The biggest battle Alana faced as a Special Forces solider wasn’t on the front line, but within herself.
“I joined the military initially because I felt like it was my only option to either force myself into manhood somehow or die,” Alana told Barcroft. “I wanted very much to be actively engaged in combat so I would have the opportunity to get myself killed. I view it very much as passive suicide.”
“I fought, shot, lifted weights, I grew beards and I rode a Harley, and it didn’t change anything. I would still cry myself to sleep at night,” she said.
With her military days behind her, Alana, now 32, has undergone gender reassignment surgery and is living her truth as a woman. But, as she recalled, her struggle with gender dysmorphia started at an early age.
“As a child, I prayed every night. I prayed that God would either change my body and make me a girl or change my mind so that I wouldn’t want to be,” Alana said. “And neither of those prayers were answered. I lost my faith.”
Though she did come out to her conservative parents, they were unable to accept her lifestyle.
“I told my parents that I was gay and I felt like I was a girl and I wanted to be a girl,” she said. “When I first told my parents this, my dad didn’t talk to me for like a week or two weeks. They just would not accept me as their daughter and I’ll only ever be their son. I was a massive disappointment.”
Alana was a victim of sexual abuse, and her folks believed the traumatic experience changed her in many ways.
“They really seemed to be fixated on this idea that I was trans because I was raped. Sexual abuse does not change your sexuality, doesn’t change your gender,” Alana said.
After joining the Army, Alana served as both a shooter and a medic with A Team Delta in Afghanistan.
“I just sort of constructed this false personality that was just a combination of action heroes that I could think of, very much the stoic violent, male type,” she said.
Alana ultimately hit one of the lowest points in her life while overseas, when she decided to cut off her own breasts with a scalpel.
“I’d been on hormones but I felt hopeless,” Alana explained. “All the messages I was receiving were that I could never be legitimate — that I could never be a real woman. You can only hear so much negativity before you start internalizing it and I started to feel like I had to be a man.”
“I’d been on hormones long enough that I had some breast development and I didn’t want to be a man with boobs so I took a scalpel and removed the breast tissue myself,” she continued. “I went into the bathroom and I had my surgical kit there and I performed surgery. As an A Team Delta, my surgical skills were up to the task and I did pretty clean work.”
Alana gave transitioning another shot in 2012, going under the knife for several procedures, including a breast augmentation and sex reassignment surgery.
“I wouldn’t say that I felt like I was in the wrong body as much as I was in the wrong role. Gender boils down to a lot more than just your physical form,” Alana said. “The surgery makes it less likely people will realize you are trans and gives you more safety. I want to survive.”
Thriving in her new reality as a woman, Alana has found support in friends and spends time crafting sculptures from metal.
“I really got into metal work because to me it was almost a sort of magic to take something cold and lifeless — like a lump of iron. With the proper catalyst, in this case to fire, you can make it into something beautiful and delicate but strong at the same time and to me that was very much an apt metaphor of my own life and my own transformation,” she explained.
As for her love life, Alana is still looking for the one who will sweep her off her feet.
“I’m hoping that eventually I’ll be able to settle down with someone — it’s important for me to find love,” Alana said. “Finally I feel happy in my own skin and I’m looking forward to the future as a woman.”
