I am a 26-year-old gender nonbinary individual born biologically male. I reside in the Portland metro area here in Oregon. I am living at home with family who is low-income, so I have limited resources when it comes to getting educational and vocational opportunities. I am totally blind and hard-of-hearing. Although I am petitioning a problem that has been around for a long time, I am not arguing on the basis of disability.

About six years ago, when I graduated high school and attempted to get federal student aid through the FAFSA web-site in the fall of 2012, I was informed by a community college financial aid office representative that I wouldn’t be able to make progress until I had registered with SELECTIVE SERVICE.

 

What is Selective Service?
The Military Selective Service Act, passed and signed on May 18, 1917, was designed to require people who identify or who are perceived as male, or are assigned male at birth, to register upon reaching the age of 18, and no later than their twenty-sixth birthday.

Why did Congress pass this law, and why did they only require males to register?
At the time that this went into effect, people who identified as female had little freedom to work outside the house and perform manual labour. At that time, it was believed that females were incapable of fulfilling combat roles compared to their male counterparts.
Given the ten major wars we fought, our country has developed strategies to call people to do their duty for Uncle Sam, even if they didn't agree with it. Failure to register for Selective Service would result in a huge fine, or five years imprisonment.

Also, considering the recent wars in Vietnam and Korea, some people expressed their beliefs that the draft has been overused rather than being reserved for actual emergencies.

If there hasn't been a draft in a long time, why should people who are considered male still have to register?
Certain benefits are gained by being registered for Selective Service. If you got a job at a federal government entity, you might be required to register for selective service. Likewise, immigrants applying for Green Cards may also be required to register, as well. The problem is that nobody tells you well in advance until it is practically on top of you.

Since I do not consider myself to be male, even though I am still considered to be such by the federal government and my biological sex, I decided, from this point forward, that I would boycott Financial Aid and other services that depend on Selective Service until they Eliminate the selective service Act altogether.

 

Here's some of the problems we're dealing with at the moment.
The federal government is still based on the gender binary for obvious reasons. Oregon was the first state to legally recognise gender non-binary individuals, and other states soon followed suit. I changed my gender on my new state ID card to reflect this new law early this year, and my court order also legally declares me to be nonbinary.
The other problem is that this society, like most Western societies, is extremely male-dominated, especially by cisgender heterosexual males, which means that it'll most likely be a lot harder to fight this policy.

Before making this petition, I attempted to find out whether I would have a legal argument to file litigation with the Selective Service or any other branch of the United States government on the basis that selecting, picking out, or subjecting a specific group of individuals on the basis of sex and gender constituted discrimination, which is illegal in almost all jurisdictions. In this last round of contacting different legal organisations, an attorney informed me that this matter of a substantially similar nature has already been addressed by the United States Supreme court in the case of Rostker v. Goldberg, 448 U.S. 1306, 101 S.Ct. 1, 65 L.Ed.2d 1098 (1980).

 

Here's what my attorney said.
At that time, the Court held in a six to three decision that Congress's decision to exempt women from registration 'was not the "accidental by-product of a traditional way of thinking about females"'. The Court found that men and women, because of combat restrictions on the latter, were not 'similarly situated' for the purposes of draft registration. The Court also upheld Congress's judgment that the administrative and military problems that would be created by drafting women for noncombat roles were sufficient to justify the Military Selective Service Act. Although the military has been relenting on this position in recent years, there is no legal precedent stating that the Constitution requires it to do so.

 

I believe that as the military makes more progress towards accommodating minority groups, we can draft people for noncombat roles, such as playing in the Marine Band or working in the Information Technology field.
One of the members of the National Centre for Transgender and Intersex Equality informed one of the college's queer resource centre's coordinators a year ago that there have been some effort made by congress to eliminate Selective Service, but as of today, it still remains unclear what the future will hold. They might either eliminate it or expand the registration to females. They might forget about it and keep things as they are.

So, I decided that if they weren't going to change this policy, we would have to petition them.

I think that you (and I) as private citizens, and constituants, should come together and make our voices heard and redefine what America was meant to be, a country where all human beings, NOT men, are created equal. The supreme court ruled in favour of same sex marriage in 2015, and five years later, they ruled in favour of us once more. As a result, people of the same sex can legally marry in all fifty states including the territories, and they now have federally-recognised employment protection.

Also, judges have been working hard on blocking Trump’s attempts at banning transgender service members from joining the military, though President Biden is most likely going to reverse it. We would need to work at lifting the combat restrictions on female soldiers so Congress would be forced to reconsider mandatory registrations for everybody.

The only time people should be excluded or exempt was if they were full-time parents or if they had a disability or chronic illness, but it should never be based on gender or sex. Those belong in the nineteenth century, and it's already the twenty-first century. A little over 101 years, and we're still dealing with this problem.

 

If we can change this for future LGBTQIA+ communities, you can help me out by being one of the first to help make change to allow anyone, not just transgender individuals, who are male or were assigned male at birth, to attend the college of their choice and receive financial student aid, if they can't afford paying for college, without having to worry that they will have to register for Selective Service simply because they were told that they wouldn't get any support because they were coercively  assigned male at birth. If Selective Service is here to stay, then people should get assurance that everyone would be required to register. If jury duty does not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender, Selective Service ought to be the same.

 

I believe that ones decision to enlist in the selective service requirement should be just that, ones own choice. It's not fair that males have to register as soon as they turn 18. What if they don't want to? I'm asking that this requirement be made unconstitutional. If America is supposed to be a free country it's time we started acting like it and stop forcing people to do things they don't want to do. If one chooses to enlist in the military that is a choice only they can make. I'm all in favour of anyone and everyone irrespective of gender identity and sexual orientation enlisting in the military if they want, I'm not in favour of forcing people to do so.

I had a great chance to go to college and pursue a career in biotechnology to help develop new methods for transgender reproduction and reassignment several years ago, but because of this unequal and unfair treatment I wholeheartedly disagree with, all of my plans came to naught. I don't want others in my position to experience what I went through. For now, I plan to make a living by being an advocate for my people and my community, for I feel that I was chosen to follow my destiny and fight for the injustice of it all.

 

Please share this petition far and wide. Get the media involved. Send this to any political advocacy organisation and help bring this to victory!