This story was originally published in Virginia Pride Guide 2025. Virginia Pride Festival 2025 is presented with the support of Out RVA, Allianz, Hit Play, Virginia Lottery, CarMax, Bank of America, CoStar Group, Genworth, CapTech, and Bar West, with media support from Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond Magazine, Queer RVA, and RVA Magazine. Special thanks to Steve Davis of River Fox Realty for his support.
The story of Jo Ellis is one of resilience, but also service, dedication, and commitment. A veteran of the Iraq War, she’s also a helicopter pilot in Virginia’s National Guard. When a climate emergency or natural disaster strikes, Ellis is one of the guardswomen who would come to your rescue. She’s a million-dollar investment in time, training, and resources, paid by all of us to support the people of the Commonwealth.
However, instead of being celebrated, Ellis is one of 4,240 transgender service members now being forced out of the military under Executive Order 14183. Signed by Trump on January 27, the order bans those with gender dysphoria or anyone identifying as transgender from serving in uniform.
I wanted to meet Ellis, not just to hear her story, but because I also worked in Iraq (as a civilian) during the war. As it turns out, we were both on the same base at the same time in 2011. And even if that connection is temporal, we still share it—a reminder that these stories happen to real people, who’ve spent years serving this country.
Yet to make matters worse, in the same week the executive order was handed down, a conservative “influencer” falsely accused Ellis of piloting the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines passenger jet at Reagan National in Washington DC. Going so far as to claim Ellis had carried out a “trans terror attack.” A social media firestorm followed, forcing Ellis to release a proof-of-life video and use private security as the “threat landscape,” as she called it, grew more intense by the hour.
The fact that both these things happened almost simultaneously speaks to the cruelty of the moment. But what struck me the most during our conversation was that, despite everything, Ellis continues to live her values. While these events may have shifted her perspective, the principles at the core of her idea of service haven’t changed; if anything, they’ve become a quiet act of defiance. It’s something I came to deeply admire during our conversation.
“My god, I can tell you about six months of emotions,” Ellis told me, her voice deadpan, when I asked how she was dealing with the fallout. Although she was quick to clarify what that meant, careful not to conflate her feelings with those of her fellow soldiers. “I process it through my own experience and what I know to be true,” she said, before adding, “My unit doesn’t want this.”
And what unit would? Ellis walked me through the process of becoming a Black Hawk pilot, a $20 million machine that’s been one the backbones of US military aviation for more than 40 years. The path is relentless: 18 months of training, from flight school, warrant officer instruction, to the classified SERE Program — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. “It’s intense,” she said, pride cutting through her voice. “If you’re trying to have kids and do other things at the same time, you’re not going to succeed. It’s way too grueling.”
That investment in time and skill, makes what came next even more significant. Ellis transitioned in September 2023 while still in uniform, under the military’s in-service transition policy for transgender service members. When she informed her commander, he called her immediately, telling her, “I don’t know much about this, but however I can support you, we want to keep you flying.”
But support at the top doesn’t always guarantee acceptance below. Spend any amount of time around the military and it’s hard to miss the distance between command and unit, officer and soldier. With that hierarchy in mind, I asked how such a personal decision was received by her actual unit. “I’ve known these people my entire career,” said Ellis. “That really helped. It felt like coming out to family.”
Acceptance isn’t automatic, however. While her fellow soldiers and pilots might have had their own opinions about her transition, when it came to the mission, nothing about her place in the unit changed. “That’s what I valued,” said Ellis. “I have a good reputation. I’ve done things. I’m an officer in the military, and they all treated me with respect.” Even so, she never assumed that respect would be automatic. “I prepared for the worst and hoped for the best.”
But that was 2023. Fast-forward to August 2025, and everything’s changed. Ellis is now in the process of being discharged from service. In May, the Department of Defense began forcing active-duty transgender service members to self-identify under a policy called “voluntary separation.” “I’m still in the process,” Ellis told me. “They’re starting the paperwork to process me out.”
Commanders are now required to flag anyone with a documented history of gender dysphoria through routine health screenings or medical readiness evaluations, a move that puts both benefits and retirement at risk. Ellis chose not to wait for that. “I went to my battalion commander and told him we don’t need to play the game,” she said. “There’s no reason to waste anyone’s time.” Then she paused, letting the weight of that sink in before adding, “It’s a straight-up purge.”
That betrayal isn’t just personal for Ellis, it cuts to the very core of why she decided to serve in the first place, the belief that she could live by her principles in uniform. It’s a promise she now sees the military failing to uphold. “I just continually see the military not honoring its own values.”
As if being forced out of the career she’d built her life around wasn’t enough, Ellis suddenly found herself at the center of a right-wing social media firestorm. Just two days after the trans ban went into effect, an Army Black Hawk collided with American Eagle Flight 5342 on January 29, killing all 67 people on board, including the helicopter’s crew. A short time later, Ellis was falsely accused of being the pilot. The accusations coincided with the release of an article and interview she had just done about the trans ban with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, which only amplified the chaos around her.
“Coincidentally, within 24 hours of this, the crash happened,” said Ellis. From there, the accusations spiraled out of control. “I found out I was being named as the ‘unnamed female pilot,’ supposedly a DEI hire that the president had alluded to in a press conference.”
Then came a rumor that the pilot was trans, which predictably sent the right-wing media ecosystem into an even deeper frenzy. The firestorm intensified when Matt Wallace, a conservative influencer with 2.5 million followers, named Ellis directly, posting her photo alongside the Smerconish article to his audience.
Ellis believes Wallace did the most damage given his massive reach online. “People were reaching out to see if I was still alive,” she said. “It was terrifying.” And in today’s hyper-connected world, what happens online rarely stays online, the risk of it spilling into the real world is genuine. That’s when Ellis’s instincts took over. “I snapped into soldier mode. My SERE training kicked in right away.”
So she loaded her weapons, packed go‐bags, and started planning her next move. As the online threats escalated, Ellis’ civilian employer brought in private security to guard her home. But by then, she’d already sent her wife and child to separate locations “into hiding, basically.”
“Then my unit called to check on me, asking if I needed any help,” said Ellis. “I just relied on my Army training and my Army values.” But as the virality of the moment escalated, she decided to take matters into her own hands, posting a proof-of-life video. It slowed some of the frenzy, but didn’t stop it entirely. “The most heinous things kept coming into my DMs,” she said.
At the same time, she also found a community rallying around her, including veterans she served with in Iraq in 2011. “They didn’t know that I transitioned, but figured out it was me,” she said. “They wanted to know I was OK.”
As the cycle of disinformation and threats finally began to settle, Ellis made a decision, she was going to fight back. She filed a lawsuit against Matt Wallace in April. “There has to be accountability,” she told me, explaining that these accounts target individuals directly. “I’m a soldier. I’m a warrior. It’s justice for so many trans people that this happens to.”
Ellis is all of these things and more. As we wrapped our conversation, I asked how the past few months had reshaped her relationship with America. She paused before answering, admitting that her faith in its institutions had been deeply shaken but not broken. What she’s come to understand, she told me, is that “it takes courageous people at every level of those institutions to keep them standing.”
As we take stock of what’s happening to America, I realized Jo Ellis is the actual embodiment of that courage. She’s a reminder that the strength of this nation no longer comes from its politics or policies, but from the people willing to live their values even when the very institutions they’ve served turn against them.
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