How It Should Be Done…

When Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) was repealed it was only for gays and lesbians; trans-people were still barred from serving in the military, but that doesn't have to be, in many of our allied militaries trans-servicemembers serve alongside, straight, gay, and lesbians servicemembers.

'Next time I work with you, I'll be a woman': What Britain's first transgender military pilot told Prince William as she speaks movingly of her momentous decision... and why she's frozen her own sperm to start a family

• Flight Lieutenant Ayla Holdom is Britain's first transgender military pilot 
• The 34-year-old worked alongside Prince William at RAF Valley in Anglesey
• One of her first work events as a woman was to the Royal Wedding in 2011 
• Here she reveals how working in the RAF has eased her gender transition 

Daily Mail
By Mark Nicol and Sarah Oliver
Published: 20 December 2014

Search-and-rescue pilot Flight Lieutenant Ayla Holdom flashed her ID badge at the security gate of RAF Valley in Anglesey.

It showed her as she had appeared just a few weeks earlier… as a man. ‘In you go, Ma’am,’ said the guard. ‘Don’t worry, you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last,’ his words acknowledging the fact that Ayla was returning to work as a woman.

Flt Lieut Holdom, 34, is a decorated RAF officer who is Britain’s first and only openly transgender military pilot. She has been, she says, ‘one of the boys as both a man and a woman’.

Among the colleagues she told in a series of emotionally gruelling one-on-one meetings was Prince William, who was at the time a fellow co-pilot within the tight-knit team of 20 at RAF Valley.

No big deal, just a routine day at work. In Britain she servers alongside the Prince and it is not the first time royalty met a trans-person, Princes William and Harry met a trans-person, one of their professors at Sandhurst was a trans-person. At Sandhurst she was a military historian, a Senior Lecturer in War Studies, she was with the Strategic Horizons Unit in the Cabinet Office, and was a History Channel commentator. But here in the U.S. you still can get discharged for being transgender, the conservatives are fighting it tooth and nail to block trans-servicemembers.