Joe Ellis is alive.
It was a non-disputed, unanswered fact until January 29th when it collided with a commercial airplane in Washington, D.C., and all involved were accused of piloting a murdered military helicopter.
After the crash, before valid explanations began to pop up, Donald Trump denounced diversity. There is no evidence that diversity initiatives played any role in the crash, but that didn’t matter.
Ellis, 34, was not involved in the crash in any way. However, she is a Black Hawk pilot for the Virginia State Guard. And she’s transgender.
Shortly after the crash, two of the murdered helicopter pilots were named, but the third pilot’s family was initially selected to keep her name private, but she later It has been identified. Ellis was misidentified as a pilot in the intervening.
On Friday morning, Ellis received a text from her best friend around 4:30am. The random account says it comments on all of his public Facebook posts asking if they were friends with “the one who killed those people in the crash” and Ellis. She discounted it because she thought it was probably a bot.
Ellis, who has been in the Virginia National Guard since 2009 and has been deployed in Iraq and Kuwait, wrote on the news website Smerconish.com about being in the military on January 28th, and later interviewed commentator Michael Smerconish. I spoke to you for that. She thought the attention was for her article.
In the article, she wrote that although she grew up in a religious, conservative home with a history of military service, she had known that she had had gender discomfort since she was five years old. She tried to do something “more religious, more successful, more manly.”
“I got married, bought a house, raised my stepdaughter, played drums in a church band, adopted a dog,” she wrote. “All the things I believed a good guy should do, and I really wanted to do those things, but I secretly wanted it to fix me. It didn’t work.”
She found herself at a point during the pandemic where she could begin to deal with her gender discomfort. She began moving to her orders in 2023 and notified her that she came out to the unit in 2024 and gained “overwhelming support,” she wrote. She paid for all her trans-related care from her pocket.
Ellis said she believes she is targeted because she is a trans woman.
“Publishing that article has caused me a side-damaged injury, like many other trans people who are unnecessarily targeted.”
Then, on Friday morning after crash, another friend sent a screenshot of the article on a Pakistani website containing photos of Ellis, claiming she was the third pilot. (This article says that Ellis was “rumorized” as an unnamed pilot, but it has not been fixed yet.)
“The Daily Mail then called my personal cell phone and asked if I was alive,” Ellis said. “And that’s when it sinks. And I, oh, this was big. This isn’t every corner of the internet.
She discovers that her name is trending with X, and some posts have earned hundreds of thousands of views. “Why is this only on Twitter?” Right-wing commentator Anne Coulter wrote to X and shared a post about Ellis being a pilot. One account said the crash could be “another trans terrorist attack.”
People expressed their opinion that she hated Trump, motivated by hatred for her actions, killing herself and dozens of others to demand. Trump issued an executive order prohibiting trans people from openly participating or serving the military, but he did not immediately kick them out. A group of trans army members sued the order.
Ellis says she was a political moderate and voted red more than blue. “I didn’t say anything negative about Trump. I just said I wanted to continue serving.”
Ellis posted on Facebook Friday morning to try to counteract the rumors and asked people to report posts that labeled her the pilot. However, she quickly realized that it wasn’t enough, so she made the video. Proof of life.
“An interesting morning,” she begins with a video. “It’s humiliated by the family to try to connect this to some kind of political agenda. They don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve it. And I’m sure you all can be alive. I hope you know you’re fine, and this should be enough for you all to end all the rumours.”
She was quiet from there, packed some bags, arranged armed security, and after being armed, she left the house for the night. She was worried that someone might use public records to find her home and try to hurt her family.
Her reaction to the video was overwhelmingly, not uniform, but positive. She messaged her that she was supposed to be in the helicopter instead, or that she was alive but she should not be in the military as she was mentally ill. Others shared anti-trans and anti-Semitics (she said in an interview with Smerconish that she was exploring her faith) comments on social media.
But she said the video ultimately worked. This is because misinformation can be easily made. “All I had to do is say I’m alive, and that kind of thing broke the entire rumor,” she said.
She saw people began to correct rumors. She saw a veteran pro-Trump account that tells others that she shouldn’t chase military members like this. Two days after rumors reached the fever pitch, she said, as if the misinformation had stopped on the truck.
She tried to report some remaining social media posts that she falsely claims to be a pilot. “Calling me as a murderer clearly doesn’t seem to be a violation of the X-Rule,” she said.
She said she was not stopped from speaking again. Her guards supported her through the trials, asserting that she wanted to continue serving in the army.
“I know that not everyone loves me. That’s fine, but I want to serve everyone,” she said. “I want to somehow use this incident as a form of good. I still don’t know how it looks, but I really want to turn this into something good for the world.
“I don’t want to create myself,” she added. “I don’t want to be a victim or a martian. I want to show people that I’m strong and stand up to this hatred, hopefully something can come from it.”
