After all, for the MtF trans person, the military is one of the great places to prove how macho you really aren't. Finally, as in other segments of society, transgender veterans from the most macho areas of the military are coming forward-and out. The primary example from this country is former Navy Seal Kristin Beck.
Now, there is a documentary being shown in Australia called Sex Change Soldier. It's the story of Ian - now Jan - Hamilton.(left) Hamilton was an officer in the British elite parachute regiment, serving in Northern Ireland, the first Gulf war, Bosnia, the Iraq war and Afghanistan.
After suffering near fatal injuries in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, he decided that he wanted to live the rest of his life as a woman.
“The only emotion I was able to show in the army was aggression, and I became quite good at that,” she says. “I hated myself, hated the world, and I hated being in the world ... I was volunteering to go back in operations simply because I thought I would die.”Jan Hamilton makes several key points which hopefully educate the general population. One was willingness to commit a form of suicide rather than accept her transgender leanings.
Another addressed the fading idea that any of us had a choice in any of this. Hamilton said:
"No sane person would do this,” she says of her upcoming facial reconstruction surgery in Thailand. “I would rather walk out of Basra palace with an unloaded rifle into the middle of a hostile crowd than put myself through this."
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