you can't fly jets if you're transgender (on Little Miss Sunshine)
I was told to watch Little Miss Sunshine because I want to be a pilot. Looking back, perhaps this person was deliberately trying to torture me. It's not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.
I started flight lessons in the summer of 2024. I remember it mostly in flashes; the oppressive heat of an unstarted Cessna that had been sitting in the sun, the sudden gale-force winds of the propeller, the jolt as the plane tried to lift off the ground even from a complete standstill. The taxi out was always nerve-wracking, each runway I had to cross a terrifying canyon, the staticky radio communications guiding me safely through the tangled maze.
I remember the whole world falling away as we took off.
I remember seeing my city from 3000 feet up. In many ways, it felt much smaller. The houses I could spend hours biking between flew under the wing like they were minuscule. The secondary cities that felt hours away by car were suddenly at my fingertips. I could turn my head from side to side and see two disparate parts of the city at once, a contradiction in visual form.
But in other ways it felt so much bigger. Lake Michigan still looks like the ocean from that height — an endless stretch of water all the way to the horizon. I couldn't get lost as long as it was there. The city itself went so far beyond what I could see, arteries of roads and rail connecting it to places I had never even known about. That high up I sometimes had the feeling that I could just keep flying forever, finding my way anywhere I wished; New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo. In the Cessna, the whole world was under my landing gear, just waiting for me.
In Little Miss Sunshine, Dwayne wants to be a pilot. He's taken a vow of silence until he learns to fly, and hasn't spoken a word for nine straight months. His desire to fly consumes him, becomes him. I get it. Nothing can compare.
Dwayne only agrees to go on the family road trip — the impetus of the entire film — because his mother promises him flight lessons. I can see the tease of freedom behind his eyes as he agrees, the thoughts that someday soon, he too will have the world laid out in front of him in patterns of patchwork farmland and miniature buildings. He is going to fly.
To fly a plane solo (alone, without a flight instructor) you have to pass a medical examination. It's pretty standard stuff: they want to make sure you won't pass out at the controls or crash the plane because you can't see, for example. My flight instructor sent me in for my examination a week or two before I was supposed to solo. Never have I been more excited for a doctor's appointment. Soon, I would be up in the clouds, solo, free. It was only a few steps after that to further certificates, a regional position, a mainline piloting gig. I could already see myself flying 777s across the Pacific, visiting far-off cities, watching two-hour long sunsets from the flight deck, the world endless and beautiful under my wing.
Midway through the film, as they're driving through Southern California, Dwayne's little sister shows him a colorblindness test to pass the time. She points to the red-and-green circles, asks him what he sees.
Dwayne shakes his head.
It's right there, she says. Just read it.
My heart leaps into my throat. Dwayne shakes his head again.
Dwayne's uncle sucks in a breath. "You're colorblind," he says. "You can't fly jets if you're colorblind."
Dwayne screams, the first noise he's made in nine months. I might be screaming with him.
I didn't walk out of the examination with my medical certificate. The examiner told me in regretful tones that the FAA is suspicious of people assigned female at birth who take testosterone. You could be a flight risk, he said. You could crash the plane.
Don't ask me how being transgender makes me more likely to crash an airplane. I have no answer.
After being told I should receive a "special issuance" certificate within a few weeks of my appeal, I waited. I waited through the end of summer, giving up the last beautiful weeks of my flight lessons. In the fall, I flew sporadically to stay "current," knowing that soon I would be back in the air full-time. But every still, cold day of perfect winter flying weather passed me by. And so did spring. The second summer that I waited, the sky above my city called to me every day. I was unable to answer. It should arrive any day now.
I waited fifteen months.
Four days after I got back to school, the letter arrived. This was it. My ticket back into the sky. I ripped it open, desperate for a release from my prison, desperate to for the world to fall away under my wing, desperate to fly.
"Due to your history of Gender Dysphoria... your application for issuance of an airman medical certificate is hereby denied."
You're transgender. You can't fly jets if you're transgender.
After Dwayne starts screaming, he doesn't stop. He pounds on the doors of the car, begs to be let out, runs into the California desert until he collapses on the ground, sobbing. Behind him is the endless sky, completely out of reach. He can't even look at it.
I couldn't either. For months, it hurt like an open wound.
Dwayne begs to be left behind, abandoned. He can't take it without the promise of flight somewhere in his future. He can't imagine a world in which he has no wings.
But his family won't leave him. His little sister convinces him to get back in the car. They bring him along even though he's missing a part of himself, hollow on the inside, his future shattered in an instant.
My family wouldn't leave me either. And, unlike Dwayne, I have a chance to appeal. My parents helped me line up everything right this time: the right lawyers, the right psychiatrist, the right contacts at the FAA. This time, it should go through.
I just don't know if I can stand being stuck on the ground for another year. I should've already had my licenses. The plan was to graduate college and become a flight instructor, to spend my days above the clouds, welcoming newcomers into the sky. Instead, I haven't touched a plane in a year.
What does my future look like? It's hazy now, my bright, clear dreams of flight blurred and twisted. I've been considering moving abroad to escape the anti-trans rhetoric gripping the US. (I don't think my country wants me here.) But then my license will be even more delayed — only citizens are allowed to fly planes in the EU, and that process takes another five years. Could I live like this for that long? I genuinely don't know.
Flying used to bring me so much joy. My dream of piloting A330s used to get me through my worst days. Now it causes them. I feel burned by flight, hardened, exhausted. I don't even want to think about it.
By the end of Little Miss Sunshine, Dwayne is speaking again. Staring out at the sea, he smiles to himself and says "If I want to fly, I'm gonna find a way to fly." I laughed. Hasn't he heard? The airspace is the same everywhere. The rules are the same everywhere. You can't fly jets if you're colorblind. Good fucking luck, buddy.
This was, admittedly, a surface-level reaction. But it's hard to read into the meanings of a scene when you feel attacked by it. There's a more charitable read here: maybe "flying" for Dwayne doesn't mean flying anymore. Maybe he'll become a writer or a bike mechanic or a train driver and love it just as much. He could fly on wings that have nothing to do with Cessnas or Boeings, wings he builds himself. I've considered it. I've tried.
But, to be honest, nothing compares with flight. Nothing even comes close. Maybe it's a blessing that Dwayne never got those flight lessons he wanted so badly. He doesn't even know what he's missing.
It could arrive any day now.