JACK MACCARTHY:

Let's start by having you say and spell your first and last name.

MONICA HELMS:

Monica, M O N I C A Helms, H E L M S.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And when and where were you born, Monica?

MONICA HELMS:

I was born in Sumter, South Carolina. I didn't have a choice in the matter.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And what year was that?

MONICA HELMS:

I was born in 1951, so that makes me 70 this year.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Happy birthday.

MONICA HELMS:

I'll be 71 in March.

JACK MACCARTHY:

so I'm a little late, but it's okay. Starting with,

JACK MACCARTHY:

of course, your fabulous shirt and I love that your book is called More Than Just A Flag because there's so much else that is in your story and your life. But just to start with the flag so we can kind of get it out of the way and move on to some of that other stuff. I wanted to start with that and have you tell the story of how the flag came to be.

MONICA HELMS:

The flag that you see on my shirt is the transgender pride flag. It came to be when I had a conversation with the creator of the bisexual pride flag Michael Page, and he said that the trans community could sure use a flag of their own. We talked about it and I couldn't come up with anything that was useful. He told me,

MONICA HELMS:

"Keep it simple because the least amount of stitches, the cheaper it is for them to make and the cheaper it is to sell." About two weeks later, I woke up one morning and the design came to me. I got up and I drew it out and it looked good. I contacted the people that made the bisexual pride flag, and they sent me some swatches.

MONICA HELMS:

I picked out the colors. I showed my friends the swatches too, so there was a lot of people that saw them beforehand. And then about a week later, I had the first transgender pride flag. Now this flag was only for me. I didn't make it for the whole community because I know that people would -- Either they wouldn't necessarily like it or --

MONICA HELMS:

But I took it everywhere. I took it to Pride parades and marches and funerals and various other places and protests, especially. I even took it to a march to the wall in DC, and lobbying on Capitol hill.

MONICA HELMS:

The flag was starting to be seen by everybody and people were asking, "Well, what is that?" I had to explain to them what it was and what the colors meant. Some people liked it and they asked, "Where can I get one?" And I told them to contact the same people that I got mine from. At that time, they weren't

MONICA HELMS:

silk [inaudible] flags, so mine was get 'em stitched and everything put 'em together that way. It was until 2013, I started looking online and I saw prides from all over the world. At that point I started seeing my flag was being shown in various places and the colors were being used.

MONICA HELMS:

I was really surprised at that. I said, "Hey, I got the original one and I need to protect it." So I figured I needed to contact some kind of museum to store it for me or protect it. I said, I'll start at the tough and contacted the Smithsonian. Just so happens the Smithsonian

MONICA HELMS:

was taking LGBTQ items. They weren't putting on display yet because they didn't have a place for 'em just yet. They asked me all kinds of questions about the flag and my history. They wanted to make sure that you know, who I was. They don't just get an item, they want to know everything about the person who donated it too.

MONICA HELMS:

Told them I was in the military. Right on the day that I created it, was the day that I donated it to the Smithsonian 15 years later, August 19th. I've been telling everybody that August 19th, this transgender flag day and so

MONICA HELMS:

they have been taking it all over places and showing people and one time it was even in the Obama administration, displayed in the white house. So, they are taking good care of it. I got to see it again a few years later. That's where it's at. Now the flag has

MONICA HELMS:

been seen on every continent, including Antarctica. But I have one bucket list idea that I wanna see the flag shown in the international space station. That would be really fun to see, especially if it was on trans day of remembrance, so that's the flag and I'm sticking to it.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And Michael Page who suggested that the trans community needed their own flag, who was he? How did you know him? Who was he to you? When was this? Can you paint that for me a little bit?

MONICA HELMS:

Yeah. I when I first started transitioning, I thought that I was bisexual and it was funny

MONICA HELMS:

that my mother, when I told her that I was into transition and she said, "Gee, I wish you were just gay." Well, a few years later, I decided I wasn't bisexual, so I called my mom and said, "Guess what? You got your wish I am gay." And during that time though, when I was bisexual, part of BiNet Arizona, and we had a conference

MONICA HELMS:

in Arizona and Phoenix and Michael Page was there. We had dinner together and talked about the flag and everything, that's where the idea of creating a flag came up. But like I said earlier, the design didn't come to me until a few weeks later.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And had you known him before you had this dinner where he talked about the flag? Were you good friends? Like, was he kind of in your life?

MONICA HELMS:

Well, I didn't know him until the conference and we became good friends at that time. Of which, now I can't find him. He's gone

MONICA HELMS:

stealth across the board, but yes, I met Mike at the conference in Arizona and that was when we became good friends.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I was trying to find out more about him and I truly could not find out anything about him except that he created the flag.

JACK MACCARTHY:

But he's a very hard person to find out about .

MONICA HELMS:

There has been an issue in the bisexual community about the flag, and that's part of why Michael is gone stealth because he doesn't wanna talk about it. Other people were saying that they created the flag and so

MONICA HELMS:

it was a big thing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And is there anything else about the flag that you wanna say or share before I start asking you some other story?

MONICA HELMS:

The only thing I think is funny is that some people would see the

MONICA HELMS:

design of the flag and say, that's a heterosexual flag, the flag for heterosexuals, because it's the pink in the blue and the white, it means purity . Everybody sees that they crack up. It's like, oh, come on, people look it up. Geez. Then when some of those people online to find out that

MONICA HELMS:

it's the transgender flag and they get all upset. That's the 21st century for you.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What's been one of the most surprising places that you've seen the flag or the colors

MONICA HELMS:

There's a mountain climber, trans

MONICA HELMS:

mountain climber, has taken a poster that has the flag on it to the top of four, out of the seven highest mountains in the world and different continents. She's climbing each one. I sent her a little flag, so she could take that up to the top of Mount Everest. And having it seen on Antarctica was

MONICA HELMS:

a real big surprise. A guy went down there and he happened to unfold the, the rainbow flag and the transgender flag. It's the only two flags he took with him. And still surprised where I see the colors and the flag, but like I said previously, I would love to see it on the international space station, definitely.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'll ask you this later. Would you be open to just having it in space at all? Not necessarily the international space station, because I might know of a way to make that happen, but we'll talk about that later.

MONICA HELMS:

Okay.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. So going

JACK MACCARTHY:

backwards in time a bit, can you just kind of paint a picture for me of like the arc of your childhood. I know you come from a military family, there was some moving around. Can you just kind of give me the overview of that?

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. I'm gonna step in the Wayback machine and talk to you about my childhood past.

MONICA HELMS:

My father was in the Air Force. He did 21 years in the Air Force. He also was in the Navy, at one time too. He was in three branches of service in three wars. I had all my uncles served in World War II and I had an aunt that served in World War II. I had a grandfather there who was in the Navy. And my brother spent 20 years in the army.

MONICA HELMS:

He's got a son that's done 16 years so far in the air force. My son did four years in the Marines. So we come from a very strong military family and I grew up, most of my childhood, I remember was in Phoenix, Arizona. We were the first people to move into the first house in that new neighborhood.

MONICA HELMS:

And it was a very interesting place to grow up. In 1961, my father got transferred to Germany, so we went cross country and I stayed at my grandparents' house in Rhode Island and went to school there for a few months. Then

MONICA HELMS:

we flew over to Germany where my dad had picked us up and took us to our new home in a small town called Ohrdruf. I was 10 years old at the time, and I like to explore. Ohrdruf was a great town to explore in, a small German town, very picturesque, with a river down at the bottom, and

MONICA HELMS:

a train that ran along the river. There was all kinds of fields and, and forests to go through. And I found all kinds of war memorabilia from different wars as I traipse through the fields. A bayonet, shells, one time I found an unexploded shell, I took that back and my father took it

MONICA HELMS:

into the base. And then after a year living there, in Ohrdruf, we moved to the base housing in Bitburg. We did a lot of traveling, we were like 60 miles from the Luxembourg border, so we went to Luxembourg in Belgium and we went into France and spent a week going through Netherlands.

MONICA HELMS:

Then we did a two week vacation where we went down through the Swiss Alps into Italy. We stopped at different places in Italy. I got to climb the Eiffel tower, not the Eiffel tower, the leaning tower of Pisa boy, do I get my towers all mixed up? And so it was great exploring

MONICA HELMS:

for somebody at my age. Even though I prayed to God at age five, to turn me into a girl, I wasn't obsessed with wanting to be a girl. I liked a lot of the things that boys do. I liked the exploring and the voice toys

MONICA HELMS:

and everything. And it made my transition a little less of a problem or less of an issue. In other words, I didn't keep telling my folks that I was a girl because I acted like a boy, and I'm proud of that. It's part of

MONICA HELMS:

what my experience was. After three and a half years of Germany and two years in Kansas, we went back to the same house in Arizona, which my folks were renting out. That's where I spent my high school years, graduated high school at Maryville high school in Phoenix. 1970,

MONICA HELMS:

my draft number was a little low, I knew I was gonna get drafted. Instead of going into the army, I decided I wanted to go into Navy and work in that field, and it was nuclear power that I wanted to work at. So that was what I did. In bootcamp, I even got my draft notice. The chief said,

MONICA HELMS:

"Ah, just throw that away, you're already in." I went through the Navy, I went to Naval Nuclear Power School and went through all the training and everything, and got sent to a submarine, [inaudible]. It was one of the submarines that carried missiles.

MONICA HELMS:

I got to earn my dolphins, which is what you see right up here or here , I'm sorry. I'm a little crazy today. I'm really proud of being a former submariner. I went to a second submarine called the USS Flasher, and

MONICA HELMS:

I spent my last two years in the Navy there, and yes, the Navy names submarines back down after fish. There is such a thing as a flasher fish, they just have to order those special order those little rain coats. It was on the flasher that I realized I didn't wanna stay in for make a career because of what I was seeing. I was still doing a lot of the grunt work

MONICA HELMS:

that people e1z2z3s would do on surface ships. But since the new nuclear Navy had a lot of high ranking people. I was an e6, I was still doing dirty work, grunt work, cleaning up and all this stuff. One day we were coming in and there was gonna be an inspection.

MONICA HELMS:

My chief told me, "Hey, you need to clean the villages." So here I am, between the pipes under the equipment cleaning oil off of the things in the villages and in the villages with me was my e8 chief cleaning villages with me. I looked at him and I thought, is this what I got to look forward to,

MONICA HELMS:

that I could stay in and still be doing the same grunt work as I'm doing now. It didn't sit well with me, and that's why I got out and that's up to that point, 1978.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What was it like to be on a submarine

MONICA HELMS:

To be on a submarine? It was a job really. I mean,

MONICA HELMS:

I wasn't claustrophobic at the time and I might be a little bit more now. But it was just a job. You do all kinds of things, do your work, you do drills, and then after you're qualified on submarines, then you have a little more time on your hands. So between watches, it was six on

MONICA HELMS:

and 12 off, that's how it worked. During the six on, you have to be awake and you have to be back doing your job and everything. Then there's the 12 off when you try to get some sleep. And sometimes you get so much sleep that you stay awake the entire 12 hours. That means that you gotta work another six hours, now you're up for 24 hours.

MONICA HELMS:

Sometimes there's movies you could watch, and back then I had a cassette deck with me and I've brought a whole bunch of books and did a lot of reading. That's what got me interested in science fiction because I read a lot of science fiction books.

MONICA HELMS:

A lot of what happened to me during that time period is in my book and my autobiography More than Just a Flag. It really goes into detail, a lot of things that I definitely not always feel good about. I did do some stupid things,

MONICA HELMS:

we all did back in that day as a kid.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And once you left the Navy, I want to talk a little bit about your unionizing at Sprint and getting into activism. Can you

JACK MACCARTHY:

walk me through, like how you left the Navy, how you ended up at Sprint and then what problems started there that kind of propelled you into activism?

MONICA HELMS:

Well, Jack, there was a lot of time period between when I got out and when I started at Sprint 1978. When I got out, I didn't start Sprint until 1990. Several jobs,

MONICA HELMS:

spent a lot of time doing video work, video duplication, video production and editing the old fashioned way on three quarter inch machines. I know, ancient history. They'll probably find a lot of those machines in some cave somewhere.

MONICA HELMS:

I got out and about shortly after I got out, I met a trans woman who was transitioning and she had a real hard life. She sold herself for sex and she lived in a really crappy apartment.

MONICA HELMS:

I saw her and I go, "Is this what would happen if I started to transition?" So it kind of threw me off about wanting to transition. She was a real nice woman, but she did live a very hard life. And now too long after I stopped seeing her. I went to junior college and

MONICA HELMS:

get some degrees. That's where I met my wife. 1988, we got married and we had two sons. Right now, they are 39 years old and 37 years old. I have four grandsons as well. There was a lot of different jobs

MONICA HELMS:

that I did in between. Then a very tight period came up in 1989, and that's when I eventually got hired at Sprint in 1990. And I was a long distance operator and did a lot of work there. I even tried to get a union in,

MONICA HELMS:

that's kind of like where my activism was born, but I was sent to do some training at ACLU or AFL-CIO, that's training, there we go, In San Francisco. I did some training in San Francisco

MONICA HELMS:

and it was very interesting, a lot of stuff that I learned at the AFL-CIO training was things I was able to utilize as a trans activist later on in my life. I was able to learn to see things as they really were and how the company was trying to screw you over

MONICA HELMS:

and yet make everybody think that everything was fine. There was even one time where they broke the law, the labor law, and the labor union for communication workers took them to court, and I testified against them.

MONICA HELMS:

Here I am doing all these things against the company, and yet I still work there and still had a job. As time went on, I realized I needed to start my transition and they were okay as far as the HR was concerned and my supervisor was concerned.

MONICA HELMS:

But it seems like my coworkers were not very happy when I started it. I got nasty notes on my terminal. We have a mail slot in our lockers, and I got nasty notes in my locker and all kinds of things that were definitely discriminating against, as it were, but I got them back.

MONICA HELMS:

I have to do the evil laugh. After I started my transition and I started into activism and there was one time -- See, we only had the second floor of a three story building. I was told that I can go downstairs or upstairs to the third floor to use the restroom. They didn't want me

MONICA HELMS:

to use the restroom on the second floor, and I was okay with that. About a year or so into it, they started turning the third floor into a training area. I went to the HR person, which was the same HR person that I talked to before, and I said, "You know what's gonna happen? Right after training, they're gonna

MONICA HELMS:

go into the bathroom on the third floor, so am I, because I can go in there." She said, "Well, you're allowed to go in there. If they don't like it, they can go to the second floor."

MONICA HELMS:

One day there was a training meeting and I sat in the back of the room with a big smile on my face, knowing just what's going to happen. Sure enough, when the meeting was over, everybody went down and all the women started traipsing into the third floor bathroom, and I went in right after them. Some of the women just

MONICA HELMS:

left the room and, oh, they were all upset. I knew right after I got back to my desk, that I would be called into HR because this is a different HR person. The one that I was familiar with was no longer there. Sure enough, 20 minutes logging back on, I get a call into HR. The new HR person, "Can we

MONICA HELMS:

make a compromise for the third floor?" And I said, "No, I was told that I could go on the third floor in the first [inaudible], and that's what I'm doing, and I'm not gonna change." My supervisor actually talked to the HR person and said, "You better let Monica just use the third floor. If nobody likes it, they should go down to the second floor. Because if she pushes it

MONICA HELMS:

she might get the second floor as well." So I kind of got 'em back. It was a nice little win. Excuse me, a little water.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And when you

JACK MACCARTHY:

decided to start transitioning at work, how did you know that it was time for you to do that?

MONICA HELMS:

It just came to me that it had to be time. In 1987 a friend of mine who was like a month younger than me told me all the reasons why she needed to transition and what she did was she was

MONICA HELMS:

saying all the things that was in my head that she kind of put the puzzle together. And so in 1987, I knew I needed to make this transition, but it wasn't until 1997 that I got to do it. It was like, okay, I just have to do this. I am so totally frustrated with myself. I don't want to continue living like this.

MONICA HELMS:

In June of 1997, that's when I started my transition. I've been living as Monica ever since. Pretty soon, it's gonna be coming up 25 years that I've been living as Monica. More than a fourth of my life has been, and it's getting close to a third.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What was the first step to starting to live authentically as Monica?

MONICA HELMS:

Say that again?

JACK MACCARTHY:

What was the first step or some of the first steps toward starting to live as Monica?

MONICA HELMS:

Well, the first steps was that I started wearing

MONICA HELMS:

women's clothes under my men's clothes, and some of the people at work kind of noticed things and my breasts were expanding rather quickly, so I couldn't hide it. I decided -- Well,

MONICA HELMS:

when I was in the process of doing this before I started living full time, my supervisor called me in and asked me, "Is there anything you want to tell me?" And then I said, "Well, I don't know, about what." She says, "Some of the people have been asking me some things about you." And I say, oh, to myself. Oh, they know. And so

MONICA HELMS:

I explained to her what I was doing. That was when I first started at work. My wife was not very happy about this at all. I knew that if I did this, that we were gonna have to separate and she would have the two boys, and so I would

MONICA HELMS:

get dressed elsewhere before going to work, or I would get dressed at home before everyone was up and had to work that way. It was very tricky moments there. After work, I would go out

MONICA HELMS:

to certain clubs to stay out until it was late. I'd come home when everybody was in bed and changed back to the other person there. I did that from, like, April to June. It was a very hazardous moment in time. June is when

MONICA HELMS:

I started living full time. That's when I told my parents, and that's when I moved out from my wife and kids. It was a pretty sad moment in my life. And yes, my wife and I finally got a divorce and the two boys, they grew up accepting me as I was.

MONICA HELMS:

In fact, the youngest one who was 13 at the time, my transition, he was still real happy to spend time with me. He was building an enclosure for a big lizard that he got, so we went to Home Depot and him and his friend went

MONICA HELMS:

running around, getting all different kinds of parts, like hinges and things. I stood in line to get the right color paint. And then my son runs up to me with some hinges that he found, he says, "Dad, dad, will these work?" And I said, yeah. I looked around and everybody was looking at me going, oh. Then I told Brian, "Hey, maybe you should just call me Monica

MONICA HELMS:

while we're out in public." But the boys have grown up to accept me. My oldest grandson who is 16 now, I got him to call me Mima, like from Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon because that's sort of a Southern name for grandmother. I didn't want them to call me grandma because

MONICA HELMS:

they had a grandmother, she passed away a few years ago. I didn't wanna interfere with that, but I said, "Call me Mima." Now he calls me Mima and I think that's pretty cool. As the others get older, I'll kind of ask them to do the same thing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And before this point of starting to live as Monica full time, there was a while where you were involved with Trias and started the Arizona chapter, right?

MONICA HELMS:

Yes.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Can you tell me more about that?

MONICA HELMS:

In 1980, I saw on television some heterosexual cross dressers, and I go, wow, maybe that's me and the organization was Tries. I figured that was a good label seeing how I like

MONICA HELMS:

to dress as a woman, but I also like women. So that meant that I wasn't wasn't gay. I contacted them and they sent me a contact information of another person who was also thinking of starting the chapter in Arizona.

MONICA HELMS:

We all got together, it was six of us that were these heterosexual cross dressers. We started the first Tris chapter in Arizona Alpha Zeta. Interesting enough, all six of those women who started Trias in Arizona all transitioned eventually.

MONICA HELMS:

So it was the first time I really got involved in a part of the community and I feel really glad that I was there at the beginning. Later on,

MONICA HELMS:

my activism began in 1998.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did your activism begin? Tell me about that.

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. That's why I stopped because I figured you ... Okay. My activism began in 1998

MONICA HELMS:

because I was a member, online, of a group called the US American submarine veterans. And they was a group of about 9,000 guy across the country. I was part of the Arizona chapter.

MONICA HELMS:

In 1998 after I had been transitioning for a year, I decided I wanted to renew my membership in USSVI, but I told 'em I needed to change the name that I registered under. And this is where it all got started, the proverbial

MONICA HELMS:

you what hit the you know what, it was crazy. They wanted me to not be a member. They wanted me to be a member of the women's auxiliary. I had the qualifications to be a member. I had my dolphins, I qualified submarines and I had an honorable discharge,

MONICA HELMS:

so they couldn't keep me out. In fact, the bylaws were gender neutral, there was no gender in the bylaws. After a while they realized that I could cause them a lot of problems if they didn't let me in, so they let me in. The local chapter allowed me to come back. It was my first taste of activism.

MONICA HELMS:

I fought for my rights as a submariner and I won. And so that made me feel real good.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. And then what was the line from there to getting more involved and being a leader in the

JACK MACCARTHY:

activism for trans veterans rights?

MONICA HELMS:

When I moved on to other activism, it was more local activism in the state of Arizona. And so I started working with the gay and lesbian groups that were available there and they were happy to

MONICA HELMS:

have a trans person along. There was another individual who was also trying working on trans activism and her name was Amanda Schrader. And Amanda and I started Its Time Arizona, which was the name for the trans group in Arizona. In 1999, we went to

MONICA HELMS:

Washington DC and lobby Congress. And I was so adamant about seeing this, I really enjoyed doing this, met lots of people that have become friends for life as it were. And I wanted to do it again. And I left Arizona

MONICA HELMS:

in 2000 because I needed to find a better job with [inaudible]. I found a different kind of job, one that paid more money and that was in Georgia. So I moved to Georgia. The thing was that I lived five and a half miles away from the house that I grew up in and my mother would not

MONICA HELMS:

let me go in. My father had Alzheimer's and diabetes and he wasn't doing well, and my mother said that she didn't wanna upset him. So being five and a half miles from home and not being able to go in was terrible. I felt it was okay to move. I figured if I was 2000 miles away,

MONICA HELMS:

it would be better. And so I moved to Georgia in 2000 and I worked in the local organization here TransAction, and then later I became the executive director of TransAction. We did a lot of work here in Georgia trying to get homeless shelters

MONICA HELMS:

to accept trans people. Most of the shelters here in Georgia are run by faith-based groups, it was really hard to get them to make any changes. And we, really, honestly, didn't make any changes. But we worked real hard for it. We were involved in a lot of different things and also went back and lobbied into Congress, again.

MONICA HELMS:

Okay, stop. All right, ask me about TAVA and how it started.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I will get to TAVA, but before we get to TAVA, I wanted to just ask something about the homeless shelters, because even though you weren't able to make changes,

JACK MACCARTHY:

there was like a work around you were able to find with the help of -- Pastor Paul?

MONICA HELMS:

Past Paul, Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Can you just touch on that briefly? And then we can go to TAVA.

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. On the work with the homeless shelters. I worked with Pastor Paul and a few others. And we --

JACK MACCARTHY:

I don't think we've

JACK MACCARTHY:

talked about pastor Paul yet. Can you just give a brief description of who he is?

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. So when we tried to get these homeless shelters, there were various people, including pastor Paul, he's a pastor of an independent Christian Church. He's extremely supportive of trans rights. One of the most supportive people that I know. And

MONICA HELMS:

he figured that having a pastor go along to these various meetings meant a lot because the other people had more respect for people of the cloth, as it were. It helped a lot, but we did get a few conceptions

MONICA HELMS:

on people, like one organization which was not faith-based, they were allowing trans people to stay there, but it was a little iffy at best and over time things just got worse. It ended up that we finally have a housing for trans people

MONICA HELMS:

that an organization started here in Atlanta. The issue is a little more taken care of now, but it was a lot of work in those days and I really feel sorry that I didn't get anything done in that respect.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And before we go into TAVA, I'm just noticing that it's been about an hour and I have to use the restroom now. So can we take five and then reconvene and, and start in with TAVA? Yep.

MONICA HELMS:

I'll turn the cameras off.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. Now tell me about TAVA. How that came to be,

JACK MACCARTHY:

what led to that?

MONICA HELMS:

In 2002, my friend, Angela Brigthfeather and I was on a Yahoo group with transgender veterans. And we started hearing stories about how they were treated in the VA and when it came to this one for person

MONICA HELMS:

Alex Fox, he said that at one time he went to the VA in DC and they totally turned him down. They weren't going to do anything for him. He drove 60 miles north to Baltimore and they did a whole bunch of things. Nice things for him. When Alex Fox told his story, Angela and I

MONICA HELMS:

just virtually looked at each other and go, 'you gotta be kidding, is this what happens?' And we found out that there's that inconsistency between the VA facilities on their treatment of trans people. And so we decided we needed to do something. First we were part of a committee at the national transgender advocacy coalition.

MONICA HELMS:

But that didn't seem to work because we realized that it needed more attention than just a committee. And so both of us dropped out of NCTE and we created,

JACK MACCARTHY:

Sorry, I don't think we've talked about NCTE yet. Can you just say what that acronym is for and what that was?

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. Well, NCTE doesn't play a big part in this, so it's not like it's a big deal.

MONICA HELMS:

The National Center for Transgender Advocacy Coalition, that's what the name was. Angela and I realized that there needed to be something done about transgender veterans being treated in the VA. We were both members of the National Center for Transgender Advocacy Coalition, the organization that was formed

MONICA HELMS:

to fight transgender rights on the national level, and we started a committee in Intech and it had a lot of restrictions to it because of being a committee. In 2003, in January, we both left Intech and created Transgender American Veterans Association.

MONICA HELMS:

It was an online group and we spent an entire year working on trying to get all the bylaws and the 501(C)3 and doing everything it takes to get an organization going. We did come up with something very interesting. However, Angela said that she had

MONICA HELMS:

a feeling about something and she said that we should have a march to the wall, transgender American veterans march to the wall. And that's because a lot of trans people that served in Vietnam were not, or felt very uncomfortable about going to the wall as themselves. We figured we would give them a safe way to go.

MONICA HELMS:

May 1st 2004, we had the first transgender veterans march to the wall and it was a success. There was 50 people there, we brought all our people to the wall and it was just all kinds of crying and going on, and helping each other

MONICA HELMS:

get through this. At the end of the day, we laid a reef at the tomb of the unknown and the master Sergeant of the guard comes out and says, "This reef is being presented by the transgender American Veterans Association." We all started crying, the word 'transgender' being said at this most holy of ground for us military people,

MONICA HELMS:

it was an event that we just would never forget. It was a historical event and even strong activists who has been activists for years were crying like babies when they heard this. We did it again a year after but

MONICA HELMS:

not as many people showed up this time, but it was still good to have this. We did lay the reef again, as well. I'm really happy about that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Sorry to interrupt. There was just a little bit of noise when you talked about going the following year, can you just repeat that?

MONICA HELMS:

We went to the wall

MONICA HELMS:

in 2004, and then again, we did it in 2005, because we figured it was important, but not as many people showed up still. It was very successful and I'm very happy about that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And there also was TAVA's work on the

JACK MACCARTHY:

Directive that took eight and a half years. Can you talk about that?

MONICA HELMS:

Yeah. Our primary goal as an organization was to try to get some consistency throughout the VA and how they treated transgender people and eight and a half years after we started the VA came out with a directive stating how to treat transgender people.

MONICA HELMS:

It didn't include surgery, but it included everything else hormones and therapy and everything. It was a very wonderful event to have that happen. A day after it went into effect, we got emails from transgender veterans telling us it worked, that we essentially

MONICA HELMS:

saved their lives and I cannot be more prouder than that than anything else that I've done in activism. That was a wonderful moment to have those people. However, today the VAs are gone back to treating trans people terribly. The current organization of TAVA is working on

MONICA HELMS:

fixing that, and I'm very proud of them. They are doing a wonderful job. TAVA has gone into other people's hands, and it worked out well.

JACK MACCARTHY:

In those eight and a half years that it took to get that directive. What did it take to get there? What was the work that TAVA was doing to make that happen?

MONICA HELMS:

In order to get to that directive that the VA put out, we had to lobby people in Congress, we had to talk to various other people. And then of course it was tough to get it through in the early years because Bush was president at the time. Shortly after

MONICA HELMS:

Obama was elected, we figured that this was gonna help, but it didn't happen right away. We were in touch with various people within the Obama administration, and the National Center for Transgender Advocacy or Education, NCTE, they were helpful in this, other trans lawyers were very helpful.

MONICA HELMS:

And finally the VA asked us to put together a directive for them, and they started out with a framework and then we built on it and made it much better. And then the Obama administration came out in June of that year, 2011 and made it official.

MONICA HELMS:

And it was a lot of work to get there.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Something that you mentioned the first time we talked is that with the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell it seems to you that gay and lesbian service members and vets are --

JACK MACCARTHY:

There's a layer of wondering that they no longer have to do about, like whether their right to serve and get what they're supposed to get as veterans won't be called into question [inaudible] trans people have that yet. Am I remembering that conversation correctly? But under the Obama administration, this directive came out,

JACK MACCARTHY:

then Trump comes along and says, 'just kidding, reverse that' then Biden comes along and reverses that. Can you just talk a little bit about the difference between how you see gay, lesbian, bisexual service members and vets and trans service members and vets in terms of their rights?

MONICA HELMS:

There was a lot of work on people

MONICA HELMS:

trying to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and there was a lot of trans people that were helping them, including TAVA was one of the organizations that was trying to help repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, even though it wouldn't affect us. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a sexual orientation, but gender identity was not included in it. So if Don't Ask, Don't Tell repealed,

MONICA HELMS:

it wouldn't affect us. Trans people would still be banned from serving in the military. It took another five years or so before they finally came out and said the trans people could serve. But in the interim, we were supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual people to serve in the military openly.

MONICA HELMS:

We felt that it was very important to lift the van on serving in the military for gay, lesbian, bisexual people because we knew once that was at place, then we could work on getting trans people to serve openly. It was such a wonderful day when they

MONICA HELMS:

finally said they could. However, it was terrible when Trump got elected, because one of the first things he did was to try to repeal that. He also repealed a lot of other things having to do with trans people, which luckily Biden has put back in place, including allowing trans people to serve openly in the military.

MONICA HELMS:

One of my good friends is a trans submariner. This person was one of the first women to openly serve in the military, on submarines, I should say. One of the first women to serve on submarines, but then he transitioned, so now he became the first trans man to be a submariner.

MONICA HELMS:

I think this is so wonderful and he's now made it to Commander. I really feel proud to call him a brother submariner, but it's a long road for all of us, including him. Many trans people who wanted to serve openly, and

MONICA HELMS:

were serving openly when they were allowed to, felt really bad when the ban went back into place. TAVA fought that fact, the years after the directive in the VA, that was when Tava started working towards getting trans people to serve openly in the military.

MONICA HELMS:

I resigned in 2013 and the organization kept working on it and it wasn't until 2016 that it took place.

JACK MACCARTHY:

This was towards the beginning of TAVA, when you were a delegate to 2004 DNC, right?

MONICA HELMS:

Yes. That was one of my other things that I've done in the past. I was

MONICA HELMS:

a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was an easy thing to do because in that year, they had the picking of the delegates at a far off location in our district and not very many people showed up.

MONICA HELMS:

They said that our particular district can have three people for John Kerry and two people for Edwards. Just so happens that there were only three people there for John Kerry and two people for Edwards, so we all became delegates. I was the first trans person to be a delegate selected as a delegate in Georgia and in the entire south.

MONICA HELMS:

I feel very glad about that. It was in Boston and I had lots of friends in Boston, and we got to go there with all the different people, the politicians and celebrities and news people all over the place. You see

MONICA HELMS:

this building with all these different signs for various states, but when you go in there and see it live, yourself, for the first time, it's just amazing. I got to meet John Glenn, because he was a delegate for Ohio. I was real happy to meet him. I got to

MONICA HELMS:

meet Jerry Springer and I actually interviewed Jerry Springer. So the tables were turned.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What did you ask Jerry Springer?

MONICA HELMS:

Well, I forgot. It was a long time . I don't know what I asked Jerry Springer, but I do remember interviewing him, doing a turnaround, a trans person interviewing Jerry Springer, and I got a picture of that. That'll be one of those pictures

MONICA HELMS:

I'll send you. I got to just do the delegate thing and I got to see Barack Obama speak for the first time that was before he was even elected a Senator. That was amazing. I thought, after hearing him, this person is gonna go far. I didn't

MONICA HELMS:

realize how quickly he was gonna go far. The experience was amazing and this was a time when the human rights campaign was having trouble trying to stay good with the trans community, but they weren't doing a very good job of it.

MONICA HELMS:

The president of the HRC got up and spoke at one of the days, during the convention, and when she got up to speak, there was a whole bunch of police officers running off to the front of the thing and standing around, like they were protecting her for something. Come to find out that they thought that the trans people were gonna be protesting in front of HRC.

MONICA HELMS:

I was way up in the balcony area. I got a call from Mara Keisling, she said, "Are we supposed to be protesting?" And I said, "No, I didn't hear anything about it." "Well, they sent a whole bunch of police people there to protect her from trans protesters." I said, , "They thought a lot of us."

MONICA HELMS:

Apparently, they figured we were gonna give 'em trouble. And that was one of the funny parts of the convention.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And there was a hard part of the convention too, with having to remove the amendment --. There was you and seven other trans people, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

MONICA HELMS:

Remind me what amendment it was. Oh, amendment for us to be included?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. To add trans specific language. And in order to maintain your access to Kerry's people, your group agreed to remove the amendment.

MONICA HELMS:

Okay. That was one really tough part, that was before the convention started.

MONICA HELMS:

We put in an amendment to the platform. The amendment was to treat trans people equally. It seemed that a lot of the delegates didn't wanna have that in there. We were told that we would not get access to talk

MONICA HELMS:

to the Kerry people if we kept that amendment in and there was no trans people on the platform committee, but there was one man, a gay man, who decided to help us, we said we would remove the amendment, and he had such a wonderful speech on removing the amendment. I can't remember it now. I'd have to look it up,

MONICA HELMS:

but it was very moving and we did finally get access to John Kerry's people, but it was toward the end of the convention. They kept putting us off and putting us off, and finally we got access and we started talking to them about the various issues: equality and hate crimes,

MONICA HELMS:

and things like that. They didn't seem to be interested in talking to us. Then when I brought up the fact that transgender veterans were not treated equally in the VA, that was something they were interested in because John Kerry was a veteran and they knew that he would respond to that, but he didn't get elected. I did have one interesting moment, personal.

MONICA HELMS:

Every morning at breakfast time, the Georgia breakfast, they would have one of the people of importance of Georgia come up and speak in the morning. Then one time it was president Carter and I knew that he was gonna have to walk out a certain way, so I stayed in a position where he would have to walk

MONICA HELMS:

near me to leave. When he was done, and he walked out towards me I said, "Mr. President, you and I have something in common." And he says, "What's that?" I said, "We're both former Mariners." And he just flashed a big Jimmy Carter grin. And I just thought that was a wonderful moment. I don't know if I got a picture of that. I probably don't

MONICA HELMS:

but it was something to remember.

Astra Price:

Monica, I'm just gonna jump in for a second just because I know we're getting a little bit further into the interview and I can see that you're getting a little bit more comfortable and kind of leaning back on the couch. Can you sit forward just to touch? Thank you.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. Thank you, Astra.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. And something that you touched on in your book that I found really interesting is that when being an activist specifically for veterans rights, there was a way of like getting to the right wing because of that

JACK MACCARTHY:

or of being able to shut people down because you are a veteran, that made it a little bit easier to talk about or easier to confront people. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about what your experience has been in terms of being able to comment trans rights as a veteran and what you feel like you've been able to

JACK MACCARTHY:

accomplish there because of that?

MONICA HELMS:

Well, early on Angela Brightfeather and I talked about different things. And one of the things we talked about was the fact that being trans was always something that people would be a little leery about talking to us about anything. But then when we say we're veterans that made a big deal, that was

MONICA HELMS:

a big deal because people were not so wanting to shun veterans. The fact that these trans people that they were talking to were veterans made a big difference in our access to various offices. When we lobbied congress, it helped get our message across;

MONICA HELMS:

not necessarily got much done because of it, because we were still talking to the same people that didn't like us in the first place. Even though we were veterans and we got in the door, they didn't listen to the message

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'm going to change focus a little bit shortly,

JACK MACCARTHY:

but before I do, I just wanted to ask if there's anything else about your activism that we haven't covered, that you wanted to make sure to touch on.

MONICA HELMS:

Currently?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah, currently or past activism, or anything we haven't touched.

MONICA HELMS:

My activism has expanded over the years. And I mean, I actually retired

MONICA HELMS:

from doing anything for a while, because I just wanted to be a "normal person", of course , that's going a little far sometimes. But I became a board member of the Georgia ACLU. I figured that all my work over the years in other parts could be very helpful to the local ACLU chapter,

MONICA HELMS:

and it has been very helpful. I'm very proud of working with the ACLU, they're an amazing organization. I got a lot of wonderful people working with me on the board. That's my current thing that I'm involved with.

JACK MACCARTHY:

As we're kinda moving into the present, I know that your relationship with your mother has changed a lot from where it used to be, and I wondered if you'd be willing to talk about that a bit, how you got to where you are now?

MONICA HELMS:

My mother passed away a few weeks ago.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Oh, I'm so sorry.

MONICA HELMS:

Over the years, my relationship with my mother had improved greatly. 2004, my father passed away and that's when my mother told me to come home. I was there at the funeral. I called the hospice,

MONICA HELMS:

my sister picked up the phone and she put the phone next to my father's ear. I said that I love you dad. And he made some noise. My sister said that was the only sound he made the entire time, was when I talked to him. My mother told me to come home and

MONICA HELMS:

I was waiting in the airport and I get a call from my youngest son telling me that my dad had passed away. I didn't get to get home in time to see him. I didn't get home in time to tell him I loved him. That was one of the saddest moments of my life. And

MONICA HELMS:

then a few weeks ago, my mother at 93, she also passed away and it didn't hit me until yesterday. It took me a few weeks before -- Something happened and it caused me to just burst into tears.

MONICA HELMS:

I miss my parents. I made a Memorial for my father, and I put my mother's picture there at the same Memorial. I have issues with a couple of my siblings,

MONICA HELMS:

but other than that everybody in the family has accepted me. I feel real blessed about that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'm so sorry about your mother. I didn't know. The last time we talked

JACK MACCARTHY:

was before that, and I'm really sorry.

MONICA HELMS:

That's okay.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Something that seemed to come about when your father passed away was that it kind of led to a reconciliation with your mother. Am I remembering that right?

MONICA HELMS:

Yes. .

JACK MACCARTHY:

Are you able to talk about that?

MONICA HELMS:

About what?

JACK MACCARTHY:

About being able to reconcile with your mother and her coming to accept you?

MONICA HELMS:

I thought I just brought that up.

JACK MACCARTHY:

You talked about the whole family.

MONICA HELMS:

Well, I just said when my father passed away, my mother wanted me to come home.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. There was something I was remembering from the book, but I can't remember it exactly, so it's okay if we move on . Something that

JACK MACCARTHY:

was also a big part of the book was your relationship to love and romantic relationships. And I wanted to ask you about meeting Darlene and getting together with Darlene.

MONICA HELMS:

Well, the love of my life is Darlene.

MONICA HELMS:

She's gonna be sitting over there listening to me say all of this . We met at what was called a Contra dance, which is kind of like the cross between line dancing, square dancing, but it's kind of an English thing. I was told that, "Hey, you need to go to this gender neutral Contra dance,"

MONICA HELMS:

so I went and I saw this tall person who was a bit androgynous, but I knew she was trans. We danced and we talked and then after everything was done, we went to a lesbian bar and talked. I found out that I wrote something that night

MONICA HELMS:

that was very interesting. You know how Facebook tells you this many years ago, this is what you posted. Well, they've posted what I said that night. I said that I met somebody really nice and it was nice to be hugged again and kissed again.

MONICA HELMS:

I got to know Darlene over the years. She started her transition about that very time that we met, and she went from androgynous looking to very feminine looking, thanks to my health . She was going through school, earning her PhD

MONICA HELMS:

In Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is a very hard subject to learn as part of microbiology, and here she's as a Georgia tech going to microbiology classes and getting her PhD.

MONICA HELMS:

In the middle of it, that's when she decides to transition. So getting a hard PhD to accomplish, and then putting on top of that was very interesting that she was able to do that. And her reasoning was that they couldn't fire a grad student. I go, 'okay, that works'.

MONICA HELMS:

About 15 months after getting her degree, she finally got hired as a contractor for the CDC. She's been working for the CDC ever since under contractors. She published her first paper

MONICA HELMS:

just recently, it'll be out in PeerJ, which is a peer review magazine. I'm very proud of her being able to do that, and that might help get her a job directly at the CDC. We have similar likes and dislikes. Like,

MONICA HELMS:

here's something on TV and I may start making a joke about it, she makes the same joke about it. We think a lot alike. We like going camping. We just have all kinds of things that we like to do together there. I'm very happy that she's in my life. I could not have asked for a better person

MONICA HELMS:

to be there. We got married on the 17th or 18th, I forget, of November because we knew that it was 2016, we got married. And that's because we figured that Trump was gonna take away

MONICA HELMS:

same sex marriages, we decided to get married. We've been happy ever since. Ever since we met each other, we've been happy. Not too long after we met, the whole time she was living in this small studio apartment in downtown Atlanta and paying a lot of money for it.

MONICA HELMS:

In February of 2010, I said, "Hey, why don't you move in with me? You'll have to drive to school, but you won't have to pay any rent." I helped her through those early times. And then when I retired from Sprint in 2015, she helped pay for

MONICA HELMS:

my junior college tuition so I can get my degree in television production. So we helped each other out.

Astra Price:

I'm just gonna interrupt for one moment. Monica, can you sit forward just a little bit, please? Okay, thank you.

MONICA HELMS:

Sorry.

JACK MACCARTHY:

We're about to start winding down. There's four questions that we ask every OUTWORDS interviewee

JACK MACCARTHY:

at the end, and before I get to those, there's one story that made me really emotional that I wonder if you'd be willing to tell here which is about when your friend Michelle said that God has told me about you, and then from her suggestion, you went home

JACK MACCARTHY:

and were able to see yourself in the mirror for the first time. Can you tell that story?

MONICA HELMS:

I remember one time where I was trying to date this one woman, and she was very interesting, and she told me

MONICA HELMS:

"Monica, you've made it." And this was early 2000. She said, "You made it, you are there. You need to go home and look at yourself in the mirror and tell that you are a woman."

MONICA HELMS:

I went home after that date with her and I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, "You have made it. You are there. You are a woman."In these early days, in the early part of

MONICA HELMS:

this century, this idea of living your true self was still not something that people talked about. It's like, okay, I'm changing from a man to a woman. Well, in reality, now I know that you don't change your -- you just live your true self. And I feel better about that than

MONICA HELMS:

I did about how I looked at myself before. But this time she was telling me that I made it, that I have become the woman that I should be. It really helped me have a better outlook on myself from that point on.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I love that story so much. Thank you for telling it. The final four. Light at the end of the title. [Crosstalk] If you could tell your 15 year old self one thing, what would it be?

MONICA HELMS:

I would tell my

MONICA HELMS:

16 year old self one thing, I don't really know what I would tell them. 16 years old, I just came back from Kansas. My father retired from the Air Force, I was going through high school. I guess I would say, "Don't stop.

MONICA HELMS:

Keep going the way you are going, everything that you do wrong is supposed to be done that way, because that's part of your life. Everything that you do right, is exactly what you were supposed to do. You did everything right. You did a lot of things wrong. You fell in love, you lost, and

MONICA HELMS:

you had children even later on. So just keep going. Don't second guess yourself, you are on the right track."

JACK MACCARTHY:

I love that. It feels related to the 'you've made it' thing. Second question of the final four:

JACK MACCARTHY:

do you believe in the notion of an LGBTQ superpower or a trans superpower? And if so, what is it?

MONICA HELMS:

I feel that transgendered people got the best of life. People would say, "Well, how do you figure that?

MONICA HELMS:

Look at all the trouble you have to go through." Well, yes, but here you are, most of us who have transitioned later in life, have got to see the world through the eyes of a man, and now we get to see the world through the eyes of a woman. How lucky can you get to be able to see the world through those eyes,

MONICA HELMS:

to be able to experience life as a man and life as a woman. That, to me, is a blessing. I know that a lot of people probably won't see it that way. There was a lot of people that would reject the idea that they weren't really a man, and that's probably true in my case. I lived as a man and I experienced life as a man.

MONICA HELMS:

It was part of what made me the woman I am today.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I loved what you said in the book about amalgamation and how in metallurgy, like they don't chemically combine, but they create something even stronger together that sounds a little bit like what you're saying.

MONICA HELMS:

Well, I could say that too.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay.

MONICA HELMS:

One of the ways I look at myself is that I am not all man and not all woman. I'm like an amalgamation. Amalgamation is when you mix two metals together and they form together, but they don't chemically react together. Essentially, I'm an amalgamation of a female and a male that

MONICA HELMS:

I've experienced life both as a man and as a woman. I'm not sad that I had to live a life as a man for a while. I'm not sad that that part of my life was there. It made me who I am today, I like it that way, better than the first one.

JACK MACCARTHY:

They're both good.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Third question, why is it important to you to share your story?

MONICA HELMS:

I think it's important for me to share my story because there's a lot of very young trans people out there wondering about themselves. And there's still a lot of trans people who feel that they're alone, that there's nobody else. Even though that's less

MONICA HELMS:

and less these days, but still, if my story can help somebody, if they go, "Well, why don't I try that?" or "That looks interesting," or, "Yeah, I could see it that way," and I could help one person, then I feel that that was the reason why I've been put here. And I would be very glad

MONICA HELMS:

to find out if I go to that higher being in after death, and they say, "Well, you did it. You helped somebody." I go, "Okay, good."

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. That is definitely true. You have helped many people including me.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I also think about when you were talking earlier about meeting a trans woman and she had a really hard life and you were like, oh, is that what would be waiting for me? I think it's important for young trans people to see someone who's doing well.

JACK MACCARTHY:

You are in a happy marriage and you're still an activist. People can feel hope.

MONICA HELMS:

Oh, I lost the primary camera.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Oh, no. We're almost done though so I think it's okay.

MONICA HELMS:

You wanna just forget about it?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Let's just forget

JACK MACCARTHY:

that one camera.

MONICA HELMS:

You're recording me here.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay.

MONICA HELMS:

I lost the light.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Oh. And there goes the light. All right. There's another camera going right?

MONICA HELMS:

There's another camera going and another light.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. Let's just do this one last question and then we'll be done. What is the value of a project like OUTWORDS that

JACK MACCARTHY:

records the stories of LGTQIA+ elders across America, and please use the word OUTWORDS in your answer.

MONICA HELMS:

I think it's important for OUTWORDS to record these stories of elder trans people, because we're not gonna last forever. It's like the

MONICA HELMS:

World War II veterans, getting all the stories of all the World War II veterans, because we're losing them very rapidly. There's not a lot of them left. Well, a lot of the early trans people and activists are getting up there in age, you need to get their stories to be able to show that we were here,

MONICA HELMS:

we existed. That's one of the reasons why I wrote my book was because I needed to tell people that I wasn't just the person that created the trans flag. I did a whole bunch of other things before and after. I think it's very important that these stories get told because we want our history to live on

MONICA HELMS:

long after we've passed. And I just lost the other.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I feel like the electronics are telling us that you're done, you have to stop, but that was the last question.

MONICA HELMS:

Well, hopefully you'll get some decent enough coverage. I mean, there was light coming off in the other part of the house there.

MONICA HELMS:

It helped .

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I can still see you clearly. You're just not as well lit, but there was all, so two hours of conversation before that, that was all very well lit.