Calpernia Addams, the star of LOGO’s reality dating show TransAmerica Love Story and the subject of the film Soldier’s Girl, lived in Alaska for almost two years as a Navy medic, before returning to Nashville and coming out as transgendered. 

While in Adak, she helped rescue passengers from a Chinese airplane, according to an entry in her blog diary:

Early morning on April 6th, 1993, when I was still a field combat medic in the Navy and living on a remote Alaskan island (yes, really!), a Chinese airliner encountered some kind of severe turbulence and had to land on the even more remote Alaskan island of Shemya. I was on duty in the emergency room that night, and volunteered to fly the quick hop over to Shemya and start processing the wounded.

The entry describes the medical needs of the Chinese passengers and the efforts to communicate with them, and concludes:

We got everyone stabilized, except for one poor soul who died. Later that day, a big plane from the mainland in Alaska arrived with medical teams to medivac the wounded back to Elmendorf Air Force Base hospital. I made the long trip (7 or 8 hours?) from Shemya to Anchorage with my patients, monitoring IV bags and vitals. It was quite a day for all of us on the Adak medical team.

Calpernia Addams is an actress, author, musician and activist currently living in Hollywood. As a co-founder of Deep Stealth Productions, she works to provide more accurate and positive portrayals of transgendered people, and to give a voice to transgendered actors and entertainers who are frequently relegated to roles which are demeaning stereotypes.

Last weekend, Calpernia was an honorary grand marshal at Atlanta Pride 2008, along with Grand Marshals Shonia Brown and Scott Turner Schofield. Scott, another trans artist with a connection to Alaska, performed his show “Becoming a Man” at Out North Theater earlier this year.