Trans Voices of America
Amid political upheaval, trans people continue to live full, complex lives—nurturing relationships, building community, and navigating everyday joys and challenges. The stories featured are a diverse range of identities and experiences, spanning individuals, couples, and collectives across different geographies. While not representative of all, they reflect a shared resilience in the face of uncertainty and a persistent reach for joy.
Over the past decade, trans people have received an unprecedented amount of mainstream media attention. This increased cultural awareness of what it means to be trans has led to a more widespread understanding of self-determination, gender as a spectrum, and bodily autonomy. But transgender communities are now facing an intense backlash as right-wing organizations have redoubled their efforts to criminalize trans people.
The federal effort to quash trans rights builds off of a campaign that’s been underway in the U.S. since 2019, and gained momentum during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a concerted movement to target transgender and nonbinary people in many state and local governments has taken hold nationally with the re-election of President Donald Trump. Republicans’ marching orders under the new Trump administration started with a day-one declaration of an intent to delete recognitions of trans existence from public life. This agenda, outlined clearly in Project 2025, has expanded to restrict trans people from living openly and safely in schools, workplaces, housing, hospitals, prisons, in transit between states and countries, and in public spaces writ large.
Over 200 laws designed to bar trans participation in society have passed in recent years, with the number of proposed state and federal bills expanding from 701 in 2024 to 940 in the first six months of 2025. Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered an opinion (United States v. Skrmetti) that allows states to deny access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18. These measures criminalize trans people and our allies and accomplices in every area of public life. Looming threats of harassment, violence, and arrest appear ever more pointed as fearmongering over our bodies, identities, and expressions increases.
Across this spectrum of grief and joy, trans people in the U.S. are thinking about health care access, personal safety, migration and home, and economic survival. If authoritarian and anti-trans policies become acceptable norms, trans people with enough money and resources might look to leave the country entirely. Others without those resources will lay low and limit the amount of time they spend in public. Many will go back to getting health care through underground markets, or forgo it altogether to avoid emergency rooms and institutions in general. The death toll for trans people will likely rise. Some trans people will move to more populous corners of the country to survive by finding each other; others will stay in their remote corners and fight to figure it out, by necessity or by choice.
While the reality we face today is not a single reality, there is a shared theme of precarity. This country is increasingly dangerous and hostile, and no one knows what’s to come. There is also a shared sentiment of solidarity. Trans people have each other’s backs, and our communities are strong, bolstered by generations of experience with near-total marginalization.
Our lives continue amid the political turmoil: trans people will raise children, tend animals, make gardens, party relentlessly, fall in love, go to grad school, make art, create collectives, get hired, get fired, fight for housing, walk streets, shock people in bathrooms, generously explain things, angrily explain things, raise money for each other’s surgeries and bail funds and rent, be embraced or rejected by family, be lonely, stick together.
The following stories cover a range of identities and geographies — individuals, collectives, and couples. They reflect an uncertain future: a daily struggle for safety, and an awareness of the constant possibility of joy.
Table of Contents
Morgan Peterson: Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Joselyn Mendoza: Queens and Brooklyn, New York
Wilson and Miss B Haven: Durham, North Carolina
Willy Wilkinson: Oakland, California
Morgan Peterson: Safety and Support in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
On a Wednesday night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a group of kids gathered around a raised fire pit to set their given names — also known as deadnames — ablaze.
“It was 18 middle-schoolers and an open flame,” Morgan Peterson says, laughing. “It was a very loud event…it was really cathartic for them.”
The Phoenix Festival, as they called this event, is one of the near nightly happenings at the Prism Community Center, an LGBTQ2S+ community center opened in 2024 by the Transformation Project — a support and advocacy organization for transgender people and their families. On Tuesday, they held a casual hangout for trans adults, and on Friday is a moth-themed, goth-hosted art show called Metamorphosis.
Peterson, a 26-year-old administrative assistant and youth support worker at the Transformation Project, gives an enthusiastic walk-through of the center. “Do you know what the P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for?” Peterson asks, beginning our tour with the massive posters of Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson just inside the entrance. “Pay it no mind!”
We view two rooms deemed “Marty’s Closet,” where trans people can try on and take home gender-affirming clothes with the help of a volunteer stylist. People come to the center throughout the week to find support and concrete resources, all of which are particularly popular with youth. During the summers, Peterson says, they often have dozens of young people at their events and hangouts. It’s also welcoming to more than just trans-identified people: While it’s trans-centered, this is also the only LGBTQ2S+ space in all of South Dakota. Many travel across the state and even across state lines to access this community.
These services are desperately needed: A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ youth by the Trevor Project found that 44% of trans and nonbinary youth in South Dakota had seriously considered suicide, and nearly 1 in 12 had attempted it. A quarter of LGBTQ youth in the state said they were physically threatened or harmed in the last year based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and more than half reported experiencing discrimination.
In the main space of the Prism Center, there’s a snack table, an art table, event fliers on the walls, a free queer library, magazines with the stories of trans people in South Dakota, and, near the entrance, one of my favorite features: the framed Kristi Noem apology.
When Noem (now the deportation-happy Secretary of Homeland Security) was still governor of South Dakota, she and her health secretary pulled nearly $100,000 of funding from the young organization after a social media troll targeted Noem for allocating federal funds to a transgender community health worker. The Transformation Project sued Kristi Noem for discrimination in 2023, and got a $300,000 settlement from Noem’s government. They also received a formal apology signed by her health secretary, now displayed prominently by the coffee machine for all to see.
Peterson has theories about Noem’s personality. Their therapist once saw her in a local café and noticed that she kept her head down and avoided making eye contact with people. Peterson’s analysis: “She is intimidated by people like us, because we’ve worked past all of these institutional horrors and our own personal horrors, and we’ve said, ‘No, I’m going to be authentic. I’m going to look people in the eye and tell them who I am.’ I pity her but I also hate her, because she’s committing atrocities right now.”
After six years of Noem’s leadership, South Dakota checks a lot of the anti-trans boxes that have become a focus for Republican governors and legislatures. In 2023, the state became the sixth in the country to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. In March of this year, the new governor of South Dakota signed HB1259 into law, making it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity in schools and government buildings. Legislators pushing for the bill said they would rather trans people in South Dakota prisons be put in permanent solitary confinement than share restroom facilities.
But South Dakota, and particularly Sioux Falls, is also a hub for grassroots responses. “We’ve created a network of safety,” Peterson says. The Transformation Project has health care providers, trans-affirming contacts in therapy, teachers, and even school therapists they can call on to support youth. They hold weekly hangouts for middle and high school students and help them advocate for themselves in school, or refer them to resources for mental health support. “Most of the time they’re not even talking about their gender or sexuality [when they’re here] — they’re just being kids and that’s all they really need right now.”
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Peterson grew up in a 700-person farming town called Viborg, 45 minutes south of Sioux Falls, and left near the end of high school to study classical music at a boarding school before heading to college in Chicago.
“I have so much love for that town,” they tell me. “That is where I learned what community engagement is, what it means to prioritize the community over the individual.”
The downside: conformity. “Like, you would get made fun of if you wore the wrong brand of Ugg boot in my high school. It was really harmful. And it’s also a very Christian conservative town.”
Peterson had barely heard of being gay, queer, or nonbinary until they left the state — and when they did, they say, “it was all over.”
When they returned fully-formed and identifying as a nonbinary lesbian, they came to understand their experience of South Dakota in less black-and-white terms. They can envision the way their life might have turned out if they had never left Viborg, and never connected with another queer or trans person.
“I think there’s a version of me out there that’s still closeted, and [is] just a band director in a small town somewhere, married to a man,” they say. Still, what they have now is better: “I’ve cultivated this wonderful community for myself.”
The day after our tour, we do some bird-watching in the park and go to the butterfly house that Peterson grew up visiting — two of their happy places. South Dakota’s prairies and wetlands are a haven for creatures, and Peterson can spend hours outside, hammocking and identifying birds with the Merlin app. I’m struck by their midwestern sweetness, their ease in nature. There’s a toughness to it, too.
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
“I love woodpeckers. That’s my favorite bird. They have a protective membrane in their skull to keep them from getting concussed when they jam their beaks into the side of a tree trunk,” they say.
After the park, we go to Peterson’s apartment, which they call their “Hobbit House” — a quiet cove with knitted blankets, a comfy couch, a cuddly cat.
“There’s this part of me that’s just, like, the scared kid that wants to be safe,” they say. But overall, they’re not afraid right now. They think the future is bright.
“I dig deeper and I listen to my gut, which I’m getting better at listening to. That’s a completely different set of feelings, and those feelings are calm. Those feelings are reassured. Those are the feelings of all of my trans elders who have come before me, who are saying, ‘No, we’re not going anywhere, and we’ve been fighting, so you can keep fighting.’”
Joselyn Mendoza: Cooperative Economics in Queens and Brooklyn, New York
Interpretation provided by Gloria Delgadillo
Interpretation and additional reporting by Ale Pedraza Buenahora
Joselyn Mendoza is a busy woman — classic New York.
“I’m always rushing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even have time for myself,” she says, showing up to meet our team between her part-time job and a political lobbying event.
Mendoza wears jeans and a jacket — denim on denim — when we meet in a Williamsburg park. Her family has lived in the neighborhood for the last two decades, through the area’s aggressive gentrification. Mendoza, 52, lives upstairs with her husband, nephew, sister, and brother-in-law. Her brother and his wife live downstairs with their three kids. After her stepfather died due to cancer and a lack of access to medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic, family became even more of a priority.
“Nothing really makes me happier than to be with my family,” she says.
Mendoza’s close with her mom, but it took years for her to accept her transition, she says. Even a couple years ago, when she went to get breast implants, “She really didn’t believe me when I told her that I wanted to go do this… I got my surgery, she didn’t even want to look at me.”
Her mom, who was an advocate for immigrants when she first came to the U.S. from Mexico, has given Mendoza more credit as her own organizing work has begun to bear fruit.
Mendoza is the director of Mirror Beauty Cooperative, which started as an effort by a group of Latina trans women to build economic independence through learning and teaching cosmetology skills.
Ale Pedraza Buenahora (they/elle)
Ale Pedraza Buenahora (they/elle)
“This city is very, very expensive,” she says, gesturing toward Williamsburg — land of high rents and $20 cocktails. “This is why many people actually engage in sex work.” For trans women who are migrants, employment options can be extremely limited.
For Mendoza, “doing makeup really came out of a need, because I left school and I needed to do something. But I am more theoretical rather than practical.” She has a cosmetology license, but her role in the cooperative is mainly obtaining funds, organizing workshops, and giving advice on makeup artistry.
The cooperative’s main offering is workshops, which happen two or three times a week in a windowless room inside non-profit offices in Queens. A smattering of Latinx folks of different identities show up and practice makeup, lashes, and hairstyling, with Mendoza at the helm. The group unloads donated makeup, mirrors, and other beauty supplies on a conference room table, and everyone gets to work — they’re familiar and comfortable with each other.
Mendoza is a natural leader, but she’s constantly crediting her team. “We need to work collectively, we need more than just opportunities, we need to come together,” she repeats. “We need our own physical space to open up a beauty shop, and someone to finance it.” Volunteers like Dani, a skilled eyelash technician, and Suleyka, a makeup artist, help out and fill in when she’s away.
Dani has only been in the country for a month and a half. At our meetup in the park, he’s visibly shy, but excited, too. Mirror, he says, “opened up a lot of doors for me …I immigrated to the United States and I joined Joselyn’s group. Because I know that beauty’s always going to be trending, right?”
He loves that, even as a person who is so new to the country, he can share knowledge with others in the queer community. “No one can take away the knowledge that we’ve gained.”
Ale Pedraza Buenahora (they/elle)
Ale Pedraza Buenahora (they/elle)
Lately, attendance at the workshops has been low. People are afraid to travel — even within New York City — because of ramped-up immigration enforcement. Still, Mendoza points out that the risk of deportations is nothing new.
“One of things that Trump has done is like, he’s really shown, he’s really reflected what the United States actually is. This country is racist. The United States is homophobic even despite the laws that exist,” she says. Her community worried about deportations under Presidents Biden and Obama, too. “I am scared,” she says.
“But like, what else is the alternative? It’s just like, are we gonna go back to hiding? Are we going to go back to living in the shadows without any freedom?”
She envisions an event where all the people they’ve trained can advertise their skills to families planning quinceañeras and other special events. “If we have to do it right here in this park, we will,” she says. In the long run, she hopes to create economic stability for herself and other trans women with a shop that belongs to the community.
“I don’t want admiration,” she says, “I want a legacy.”
Wilson and Miss B Haven: T4T Love and Nightlife in Durham, North Carolina
Wilson and Miss B Haven sit at a queer-friendly bar in downtown Durham, sipping the hair of the dog. They have just pulled an all-nighter, partying with a friend for a birthday.
“It was pretty chill,” Wilson says, “but we did see the sun rise.”
The following week, at an airy coffee shop in north Durham, Wilson has on a red dad cap that says, “Black Coochie Matters,” and they’re fresh off an “all-day-er” — Miss B had three drag performances in different parts of the Triangle the day prior. “I don’t even remember falling asleep last night,” Wilson tells me.
This unconventional and unpredictable schedule represents their relationship well: “I’m attuned to the divine timeline,” says Miss B Haven, 28, an artist, drag performer, and “overall good time.”
Wilson, 32, is a journalist, photographer, organizer, and the Type A in the relationship when it comes to planning. “I have gotten used to never knowing what’s going to happen with her,” they say. “We have very different relationships to time.”
When talking about their first meeting at a dance party last summer, Wilson says, “She comes up to me and I ask her how she’s doing and she’s like, ‘Better now!’ And I ran to my friends and was like, ‘Y’all, this girl so fine…I don’t know what to do. I’m, like, freakin’ out.’ And then one of my friends was like, ‘Just go ask her to dance!’”
“Then we started dancing,” Wilson says, “And we’ve been dancing ever since.”
Miss B adds, “You actually can find the love of your life out in the club.”
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
The second time the pair hung out, their night ended at Miss B’s house, where Wilson watched as she did her hormone injection.
“There was something very sweet and very magical about just being there, witnessing her,” Wilson says.
After a casual summer, they made their relationship official near Halloween, when they attended a party dressed as Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit — “a really great T4T couples costume,” says Miss B.
“I always told all my friends, yo, I just know the moment that I really get into my T4T s**t — just know y’all better get me while you can,” she continues. “[Because] the schedule of people that I will be making time for in my day will be limited.”
Wilson and Miss B describe an ease and a sense of intuitive understanding in dating another trans person. Both say their relationship helps them feel safe and grounded.
“Being in a T4T relationship is very healing and…so affirming. When the world is out to get us…we can just be with each other and be with our community,” Wilson says.
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
Jaylan Rhea (they/them)
Miss B says she’s from a “cowboy-esque” part of Texas. She moved to Durham for college and stayed because she loved the community. Wilson moved around the Midwest as a kid and took up residence in the Raleigh area at 14. Both came out as trans in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and see Durham as something of a safe haven for trans people.
“Durham feels specifically like a Black trans mecca,” Wilson says. “Just last month, there was a Black trans film festival here, and it was so magical having Black trans people here.”
But, they add, microaggressions and outright violence can pop up anywhere.
“I feel like anti-Blackness and transphobia go hand in hand… No place is absolved from that.”
Miss B has recently had some explicit run-ins with gender harassment. Just a few months ago in downtown Durham, a right-wing extremist went to several bars, harassing people and spewing homophobic language — a story the couple followed closely (and recounted on the TransLash podcast), because downtown Durham’s bar scene is generally queer- and trans-friendly.
“You can feel that Durham is really like a safe bubble,” Miss B says. “I think that reality can quickly be bursted, unfortunately.”
She’s ready to get a gun for self-defense, but needs to deal with her nails first.
“I’ve decided to go a little bit short because my friends told me… ‘If you’re going to learn how to shoot a gun, maybe you should learn first without nails. And then once you are a little bit more familiar, then it’s like, go off, do what you want.’”
Miss B is playful, not inclined toward fear, but she’s concerned about losing access to hormone replacement therapy in the future. She also paused her own legal name change process after Trump came back into office. Some of her family members are trying to become naturalized citizens, and she doesn’t want her legal identification to be an issue if she needs to provide documentation for their cases.
Wilson, who started doing volunteer trans advocacy in journalism school after writing articles about trans women in prison, is particularly concerned about the incarcerated trans women they work with, because for them, “there is no protection.”
“These are my trans siblings,” Wilson says. “We are as free as our kin.”
North Carolina and many Southern states have historically resisted placing trans people in facilities that align with their gender identities. In state prisons in general, getting health care or getting placed in the right facility can be a huge fight. Currently, a federal executive order is attempting to mandate the same anti-trans treatment in federal prisons, although a judge has blocked the administration from enforcing it for now.
But fundamentally, the conditions that Republicans are bringing on nationally are not new here.
“As a Black person who grew up in the ghetto, I’ve always been of the mindset that, like, nothing has really changed for us,” says Wilson. “This just feels like the American experience.”
Miss B says, “In the state of the world right now, it could be really scary and ugly. But…surrounded in our love, a lot of times it’s like, well, we just don’t care. Because we have each other.”
Willy Wilkinson: Community and Creativity in Oakland, California
Willy Wilkinson is just back from a weekend in the woods with a bunch of other transmasculine folks, and he’s glowing.
“I’ve been to more of these retreats than anyone,” he says. Now in its 10th year, the Transmission retreat brings transmasculine people together for a few days in the Northern California redwoods. Wilkinson says these retreats are healing. “There’s a certain timelessness to these experiences. The world can go to shit, but community is consistent… The joy we have when we relax and play in a safe environment elevates us.”
Wilkinson, a 62-year-old author, speaker, and public health consultant who founded API TransFusion — a summer retreat for Asian and Pacific Islander transmasculine people — regularly gives workshops at these events. He quickly identifies himself as someone who loves to dance, play, and party.
“People think, ‘Why should I be partying?’ because I’m old. I’m always gonna be partying. I can bust a move.”
He also swims in the San Francisco Bay almost every day. “The pandemic turned me into a sea creature,” he says. “Being in nature reminds you that wherever you’re at, things will evolve and change.”
Jordan Reznick (he/they)
Jordan Reznick (he/they)
Right now, change feels cyclical. “This particular moment, in some ways, feels a lot like the 80s,” he says. “In the 80s, we really didn’t have anything but ourselves. And there was this concept of family. People would say, ‘Are they family?’ Meaning: Are they gay? But it was generally used in reference to the broader LGBTQ community — even though we didn’t really have that term at the time… So we can wink, we can wave, we can connect with folks with a shared experience of the power of self-expression, the joy in the community, and know that we’re not alone.”
The father of three teenagers, Wilkinson also considers trans community his family. “I love being ‘brother’ or ‘uncle.’ I love how so many of our trans sisters are mothers and daughters to one another — Miss Major, Cecilia Chung — elders uplifting and caring for our younger community members. When you’re experiencing transphobic harm, when you’re struggling to survive on multiple fronts, maybe your friends, family, and community turned their backs on you. Those who have survived the most harm don’t do you like that, even if it’s the middle of the night. That’s family — trans family.”
Wilkinson grew up in a San Francisco suburb in the 60s and 70s, where “there was not much consciousness around race or around LGBTQ issues,” he says. “If people were throwing racial epithets on the playground, nobody was saying, ‘Don’t do that.’”
But despite having little context or information about trans identity, he always knew he was male.
“When I was four years old, I asked my dad about the people on the money. I said, ‘Are they all white men?’ And he said, ‘Yes, they’re all former presidents.’ So I decided at age four that I wanted to be a white man, because I figured that was the only way to be president and get anywhere in the world,” he says with a self-effacing grin. “Over time, I did work through my own internalized racism, but the idea of being male never changed.”
He took the name Willy (derived from his last name) at age nine. But even at 18, “there was no route to transitioning to male. There was no visibility of anybody transmasculine.”
By the 1980s, he was living in San Francisco as a butch lesbian, organizing the Asian lesbian community. Working as a community health outreach worker in the Tenderloin district, Wilkinson helped people access resources for HIV prevention and safer drug use. He provided services for transfeminine people working the streets, but he wasn’t always recognized as part of the trans community. He felt like an anomaly.
“I really felt that my gender identity was inextricably linked to my mixed heritage, and that I was a third-gendered person,” he says. “I was considered a weirdo.”
Now, he identifies as a trans man and says he’s loved seeing so many people embrace nonbinary identity, “because there are as many genders as there are people embodying them. There are as many genders as there are stars in the sky.”
Jordan Reznick (he/they)
Jordan Reznick (he/they)
His health care work gradually connected him to other trans people as they built the modern trans movement in the 1990s. “Over time, we developed a concept of trans health,” he says. “Earlier, we didn’t have that language. I started working in HIV prevention, focusing on trans individuals. It was from HIV/AIDS that we really began to look at a broader health picture of trans people… And then we were talking about transition-related care, and later gender-affirming care… It evolved over time.”
In 1996, the City of San Francisco conducted the first large-scale study of transgender health, with over 500 participants. Then, the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival was launched (then called “Tranny Fest”), and more of the marginalized stories about transmasculine people and trans people of color began to emerge — first through these grassroots events, and later in the media.
“That was exciting, documenting our stories,” he says. Wilkinson was a spoken word performer himself, and appeared in one of the early films Christopher Lee and Elise Hurwitz directed in 1997: “Trappings of Transhood.” At the same time, a growing number of organizations that recognized FTM (female-to-male) identity and community began to pop up, in addition to more studies and news stories on transgender people generally, and transmasculine people specifically.
Wilkinson has celebrated as trans people have gained increasing access to gender-affirming care. “Access to care is truly one of the greatest victories of the transgender movement. I have seen people’s mental health status so elevated because of access to care. In the 90s when we did that large-scale study, one of the biggest findings was that suicidality was directly linked to access to care. Numerous studies since, including the recently released U.S. Trans Survey, with over 92,000 respondents nationwide, corroborate the link between access to culturally competent, gender-affirming care and well-being.”
In 2006, California led the way by banning gender-based discrimination in health insurance, and again by requiring health care plans to remove trans exclusions in 2012. Increasingly, states began to include trans health coverage in their federally funded Medicaid programs, and private insurers removed exclusions for trans health care. Finally, in 2016, the federal government under Obama declared that federally supported health plans cannot discriminate against trans people.
But over the last five years, conservative activists have worked around the clock to reverse these victories, passing laws against gender-affirming care for minors in 24 states and counting.
Trans health care access has continued to be a messy patchwork. People in rural areas and red states are particularly likely to go without medical care, due to the amount of travel required to find a trans-friendly provider who will prescribe hormones and gender-affirming surgeries.
“We’ve been really creative about getting care anyway,” Wilkinson says. He’s now a health care consultant, helping medical professionals provide more affirming care for trans folks and people of color.
“This is a moment, but we will get through it and we will continue to build. …As an eternal optimist, I believe that this is an unfortunate derailment on the quest for trans equality, but it’s not the end — just a roadblock that we’re ultimately going to overcome.”
Vera Verbel: Flight Plans in DeKalb, Illinois
Vera Verbel, always on the move, just made an offer on a house in Belize.
“Worst case scenario, I’ve got a place outside of this country to egress to,” she says later. She sold one of her most prized possessions — a small plane she loved to fly recreationally — to put down the deposit. “Best case scenario, it’s a really nice place to snowbird to.”
Verbel has traveled and lived all over the world, mostly as a pilot for the U.S. Army, and later as a pilot for a major commercial airline. She now lives a comfortable, semi-retired life and flies her remaining small plane, a PA28-161 Piper Warrior named Charlie, multiple times a week.
“Quite frankly, I’m afraid,” she says. “There’s definitely an undercurrent in the federal government to eradicate transgender people in this country, and that, to me, is scary.”
Verbel picks me up from the train station in a huge, boxy van, which she bought for the same reason as the home in Belize — it could be fun for vacation, but it could also transport everything she owns in a pinch. She plans to take me around the pathways of her daily life in the flatlands of suburban Chicago: the orderly development where she lives, the nearby law school where she briefly enrolled, the airfield where she flies Charlie. She has the radio on when I climb in the van. JD Vance is talking about immigration.
“I can listen to him because he can speak cogently and make sense,” she says. “The president, I have a hard time listening to because it’s just adolescent gibberish.”
We talk politics until we pull up at her home, which is simple and colorful with pale pink walls, an elaborate display of scarves in every shade of the rainbow hanging from the vaulted ceiling in a handmade frame, and numerous photos of herself and her family in her spare room. In the pictures she’s flying planes, captaining catamarans, running races, paragliding.
“I am a very young 71,” she says happily. She used to fly people over the North Pole. “I’ve seen Aurora Borealis looking south. How many people can say that?”
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
I ask if she’s always been so daring.
“I think it started because it was part of the masculine facade that I had to maintain,” she says.
She first recognized herself as a girl when she was a tiny child, but kept it secret through her difficult upbringing, 29 years of military service, one marriage, two children, and long-term participation in a conservative church.
“It felt like I was holding my breath for 50 years,” she says matter-of-factly.
For several decades, the only person in her life who knew her as anything other than a man was her wife, whom she came out to in the Army barracks in Berlin, just before their wedding in the early 1970s. After much hemming and hawing, she says, she told her fiancée, “‘I have the sense that I’m a woman…’ You know, she’s looking at this 6-foot-3, 220-pound Army E-5. And she goes, ‘Okay!’”
Her wife was supportive, so long as they kept it quiet. Verbel would dress in women’s clothing privately at home, and occasionally go out to hotel bars in neighboring suburbs to avoid the possibility of running into anyone they knew. It wasn’t until she’d been deployed as an Army Apache pilot in Afghanistan that things finally broke.
“I flew 15 combat missions. It scared the bejesus out of me on some occasions, and I got back from that with a new resolve.” She left the Army in 2002, after coming to the realization that if she died, she would “never have lived the life that I know I need to live.”
Verbel and her wife decided she would finally pursue transition.
“I was gonna do a long, slow bake instead of pushing ahead really fast… so everybody in my life could get their head around it,” she says. “Minimize the amount of collateral damage.”
But when her church found out, they asked her to leave. Then her wife left her abruptly, with no explanation.
It was a rough patch followed by a quick emergence. Freed from the pressures of her church, the military, and her marriage, Verbel hastened her transition. She took a break from flying for a large commercial airline to go to law school, imagining a career shift to legal advocacy, but when her airline offered her an even better deal to come back — now living and passing as a woman — she decided to drop out. Instead of pursuing her degree, she created a scholarship program in her name at Northeastern Illinois University. Embracing Diversity, the scholarship she funds annually, is now in its 11th year, holding steady in the face of federal attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Verbel isn’t shocked by the political environment, in part because she remembers what things were like before trans people had mainstream visibility — when being trans “was just an unknown. It was an enigma.” Now, she says, “there’s a push to villainize, demonize, [and] scapegoat transgender people for political gain. And it’s working, because that’s what an authoritarian government does.”
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Deni Chamberlin (she/her)
Verbel’s been through a lot, but she doesn’t dramatize what’s next. After our interview today, she has an appointment with the doctor who did her breast implants to make sure she’ll be okay if gender-affirming medical care gets outlawed. She’s practical and cautious — just what I would want in a Boeing 787 pilot.
“I’ve been to Belize three times this year… We stopped over in Miami once, stopped over in Dallas once. I go use the restroom. I’m doing a felony trespass, but I gotta pee. It’d make more commotion if I walked into the men’s room,” she says. “So what do you do? You just go in like you belong and get out, and hope there isn’t a Karen or a Ken around to confront you.”