Transgender Army master sergeant dares Pete Hegseth: Say your anti-trans slurs to my face

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent more than a year broadcasting his contempt for transgender troops from behind microphones and across social media. On Tuesday, one of the soldiers he is trying to force out invited him to try it face to face.“Words are only words if you give them power,” Army Master Sgt. Amiah Sale told MS NOW’s Peter Alexander. “I don’t think that it’s something that he would say to our faces.”“If so, I’m in South Korea,” she added. “I hope to see you soon.”Sale was responding to Alexander’s question about Hegseth’s repeated use of anti-transgender slurs, including his description of transgender troops as “dudes in dresses.” The defense secretary has paired that language with a policy designed to remove transgender people from military service regardless of their performance, experience, or commanders’ support.Related: Trans troops ask judge to protect everyone targeted by Pete Hegseth's military banSale called the ban “bigoted and based on a culture war.”“It not only hurts myself or my family. It hurts my unit,” she said. “The millions of dollars that it took to make me a trained and proficient leader are just thrown away when we say, ‘Oh, we don’t want them anymore. They’re the wrong kind of American.’”Sale is among the named plaintiffs in Talbott v. United States, one of the central legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s second attempt to drive transgender people from the armed forces. She appeared alongside Michael Haley, an attorney with GLAD Law who represents the service members challenging the policy along with attorneys from the National Center for LGBTQ+ Rights.The Justice Department’s August 28 petition to the Supreme Court identifies Sale as one of the service members now defending a lower court order protecting currently serving plaintiffs from discharge.She remains on active duty in South Korea. Her career has not formally ended. Its fate is suspended between an Ar