4 minute read
A Time to Serve
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.
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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 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 the need to be myself in other ways. In the end, one half won out over the other – but not without the struggle between the two sides nearly destroying me and my family in the process.
I did end up becoming a pilot and flying through three deployments to the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic. But by 2005, I was on my fifth deployment in four years and my dysphoria had caught up with me. The situation seemed hopeless. My gender identity seemed like the most shameful secret imaginable. I couldn’t tell a soul, much less my wife, who was expecting our second child. I couldn’t legally speak with a therapist outside the military system. President Bush had just been re-elected to a second term, and the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), to say nothing of the medical ban on transgender service members, seemed impossibly far away.
There was no network of transgender service members to reach out to in 2006. As far as I could determine, I was the only one. Sure, I found online a few Vietnam-era veterans who came out late in life. However, because many in the medical community had advised transgender people up until that point to leave behind their old lives and disappear, generations of transgender people from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s had simply vanished.
By 2010, I had left active duty. I transferred to the inactive reserves and began transitioning. The organizations working on ending DADT were consumed with this one effort, and had little more to offer me than a secret Facebook page with 20 or so active transgender service members. Yet, that small group of people would go on to change the course of transgender civil rights history.
After DADT was repealed, membership in the transgender Facebook group grew to 35. By the time the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was shot down by the Supreme Court, our group had reached nearly 100 members. At the same time, in 2013 we formed
Service Members, Partners, and Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPARTA), an organization dedicated to ending the medical ban on transgender service. When I told other LGBT activists what our policy goal was, they laughed at me. One said, “you sure know how to pick impossible battles.”
But we had a cadre of LGB allies in the fight. People like Sue Fulton, Fiona Dawson, and Bridget Wilson stuck around after the repeal of DADT to make sure no one was left behind.
The true turning point came in January of 2014, when we organized the first-ever conference of active transgender service members. For many of the people at this conference, it was not just the first time they had met another transgender person in the service; it was the first time they had met another transgender person, period.
It was a moment of awakening for all of us in that space. We saw each other. We saw possibilities. We saw that if we worked together and had a plan, there was a chance that we could change forever the way American society and the government sees transgender people. But we also saw that if we wanted to make progress, we had to hurry. Only three years remained until the next election, and we were starting from ground zero.
Yet somehow we both changed medical policy against open transgender service, and changed hearts and minds along the way. This was accomplished in great part due to our allies using every ounce of their effort, skill, knowledge, and connections to open doors for us. Failure was not an option, and ultimately it was the transgender service members themselves who convinced leadership in the Pentagon that not only was this change possible, but that it was also a moral imperative for people so dedicated to serving.
We belong. We want to serve. We do not want special treatment. We just want the chance both to be ourselves and to pursue the career of arms we chose.
We belong. We want to serve. We do not want special treatment. We just want the chance both to be ourselves and to pursue the career of arms we chose.
When Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced the end of the ban, and the implementation of a new policy allowing transgender people to serve openly and to transition, it passed through the 24-hour media cycle with little notice.
But for us, it was the beginning of a new era. Well, for most of us. This Pride is a bittersweet moment for me. In June, I will be honorably retired (forced) out of the inactive reserves without having had the chance to rejoin the service. I will not wear the uniform again. This is due to being ineligible for promotion while I was waiting for the transgender policy to change. But I do so knowing that those behind me will no longer have to make the choice between the jobs they love and being the person they are. And this is due in some small part to what we members and allies of SPARTA did.
LCDR Brynn Tannehill is a defense analyst and writer for numerous publications, including Salon, The Advocate, LGBTQ Nation, USA Today, The Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism. She lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and their three children.
