Transgender Air Force veteran: ‘Kansas is worth fighting for’
I am a United States Air Force veteran, a college graduate, a small business owner, and an animal lover.
I am also transgender. Born and raised in Ohio, I found my way to Wichita in 2009 as an active-duty military member. Shortly after my arrival to McConnell Air Force Base, and after nearly a decade of service, I was honorably discharged subsequent to disclosing that I was transgender.
I was officially discharged in April 2011, but it would be another year before I actively began pursuing a public-facing transition. It is oftentimes mischaracterized by detractors, but making the decision to transition is not something that is made lightly or on a whim. Transition often comes at an enormous and chronic cost.
To complicate matters personally, I had never knowingly met another
trans person before my own transition. I did have a tiny, supportive network of allies, but no one whose lived experience reflected my own. No one that just “got it”.
In time, I was introduced to a small group of trans folks that met regularly in a super-secret support group in a nondescript strip mall in west Wichita, and later on, in the basement of an inclusive and equally nondescript church. That group was a lifeline, a welcome oasis in a social
desert.
After attending months of meetings, I told the group that I wanted us, trans people, to be more visible in the community because when you are forced to live so far outside of the public eye, it can be very difficult to find each other, to build a support network and a life. After hiding for so long, I was not at all interested in the idea of upending my entire life only to hide in a different kind of closet.
The response was adamant, if unsurprising. It is too dangerous to be visible. I could not argue with that, but I also could not help but think it will always be too dangerous if no one ever takes that step. And so I did.
With the indispensable help of a friend, I plunged headfirst into advocacy work with The Face of Trans, a project designed to not only raise awareness that there were, in fact, trans people living in Kansas, but that we are just as complex and human as anyone else.
One particularly popular talking point when it comes to transgender and gender-diverse people is how suicidal we are and how that’s proof that our “transgenderism” is a mental illness. This illness left untreated, or god forbid actively supported, naturally devolves into a state of complete entropy and self-annihilation, or so the story goes.
Poetically enough, the motto of the State of Kansas is Ad Astra per Aspera. To the Stars Through Difficulties. And in that sense, trans existence is about as Kansas as it gets. Transgender and genderdiverse folks have always lived in Kansas. We live in Kansas now. And we will always live in Kansas. Among many things, we are resilient.
Personally speaking, I have never felt more safe and at home in my own skin than I do now. But the unrelenting antagonism that comes as sure and as frequent as the tide is enough to drive anyone to the edge of madness.
I have friends who will never transition because it will financially ruin them. I have friends who have de-transitioned because of the social and familial retribution they experienced when they dared come out. I have friends who have died by suicide, a direct result of compounded discrimination and hardship that just stopped feeling worth enduring.
Early on in both my transition and my advocacy work, people would ask me why I stayed in Kansas instead of going somewhere where it might be easier to live and thrive as a trans person. And for many years, my answer was that Kansas is where the work is. Over a decade later, Kansas is still where the work is, maybe even more so, but why I stay has changed.
Now I stay because this is my home. This is where my family and friends live, where some of my favorite places in the world are. Kansas is home to so many memories for me that I could not imagine living anywhere else. And I shouldn’t have to.
From school boards and city councils across the state to the Legislature itself, Republicans have ceaselessly criticized and villainized queer Kansans. The more inclusive human rights are, the harder the theocrats dig in, the harsher their rhetoric becomes. Traditionalists will love you to death if you let them.
In the end, my decision to transition cost me my marriage, my children, and my military career, and made subsequent employment experiences difficult. But I also found myself living into a future that I literally had never been able to imagine before transitioning, one of possibility and old age.
I have been a part of or worked alongside people from a number of organizations that are invested in their respective communities, including the Sedgwick County Democratic Party, the Wichita Public Library Board, and the District 1 Advisory Board as well as the Wichita Transgender and Community Network (WiTCoN), the Flint Hills Human Rights Project, the Kansas Statewide Transgender Education Project (K-STEP), and Wichita Pride.
There is no shortage of good souls, but we need accomplices. Vulnerable Kansans need those who are able to stand in the gap to do exactly that, to break the tide of hateful rhetoric and discriminatory legislation in a way that affects real and lasting change for queer Kansans of all ages, races, and religions. I’m here for it, but there is a lot of work to be done. It’s going to take a great many of us doing more than we are currently doing to get there.
Kansas is a beautiful place, and it’s worth fighting for. For transgender people, for small business owners, for college students, for veterans. For everybody.