TRANS RIGHTS: Retired Army 1st Sergeant Jessica Kalarchik on being trans

East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

Jessica Kalarchik was an Army First Sergeant who deployed with me and the Alaska Army National Guard’s 1-297th infantry battalion to Kosovo 2019-2020. 1st Sergeant Kalarchik presented as a very masculine man, and I never suspected that she was a trans woman. She was medically retired after 31 years in the military during her next deployment to Poland. Leaving the military gave her the freedom to begin her life as a openly trans woman, with the support of her wife, her daughters, and her grandchildren. She is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU against her birth state of Montana over the right to amend the gender on her birth certificate.
To read more about the lawsuit, click here.
This episode is part of a series on trans rights. The inspiration for these interviews is three bills currently moving through the Alaska State House: HB 183 which bans trans girls from playing girls sports; HB 105 which requires kids to get signed permission slips approving their preferred name and pronouns; and HB 338 which allows doctors to be sued up to 20 years after performing gender affirming procedures on trans youth.
Alaska has many big problems. The pressing need to increase the funding of our public school system and finding a solution for an imminent energy crisis, for example. But instead of working on these very real, very substantial problems, we are spending the last weeks of session debating whether trans youth exist and have rights. They do exist; they do have rights.