By: Emily Starbuck Gerson
KeiShaun Lowery was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a conservative Pentacostal community. He was assigned female at birth, but he never felt comfortable in his own skin.
Upon graduating high school, he began going by his given middle name and started college with a new sense of self. While he dated women and presented as masculine, something still didn’t feel right about his gender identity.
Lowery struggled in school and decided to join the Army in 2007. In 2015, soon after the Supreme Court demanded marriage equality for all, Lowery wedded his wife, Shantel, who also served in the military. Together, they raise their daughter, NaStáceya.
Eventually, Lowery put the pieces together and found the right language to describe his authentic identity: he is a transgender man. He started to transition in early 2017, and his experience in the military was full of contradictions. People who assumed he was a cisgender man called him “sir,” though some started misgendering him upon learning he was trans. But Lowery also noticed that he was treated with more respect and authority when he spoke, and he made sure to put that privilege to good use. He also went on to serve on the board of SPARTA.
Lowery retired from the Army last fall, after serving 14 years in the chaplain corps as a religious affairs specialist. His family relocated to his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, where they are dedicated to contributing to the Black community. When Lowery left the military, he had 90 undergraduate credit hours, and he visited nearby universities until he found one who met his need to finish his bachelor’s degree within 12 months. That was Mount St. Joseph University, where he’s studying behavioral science full-time, with the goal of starting law school in September 2023.
Now that he’s in the civilian world, Lowery feels a responsibility to be open about his identity as a Black trans man. He and his wife are passionate about teaching their daughter to celebrate their Blackness and use their talents to make their city a better place. MMAA interviewed Lowery to learn more about his journey and what Black History Month means to him.
Modern Military Association of America: To start, when did you first realize you were transgender?
KeiShaun Lowery: I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I didn’t know it was an option. The language was not there for me. I thought that I could be a tomboy, and that was pretty much it.
I wasn’t extremely popular as a child and I really wasn’t trying to be. I wasn’t coming into my own. I was just kind of in the shadows. Most people didn’t really know who I was — I was just so and so’s cousin. I wasn’t thriving. I was just existing. I was deployed during my 10-year high school reunion and no one reached out to me. My graduating class was nearly 400 people.
MMAA: Do you think you stayed in the shadows on purpose?
KL: I don’t know, I can’t tell you — I was a teenager. When I turned 19, as soon as I graduated high school, I started going by my middle name. As soon as I got to college. That was on purpose. I knew in 2012 that I wanted to change my name, and I started coming out as transgender at the beginning of 2017. Ironically, it took me all the way until 2019 to decide on a name and it wasn’t until 2020 that I made it official.
Part of it was because I knew it would be challenging for my family to accept my name change. I was trying to come up with derivatives of my birth name, because my family did name me. But nothing ever felt authentic, and my birth name sounded very ethnic.
Previously, my identity was I was lesbian, I was a stud, I was masculine of center. I was in constant evolution with the times. As language evolved, so did I. As my knowledge of self, as my knowledge of the world around me evolved, as my knowledge of language evolved, so did I.
I didn’t start to transition until after the age of 30, which was 15 years after I left my hometown. I now go by he/him pronouns, but I also have they/them on my Facebook page. That’s for the old church folk to give them an opportunity to not use “she.”
MMAA: What was your experience being transgender in the military?
KL: It was nuanced. Since the military is so hyper-gendered, I’m glad that I experienced it there. Because I was getting sir’d everywhere else anyway. Then I was in Korea, which was my second time there. I was sir’d all the time there, so it was affirming in a lot of ways.
I say it was nuanced, because people would sir me, but then once people — mostly military leaders — had access to the information that I was transgender, they’d start to misgender me. I was like, you thought I was a dude 10 minutes ago, so what’s up? Individuals who previously thought I was male and would call me brother would then start to misgender me, which really frustrated me.
That was my experience for about a year in the military. They were pretty much gaslighting me; they couldn’t understand why I was so upset about it. “I mean yeah I thought that, but now that I know, I can’t overlook it.” Full stop, because you could just say sergeant, you don’t have to say she or her.
MMAA: Did that eventually get better?
KL: No. When I went to a different unit, and by then my DEERS marker had changed, and these people had no knowledge, so they had no opportunity to mistreat me.
One person did have knowledge and one time did misgender me and they corrected themselves, and that was the end of it.
MMAA: I’d love to hear about the intersection of your identities, both as a Black man and trans person who has navigated different types of intersectionality. What has this experience been like for you?
KL: It’s a loaded question, because to be honest, I possess more privilege as a Black man than I ever did as a Black woman. Far more privilege. Like when I speak now, people listen. And they listen as if I am speaking with absolute authority, especially when they learn of my veteran status.
I know without question that they do because my wife is a veteran as well. When she speaks, they pay her no attention. She is not given the same reverence. They make a big deal out of me, they’re like, “Oh you’re a veteran, yay yay yay!” They don’t do the same for my wife.
My wife doesn’t much care; she feels that she got what she needed, so she’s indifferent to it. But I try to check my privilege at the door and be well aware of that, so I don’t perpetuate anything negative and instead try to make sure to amplify others’ voices.
My voice is one that hasn’t been amplified, and I’m not a quiet person at all. Everything that I have, I’ve always had to fight for it. I’ve always had to prove. I’ve not always been given a chair at the table. I’ve had to pull up my own chair and bring a folding chair like the late Shirley Chisholm said to do, and sometimes I’ve had to just lean against the wall and bloom where I’m planted, and I don’t have a green thumb. That’s just my truth.
I’m not always invited. But now that there’s circumstances that are affording me a seat at the table, every single time I go in and I’m given a seat at the table, I have no issue telling people, as soon as I get in there, that yes: I’m a proud Black trans man.
How dare I go in the room and hide? I don’t get to hide, I must be visible. I don’t know who’s in the room, I don’t know how far my voice will travel. So when I stand at that intersection, I don’t get to hurry across. That’s not fair, it took me too long to get in the room — I’m nearly 36 years old. I feel a responsibility. To whom much is given, much is required.
When you get what you need, you don’t take it and just keep it moving. It took a lot to get what I needed. It took a lot to learn how to ask for what I needed. I must continue to learn how to ask what I need, and I must continue to show people it’s OK to ask for what you need in that space. And be bold about it.
MMAA: That is so powerful. Given that it’s February, what does Black History Month mean to you?
KL: Black History Month to me is Black history awareness for people who are not Black. I say it’s more for others because we communicate constantly with our child about our Black history. It is intentional. It must be.
We talk daily about what it means to be Black. We are amplifying her voice around being Black. We are always encouraging her to be comfortable being Black, be comfortable being in her own skin, to be comfortable using her voice, to be comfortable existing in her place, in her space, because she deserves it.
We chose her school because the majority of the staff were Black educators. We chose this city because we wanted an urban center of Black educators. We came to Cincinnati because we are concerned about the state of Black Cincinnati. I have over 100 cousins in the city.
If I were to bring my talents anywhere — and I believe I’m talented. I don’t want to gas myself up, but you don’t make it 14 years in the military without any talent. I wanted to bring my talents back to my hometown because I’m concerned about the state of Black Cincinnati and the future of Black Cincinnati.
So we talk about being Black in Cincinnati and being Black in America and what our Black future looks like a lot. It is very, very important to us and is not something we play with. It is not a game to us.
MMAA: Do you see any opportunities within the Black community to be more inclusive of LGBTQIA+ people?
KL: I think Black history needs to be included and brought more to the forefront in this history of queer Black Americans. Especially what they’ve done in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. They were really in the background, but they were the administrative staff that were really driving a lot of it. And sometimes we don’t know that, but it’s important. Their contributions were critical.
And then a lot of times, I see that the work Black Americans are doing in our communities is hyper-gendered. That affects some of our talent pool, when we start rallying and doing calls to action. “We need all of our young men to do this and all of our young women to do that,” and then we don’t have young people because our trans and nonbinary kids are like, what do you need me to do? Because we’ve pigeonholed our volunteer staff and we don’t have a place to put our trans or gender non-conforming people.
MMAA: There’s been a lot of talk about not just highlighting dark history such as slavery during Black History Month, but also showcasing Black joy and Black excellence. As we wrap up, what are your thoughts on that?
KL: I think we need to know about all of it. We need to know about Black history, we need to know about Black excellence. I’m disappointed that I didn’t learn about Ruby Bridges until I was well into my adult years. Ruby Bridges isn’t just Black history, Ruby Bridges is living history. This woman is still alive. This is not an old woman! She’s younger than my grandmother, that’s ridiculous.
Then there are a lot of historical sites, like Brown vs Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. There’s a lot of historical places that I haven’t even thought to visit, not even on my radar. We just drive right past them. And I’m like, nah, this has to be on my radar, this has to be important to me.
This history is critical and it must be important in order to change the way we view what has happened to people in our country. Not just Black people, in all honesty, but people in our country. We have to talk about what happened. We have to care about it.
