,” she wrote in a December 2021 email.

“Thanks for trusting me,” he replied. “You have my full support.”

In early 2021, President Joe Biden had signed an executive order allowing trans troops to serve openly.

Vandal eventually came out to Janelle.

The marriage was strained, but they agreed to try to make it work, Vandal said. In deference to Janelle, she slowed her transition, forgoing makeup and dresses and postponing surgical interventions.

The “brain fog” that had haunted her for decades lifted. She said she felt increasingly at ease in her body. She started to grow out her hair, slicking it back with gel to conform to the Army’s male grooming standards. She painted her toenails under her combat boots.

Most of her Army friends didn’t know she was transgender until late 2023 — two years after she began her transition — when she was serving at Fort Drum. She didn’t make a big announcement because she wanted to be seen simply as an Army officer, not a trans officer. Some soldiers asked whether they should change how they referred to her. Others simply began addressing her as “ma’am.”

Beyond the base, Trump was railing against transgender troops during his presidential campaign stops. At rallies he aired a video that interspersed clips of a Marine drill sergeant screaming at recruits with images of transgender troops in uniform. Every time a trans person appeared on the screen, the crowd would boo.

Seven days after Trump was inaugurated, he revoked Biden’s directive allowing transgender soldiers to serve openly. In a new executive order, he asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”

Soon after, Vandal signed onto a lawsuit seeking to block the ban. She and her brother, Nick, a former Marine pilot, had talked earlier about whether she should join the case. On Jan. 28, she texted him that it had been filed. It was on CNN.

“I’m proud of you,” he told her.

In February, the Pentagon issued a memo setting March 26 as the day the trans ban would start. With the deadline fast approaching, Vandal’s lawyers petitioned a federal judge for an emergency injunction to block the ban from taking effect.

A hearing was scheduled for March 12 in Washington. Vandal led a group of about a dozen plaintiffs from their hotel to the federal courthouse, passing the Capitol on the way.

The Pentagon’s order asserted that trans troops lacked the “honesty,” “humility” and “integrity” required to serve.

“How can you even say that — that a whole group of people lack humility?” Judge Ana C. Reyes of U.S. District Court asked the government’s lawyer, Jason Manion. The Trump administration had cited no studies and offered no testimony from officers to back up its claims.

Instead, Manion argued that the law gave the Pentagon wide leeway to decide who is fit to serve. “At the end of the day, we are asking you to defer to military judgment,” he said.

The same arguments had been made about Black, gay and female troops, Vandal recalled thinking.

She was washing dishes at her home a week later when she received a text telling her that the judge had issued an injunction temporarily blocking Trump’s ban.

Six weeks later, on May 6, the Supreme Court sided with the government and lifted the lower court’s injunction.

Back at Vandal’s home, half-filled moving boxes were scattered about. Janelle had decided a few weeks earlier to move with their children to Colorado Springs, where they owned a home from a previous tour. She didn’t want to be married to a woman. And Vandal, who was weighing starting surgical procedures that she had long delayed, could not be happy as a man.

“I still love her,” Vandal said. “There’s hurt and pain but no animosity.”

Vandal had until June 6 to decide whether to ask for a “voluntary” separation from the Army, which came with the promise of a $320,000 payment. It was a fraction of the millions of dollars in pension and health benefits she would receive if she retired in six years with 20 years of service. If she took her case to a board of inquiry — typically reserved for soldiers being separated for misconduct — she would get only $160,000.

Her instincts told her to fight her dismissal.

But she knew that appearing before the board of inquiry would be demeaning. To the Army, she was now a man.

There was financial pressure, too. Soon she would be supporting two households on a single salary. Vandal said her wife had urged her to put her family’s needs ahead of her pride. Her mother gave her similar advice.

On June 2, she sat at her home office and typed up a “memorandum for the record” requesting a voluntary separation.

She was required to write just one sentence. Instead, she filled three pages.

She emphasized that she was leaving the Army under the threat of “coercion, fear of unjust treatment, and pressure caused by an unstable and hostile policy.” She closed by requesting that her memo be kept in her personnel file in case the Supreme Court ultimately overruled the transgender ban or the Pentagon changed the policy.