Walking

and more walking

Good morning (or afternoon, evening, or night)

Last time I talked about finally officially starting hormones and how I’d been dealing with some of the rumors flying around about me. The cameras were still around, but now I was being ‘aired’ on a different program. Because I was visibly out, my hair was longer than guys could have in uniform, I started wearing makeup to work, among other things.

This new ‘program’ I had to worry about wasn’t about trying to look or act like a certain way in order to blend in. I was discovering who I really was after all those years of pretending to be a certain way. And unfortunately, because of how the military is, I had to be perfect from the first moment.

Even though my leadership knew that my medication could make me ‘emotional’ at times, I still had to act like everything was fine. I had to be that NCO I was expected to be. If someone who outranked me had a question about anything dealing with me being trans, I had to be able to explain it to them. To a certain point obviously. There are still questions that would be totally inappropriate regardless of who asked.

That was probably the worst part of my early transition. I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes, if I did, then everyone would just point at me and be like “that’s why we can’t allow trans people in the military.” I wasn’t just representing myself. I was representing an entire community.

Now, I know that this isn’t a singular experience for just trans people. Every one that isn’t a cis-het white guy has had to experience it. Everyone one else who doesn’t fall into that category has/had to do the exact same thing.

Not everything was doom and gloom or walking on eggshells.

In March of 2023 I got to participate in the Bataan Death March, where I was able to go to White Sands Missile Base, New Mexico with four other soldiers. I’m not going to go into the full backstory of why the military marches every year, but it’s to honor soldiers who were forced to march during WW2 and passed away during their confinement.

I trained for about 3 months before the event itself. Waking up at like 3 am in order to go and walk anywhere between 10 to 15 miles a day. This was on top of normal PT and my work schedule. (I was still in the training room at this time.) There were a few times where I was doing my walk, had to pause it to help run an ACFT, then get back to training. It was pretty brutal training that I put myself through so I could complete it.

Driving all the way from Kansas to New Mexico was rough in itself. We had to do it in one day. Because I was the highest-ranking person in the van, they all looked at me to make the decisions. So I told them we’d set off at like 5 am and just change drivers every 2-3 hours so no one would get burned out or too tired from driving that long way. It took us all freaking day to get there. We left our company area pretty quickly after 5 and it was like 1030 when we finally got to the other army base. Fortunately, the next day wasn’t the march itself. There were some events going on that day and my group mostly rested that day. Personally, I sat on my cot for most of the time, either sleeping or watching a movie. I was conserving as much energy as I could because I knew the next day would be brutal.

And boy, oh boy, was it brutal. 26.2 miles of walking through the desert. I walked on asphalt, loose sand, hard pack sand, and rocks. Up and down a mountain. It was rough.

It was a good time though. I know this post is short, but I’ve got things to do today and I need to get ready for it.