PROVINCETOWN — The grand marshals of Carnival have a role that’s equal parts festive and formal. They rally onlookers’ energies as the floats progress down Commercial Street and stand for the values important to people in this town that’s like no other. Musicians and actors often get the job, and last year outgoing state Rep. Sarah Peake was one.
This year’s marshals were neither performers nor politicians. Instead, the Provincetown Business Guild invited GLAD Law, a legal advocacy organization in Boston, and two U.S. military service members, Commander Michelle Bloomrose of the Navy and Second Lt. Nicolas Talbott of the Army, to lead the parade from the Harbor Hotel to the Coast Guard Station.
GLAD Law, which specializes in LGBTQ rights, is representing Bloomrose and Talbott as two of 32 plaintiffs in Talbott v. USA, a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s Jan. 27 executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military.
The Supreme Court on May 6 allowed the ban to continue while challenges like GLAD’s move forward in lower courts. As has become the norm in emergency applications, no reason was given for the court’s ruling overturning a federal judge’s earlier preliminary injunction.
The plaintiffs were cheered by the crowds at the Thursday afternoon parade. On a float that was part flowery petticoat, part tent, Talbott and Bloomrose donned “Grand Marshal” sashes and appeared to relish their duties as celebrants-in-chief. Talbott waved to the crowds, and Bloomrose carried a sign that read, “Pride in service for all.”
Rachael Brister, executive director of the PBG, told the Independent that she’d followed the legal challenges to the ban and observed how “with grace and professionalism” trans service members on social media told candid stories about being forced to leave the service. The PBG, she said, wanted to “honor and amplify” those stories.
GLAD, founded in 1978, holds an annual fundraiser in Provincetown. Its executive director, Ricardo Martinez, said the parade appearance was a chance to “allow people to ask questions and demystify the process of the litigation.”
Commander Bloomrose, 45, leads training for incoming lawyers at the Judge Advocate General’s Naval Justice School in Newport, R.I., where she lives with her spouse and children. The ban on trans service members would force her into early retirement.
Second Lt. Talbott, 31, was also a plaintiff in GLAD’s earlier legal challenge to President Trump’s first ban on trans service members in 2017. At that point, he was still hoping to enter the service as an openly trans man.
“That time, it was such a gut punch,” he told the Independent. Talbott, who is from Boston, now serves in an Army Reserve Unit in western Pennsylvania. He faces the prospect of “involuntary separation” by opting to continue to serve in the Reserves.
“What our fellow service members care about is whether we can put on the uniform, meet the standards, and do our jobs,” he said. “We’ve proven that we are absolutely able to do that.”
He said he sees his public appearances as a trans service member as a way to change minds and uplift junior personnel.
Bloomrose told the Independent that being a plaintiff was “much to my family’s chagrin” but added that appearing in events like the parade was “about trying to increase the visibility of this issue and of these people.”
While Talbott grew up visiting the Cape, this was Bloomrose’s first time in Provincetown. “I haven’t been in a place where everyone is that happy in a long time,” she said.
Bloomrose said she was “grieving the loss” of her Navy career, which she said was as integral to her identity as her gender. “It’s like losing a leg,” she said.
A ‘Sense of Humanity’
The day after the Carnival parade, the two plaintiffs spoke about their experiences to a far smaller crowd at the Brasswood Inn as part of a PBG-organized panel titled “A Fundamental Betrayal” alongside Martinez and GLAD Legal Director Joshua Rovenger.
The inn’s exterior had been transformed for Carnival into “Band Camp,” complete with trumpet and marimba decorations. But inside, the mood was somber. Of the ban, “I don’t think it’s unfair to say it ruined my professional life,” Bloomrose told those present. After serving as a Navy attorney for 20 years, including as counsel in three combat operations, she started transitioning last year.
“I had a Senate-confirmed appointment to the next pay grade of captain,” Bloomrose said. She had also expected to stay in Newport with the JAG Corps so that her oldest child could attend the same high school for four years. “It’s all just slowly been taken away or fallen apart.”
Both plaintiffs said that junior trans service members were often “worse off” than they were and risked their jobs by speaking freely. “They don’t have the resources that we do, they don’t have the opportunities that we do, and their lives are also ruined,” Bloomrose said.
Talbott pointed to studies, such as one published in Transgender Health in 2020, finding that trans people are twice as likely than the general public to serve in the military. Joining the military, he said, was a “lifeline” for many young trans people who felt they “had nowhere else to go.”
The 2025 ban differed from the one issued in President Trump’s first term, Rovenger said, in the extent of its hostility toward transgender people. The president’s executive order in January declared that changing one’s gender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”
In her original preliminary injunction, Federal Judge Ana Reyes did not find that reasoning persuasive. The ban was “soaked in animus,” she wrote on March 18. “Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”
The government has appealed that injunction. The next step, Rovenger said, is to enter the discovery phase in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and to ensure review board processes for “separation” are fair.
“I think a lot of people forget we’re not just names on a docket or names in a news article,” said Talbott. That’s why he’s talking about his experiences publicly. “To be involved in the community and create that sense of humanity,” he added, “really helps push things forward.”
