Seth Moulton: “I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. Hanna Tripp served in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013. Hanna is also…”

“I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. Hanna Tripp served in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013. Hanna is also a Team Moulton alum, where she did extraordinary work for veterans in Massachusetts' Sixth District. Today, as a senior policy adviser at Minority Veterans of America, she continues to advocate for veterans everywhere. I am grateful to be here on this year's 10th anniversary of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I am honored to share Hanna's story with you all. This is her story, in her words: ``I graduated flight school at the top of my class; flew 20 combat missions in Iraq; and later brought back the remains of our fallen from Afghanistan. ``Objectively, I was a good airman. However, nothing that I did or could do would supersede the fact that I was trans. In coming out, my service to this country would have been made irrelevant simply by this one aspect of who I was. ``So, in order to remain, I chose to bifurcate myself; to project a facade of the person the military expected me to be. The catch-22 was that while I heard members of my squadron talk about how `the gays' would destroy our combat effectiveness, I was unable to demonstrate that it didn't. This is the most enduring aspect of Don't Ask, Don't Tell for me. It was not that people like me were banned. It is that we were denied the opportunity to show our worth.…”