PERSPECTIVES
Credit: Sylvain Bruni; source image: Militarist.
I knew I wanted to be a military pilot even before I knew I was transgender. But I couldn’t be both. Someone once said that pilots are the only people who know at age six exactly what they will be when they grow up. And in my case that person was right. My mother was a teacher who worked next to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, and as a child I would watch the F-15s do full afterburner touch-and-gos in the cool dawn desert air. The noise was something you could feel in your chest. I was hooked. For the rest of my youth, I would dream of being a pilot. When I was seven years old, my grandmother took me to the Pima Air Museum, where we ran into a pair of Air Force pilots. I 82 | Boston Pride 2017
eagerly told them all about the solar-powered helicopter that I had built. My grandmother hid a little smile and said nothing. The ‘helicopter’ was made only out of Legos. Still, the two young officers were impressed and handed her a business card. “Let us know when he turns eighteen,” they chuckled, “we’ve got a spot.” I even knew that I was supposed to be a pilot before I knew I was supposed to be female. When I did figure out the latter, I knew that I couldn’t be both. ‘Those people’ – transgender folk – didn’t get to fly military aircraft. So I mentally partitioned my identity, and dedicated every moment of my life to becoming a pilot, while denying
