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On Thursday, Nov. 8, Carson Graham of TransInclusive moderated a panel discussion for four transgender veterans about their experience in the military at the Stonewall Museum in Wilton Manors, Florida.

Transgender individuals have been allowed to serve openly in the United States since 2011. According to the U.S. government, there are approximately 15,000 transgender service members currently on active duty or in the reserves and over 150,000 transgender veterans.

Kristy Golba had served 31 years in the Marines with multiple deployments all around the world, including, Bahrain, Suriname, Iraq, Norway, Japan. “I joined when I was 18,” Golba said. “My family life was a bit distorted. My dad was a drunk, former marine – it was a combination of things, getting away and changing my environment. Now, but now I want to focus on myself.”

After all the panelists introduce themselves, Graham asked, “What advice do you have for future transmen or transwomen that would want to enlist?”

“If they are already transitioning, then they can’t,” was Nicki Ruiz’s quick reply.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis released a 44-page memorandum earlier this year which proposed a policy that was deemed as extremely discriminatory by The American Psychological Association. Mattis’ expert panel from the Pentagon has been heavily criticized for skewing data from various research studies.

There are three keys points that the Pentagon’s panel claims – there is minimal success with mental health and when hormone therapy was introduced to transgender servicemen and women, they were more prone to depression and suicide.

Secondly, the policy states, “Transgender persons who require or have undergone gender transition are disqualified from military service.” However, there is a bit of legal jargon following the statement, which allows the Pentagon the ability to make exceptions.

Third, the policy also states that transgender persons should serve as their biological sex.

“I don’t care if you are transgender, homosexual, heterosexual or what have you identify as, I would say no,” said Champagne Boudreaux. “I cannot recommend people to enlist. It’s a lot of mental work. You see how we are all up here, speaking monotone? We were trained that way, they put us in this kind of environment. Our experiences, we relive it, we go there. It is a tough road to live, [you have to] think of every aspect of your private life.”

“I did five years, I went to Kuwait for 6 months, and in 2016 I went to the countries surrounding Russia,” said Nicki Ruiz. “Bulgaria, Latvia, Jordan and Kuwait, it was hot, it was so fricken hot. If you can imagine standing outside, it was about 130 degrees, and [you have] about 60 pounds of [gear] on you and you’re just raining [sweat] inside of your cap.”

“I would say if you’re transitioning, I would say wait,” added Nicki Ruiz. “Unless you have already had bottom surgery, the military won’t give just one person any special treatment so you will end up sharing 5 showerheads with 30 people that were born your biological gender.” Ruiz then reiterated, “We are all one solider, we are all one sailor. There’s no room for special treatment.”

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(AP) — William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Hollywood wise man who won Academy Awards for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and summed up the mystery of making a box office hit by declaring “Nobody knows anything,” has died. He was 87.

Goldman’s daughter, Jenny, said her father died early Friday in New York due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. “So much of what’s he’s written can express who he was and what he was about,” she said, adding that the last few weeks, while Goldman was ailing, revealed just how many people considered him family.

Goldman, who also converted his novels “Marathon Man,” ″Magic” and “The Princess Bride” into screenplays, clearly knew more than most about what the audience wanted, despite his famous and oft-repeated proclamation. He penned a litany of box-office hits, was an in-demand script doctor and carved some of the most indelible phrases in cinema history into the American consciousness.

Goldman made political history by coining the phrase “follow the money” in his script for “All the President’s Men,” adapted from the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate political scandal. The film starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Standing in the shadows, Hal Holbrook was the mystery man code-named Deep Throat who helped the reporters pursue the evidence. His advice, “Follow the money,” became so widely quoted that few people realized it was never said during the actual scandal.

A confirmed New Yorker, Goldman declined to work in Hollywood. Instead, he would fly to Los Angeles for two-day conferences with directors and producers, then return home to fashion a script, which he did with amazing speed. In his 1985 book, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” he expressed disdain for an industry that elaborately produced and tested a movie, only to see it dismissed by the public during its first weekend in theaters.

“Nobody knows anything,” he wrote.

In the book, Goldman also summed up to the screenwriter’s low stature in Hollywood. “In terms of authority, screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week),” wrote Goldman.

But for a generation of screenwriters, including Aaron Sorkin, Goldman was a mentor.

“He was the dean of American screenwriters and generations of filmmakers will continue to walk in the footprints he laid,” Sorkin said in a statement. “He wrote so many unforgettable movies, so many thunderous novels and works of non-fiction, and while I’ll always wish he’d written one more, I’ll always be grateful for what he’s left us.”

Goldman launched his writing career after receiving a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1956. Weary of academia, he declined the chance to earn a Ph.D., choosing instead to write the novel “The Temple of Gold” in 10 days. Knopf agreed to publish it.

“If the book had not been taken,” he told an interviewer, “I would have gone into advertising … or something.”

Instead, he wrote other novels, including “Soldier in the Rain,” which became a movie starring Steve McQueen. Goldman also co-authored a play and a musical with his older brother, James, but both failed on Broadway. (James Goldman would later write the historical play “The Lion in Winter,” which he converted to film, winning the 1968 Oscar for best adapted screenplay.)

William Goldman had come to screenwriting by accident after actor Cliff Robertson read one of his books, “No Way to Treat a Lady,” and thought it was a film treatment. After he hired the young writer to fashion a script from a short story, Goldman rushed out to buy a book on screen writing. Robertson rejected the script but found Goldman a job working on a screenplay for a British thriller. After that he adapted his novel “Harper” for a 1966 film starring Paul Newman as a private eye.

He broke through in 1969 with the blockbuster “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” starring Newman and Redford. Based on the exploits of the real-life “Hole in the Wall” gang of bank robbers, the movie began a long association with Redford, who also appeared in “The Hot Rock,” ″The Great Waldo Pepper” and “Indecent Proposal.” Goldman’s script set a then-record $400,000 (or about $2.9 million today).

Though the sum made Goldman a target in an industry that had long devalued screenwriters, the price proved worth it. “Butch Cassidy” was the year’s biggest box office hit, grossing $102 million (or close to $700 million today).

“All the President’s Men” (1976) further enhanced Goldman’s reputation as a master screenwriter, though he initially had a low opinion of the project (“Politics were anathema at the box office, the material was talky, there was no action,” he later wrote) and was even regretful afterward because of the production’s headaches, including the use of multiple writers.

Other notable Goldman films included “The Stepford Wives,” ″A Bridge Too Far” and “Misery.” The latter, adapted from a Stephen King suspense novel, won the 1990 Oscar for Kathy Bates as lead actress.

In 1961 Goldman married Ilene Jones, a photographer, and they had two daughters, Jenny and Susanna. The couple divorced in 1991. Goldman passed away Friday in the Manhattan home of his partner, Susan Burden.

Born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1931, Goldman grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1952 and served two years in the Army.

Goldman wrote more than 20 novels, some of them under pen names. “The Princess Bride,” published in 1973, was presented as Goldman’s abridgment of an older version by “S. Morgenstern.” The scheme, he said, was liberating.

“I never had a writing experience like it. I went back and wrote the chapter about Bill Goldman being at the Beverly Hills Hotel and it all just came out. I never felt as strongly connected emotionally to any writing of mine in my life,” Goldman once said. “It was totally new and satisfying and it came as such a contrast to the world I had been doing in the films that I wanted to be a novelist again.”

The film grew into a cult classic, adding more phrases of Goldman’s to the lexicon: “As you wish,” ″Inconceivable!” and “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”

Despite all his success as a screenwriter, Goldman always considered himself a novelist and didn’t rate his scripts as great artistic achievements.

“A screenplay is a piece of carpentry,” he once said. “And except in the case of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not an art, it’s a craft.”

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