What Is This Transgender Journalist Doing In Ukraine? Covering A War

On Feb. 2, the U.S. State Department warned Americans in Ukraine to “depart now” and also issued a travel advisory warning against going there, due to the “increased threats of Russia military action and COVID-19.” The Russians invaded three weeks later, and on March 2, journalist Sarah Ashton-Cirillo of Las Vegas headed that way.

She has been on the ground, covering the war for 119 days now, and is believed to be the only out transgender woman war correspondent in Ukraine.

“I wasn’t coming here to necessarily cover war,” Ashton-Cirillo told me over the phone from an apartment she’s renting. “I’ve never been in combat before. I’ve never been exposed to live fire. This was a follow up to my refugee book that I was unhappy with. That’s what this trip was, to let me write the refugee book that was not written properly in 2015.”

She wrote that book about the Syrian refugee crisis prior to coming out as transgender, and she knew, traveling this time, as an out trans woman—to a war zone—was going to be a very different experience.

“At first, I was not planning to go into Ukraine,” Ashton-Cirillo said. “I thought I would be in Poland for maybe 10 days covering the refugee crisis.”

“And when I got there and thought, maybe I’ll go into Ukraine,” she said. “But I had major, major problems.”

Those problems were something a lot of American trans people can identify with, especially those living on the margins: Her identification was inconsistent with how she was living, and how she now looked.

“My gender is female. My name change is legal in Nevada and on my driver’s license. Driver’s license is fine. Passport shows something different,” she told me. “I never bothered to update my passport. So, my passport still has a face that looks nothing like mine.”

One of the gender affirming healthcare options for transgender women is FFS: Facial Feminization Surgery. The procedure cosmetically provides a more feminine appearance for those whose male puberty has defined their features as unmistakably male. Ashton-Cirillo had FFS, but the picture on her passport showed what she looked like prior to that operation.

“I don’t mind people knowing that I’m trans. My issue was the passport shows something different. There’s no other way to put it. I’ve had massive Facial Feminization Surgery. I don’t look anything like that person. I was scared shitless as to what would happen if I tried to go into scary Ukraine as my authentic self,” she said.

Once in Poland, Ashton-Cirillo met up with other journalists covering the refugee crisis and was presented with an opportunity.

“I’m there with a couple of other journalists and they’re like, ‘Come on, if you don’t come now, are you really gonna go by yourself?’ And I just met these people. I’ve been in Poland, maybe 12 hours,” she recalled. “There was a train leaving with members of the Ukraine military, returning supplies, and these three other journalists were going. I said, ‘You know what, I’m coming with you guys.’”

The moment of truth for Ashton-Cirillo happened on that train, after crossing the border from Poland into Ukraine. The price of her admission: She was willing to be humiliated.

“Security comes aboard for the border check, and you could tell immediately the state of heightened, you know, we’re at war. They look at my passport. They look at me, and they look at some of my writings. And they look at some of my media, because you know, I’ve been in the media a lot for different things. They make me take off my hairpiece. They’re in the middle of training everyone. And then they look at me more. And then they welcomed me to Ukraine, and I said, ‘Holy shit.’ That was so worth the humiliation. Because I couldn’t believe they let me in.”

And once in, Ashton-Cirillo didn’t hesitate to show her social media followers and readers at her website as well as the news site, LGBTQNation, what she saw first-hand.

“Oh my gosh, I’m traveling with strange men, driving across a country at war, where I don’t speak the language, I don’t know anyone except for this one doctor. And we pull into the war zone, and we stopped 20 kilometers outside of the city of Kharkiv,” said Ashton-Cirillo. “We’re in this white Jeep Cherokee, sleeping in an alley, when there’s these rockets and mortar fire and artillery fire overhead. And I’m like, ‘If this is how I go out, this would have made Hemingway and Gil Horn and Orwell proud.’ The next morning, I woke up and realized I didn’t die after sleeping in a car in a back alley. And being here? Wow, I’ve been at the frontlines of the war.”

Ashton-Cirillo wrote about that night in her first article for the LGBTQ website, back on March 17, and included a tweet in which she declared, “I’m in it for the long haul.”

To do so, she needed something she could only get in Ukraine: Media credentials.

“I’m told that the only way I can cover the war is by applying for Ukrainian Army credentials. And I was told that they were taking anywhere from weeks to months to get, in those early days of the war. This was eight days after the war started. So, I put together a very long dossier on myself for the Ukrainian Army to look into, including the fact, obviously, of being trans, my former name, as we refer to it, my deadname, my current name, my current legal name, all my legal documents,” said Ashton-Cirillo.

To her surprise, she got a phone call just two days later.

“Somebody from the government wanted to meet with me, just to get a sense of what I was doing. We sit down, a 10 minute talk in a coffee shop, and it turns into an hour. That was a Tuesday. By Friday, I had my credential. I got them in four and a half days, under my name, political.tips, which is my website.”

Something else is on her credential, which to Ashton-Cirillo is a good thing, but to most trans people, it would be seen as an insult: Her birth name, or as many call it, her “deadname.” I asked her, how was that a good thing?

“Very fine print,” she explained. “So this way, if they were to stop me, I can present my driver’s license or the passport. The government did that much for me. It wasn’t to humiliate me, it was a prudent, paper trail, big thing. It says ‘Sarah Ashton Cirilo,’ has my picture. political.tips. It was one of the most validating things. All of a sudden, the entire country, including the war is open to me.”

With the war continuing without any end in sight, when will she come home? Ashton-Cirillo said she isn’t sure. But when she does, she knows there are more stories to tell.

“I’ve met with very high ranking officials, I’ve met with high ranking politicians, I’ve seen things that, I probably have not been able to write about 80% of what I’ve seen, until I leave Ukraine. That said, I also needed to cover this ordinary life, I needed to cover the people living in the subways. I needed to cover the people who are standing in soup lines, who’ve lost their homes, who’ve been victims of war crimes. I spend most of my days photographing evidence of war crimes right now, and going through Russian disinformation, about the war, trying to figure out what’s really happening and what’s not happening.”

One of Ashton-Cirillo’s tweets from this month shows her learning how to fire an M-16 rifle.

That may be a necessary skill for this journalist, because this morning, she tweeted that the war rages on.

Follow Sarah Ashton-Cirillo on Twitter by clicking here.