We spoke to Faera (she/her) in Rochester, NY on June 19, 2026. Faera served in the US Army from 2011 to 2019. She was medically discharged as an E-5 Sergeant Indirect Fire Infantryman. Faera enlisted because she was “stuck in life and needed a change” and military service appealed to her “as a way to test my character as a human.” 

Before enlisting, Faera said that she knew “that I wasn’t overly straight.” She remembered seeing openly queer and trans people serving alongside her in the years after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and that this visibility was “empowering” for her long before she was out herself. She described the climate as generally accepting for LGBTQ+ service members until Trump’s election in 2016, when some of her friends started encountering problems receiving medical care. 

Faera began coming into her own sense of gender and sexuality after discharge. “I didn’t remember who I was until after the military when I started dealing with what happened in the military, which forced me to deal with what happened to me as a kid,” she said. She found herself processing the traumas of witnessing extreme violence and destruction in the interest of “political expediency” during her deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time that she was grappling with extensive childhood traumas that were triggered by her military experiences. Working through this brought Faera to realize that society had failed her time and again and that she had “stopped being me… I kept shearing off pieces of myself.”

The road to healing has been difficult but necessary, and Faera considers “the trials of the military [to] have allowed me to be prepared to accept myself.” Faera had to reconcile her relationship to her former wife and children after coming out. She has had to find way to manage her neurodivergence. And she has had to find herself anew in the landscape post-service. Today, Faera lives as an out queer trans woman in Rochester, NY a student, an artist, and a kind and curious person.