At 99 years old, trans activist and WWII pilot Robina Asti died on Friday at her home in Riverside County, California. In her long life, she successfully fought and won two battles, serving in World War II before suing the Social Security Administration after she was denied survivor benefits as a trans widow.
Ever since she was a child, Asti had an internal sense that her gender was different from the way the world perceived her but didn’t understand it or how to deal with it, as she told Out magazine last year. It wasn’t until her 40s, after the tragic death of her 9-year-old son, that Asti came out as trans. Transitioning during a time when few Americans even knew transgender people existed was painful but also joyful, she added in a mini-documentary produced by Lambda Legal in 2014.
“In 1976, I finally decided that I must become a woman,” she said in Flying Solo: A Transgender Widow Fights Discrimination, which screened at the San Francisco Trans Film Fest. “What was so amazing about it, once I made the change, I became a woman in body and soul and mind.”
Asti and her then-wife peacefully divorced 18 months after she transitioned. Some years later, Asti met her future husband, Norwood Patton, at a bar. They soon fell in love, and made their vows in 2004.
“It was a delightful relationship,” Asti recalled in the documentary. “It was, without a doubt, the finest time of my life.”
In 2014, Patton died at 97 years old, and Asti filed for widow benefits from the Social Security Administration. After a year of waiting, she was denied on the basis that she was not legally female when she married Patton.
“I was shocked, I was shamed,” she said in the film.” “That is so insulting. It was just devastating.”
Furious at her mistreatment, the then-92-year old appealed the decision with help from Lambda Legal. In the documentary, Asti said she hoped she’d win the case “not for the money, but for the act of humanity, that is absolutely necessary here.”
Asti was eventually victorious, setting a major precedent that forced the government to rewrite its policies for how it handled survivor benefits for widows who are trans, but she was not done fighting. At 98, she founded the Cloud Dancers Foundation, a nonprofit that supports “invisible” members of the LGBTQ+ community, connecting trans people across generations. The project was named after World War I pilots whose planes seemed to “dance” among the clouds.
Still grieving the death of her husband at the time she founded the nonprofit, Asti told Out magazine that she started it because she was “alone” and had no one to support her in her transition.” “That was a dark and lonely period in my life, and I felt abandoned,” she said.
The project also pays tribute to her own military record. Decades before her transition, Asti fought as a fighter pilot during World War II in the Pacific, where she flew reconnaissance missions hunting Japanese warships. Asti continued to be a pilot up until her death, and in the last year of her life, she earned dual Guinness World Records for being both the world's oldest currently active pilot and flight instructor. Before she broke those barriers, she told NPR that the milestones don’t “mean anything to me.”
“It's for you guys that are coming behind me that you've got something you could shoot for,” she said. “And I hope that the record is broken pretty soon — and by another woman. Would be fun, wouldn't it?”
Asti’s grandson, Erik Hummell, told Out that Cloud Dancers is working to raise $100,000 for the foundation to celebrate his grandmother’s life.
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