Trish grew up in Cape Cod and spent her childhood bike riding and running through the trails that connected the wooded subdivision five minutes from the ocean. She tried baseball, soccer and basketball but had more aptitude for the YMCA swim team.

Her interest in the military was sparked in part by a disabled Vietnam veteran whom Trish visited weekly to play checkers and watch movies. Trish’s mother falters and says “our child,” instead of her only child’s given name, Peter, when she talks about the time Trish bought an iguana without telling her parents, then persuaded her friends to feed it while her family went on a weeklong summer vacation in Maine. Her parents found the lizard, Gus, upon returning home to the stench.

Instead of taking down her old photographs — the ones that show a little boy, then a grown son with children — Ronnie is adding new ones of Trish. She looks different, she said, but “the heart and soul is all the same.”

“One of the things that I’m very thankful for is that Trish is not walking away from the past,” Ronnie said. “The past is who she is.”

Trish was 12 years old watching TV when she first believed she was meant to be a girl. It was the iconic episode where Punky Brewster gets boobs, and Trish wished she could become Punky Brewster, and more specifically, a girl just like Punky Brewster.

Two decades later, when Trish decided to “live genuinely,” she intended at first to do so without causing a ruckus within the Army. But that’s not her. She soon felt a duty to speak up, to push back against military policies that refuse to recognize her gender identity or allow her to use the women’s bathroom. She revealed herself to her boss even though it could have meant dismissal, and then filed requests — so far ignored — to change her gender marker and adhere to female dress code.

She calls it a different kind of combat. “Something was wrong and I felt I could help make it right,” she said. Trish took the biblical name Esther as her middle name because her mother believes “she was born for such a time as this.” Supportive colleagues have told her it’s not important how she looks, only that she is good at her job.

Despite feeling embattled the past 10 months, Trish is relieved. She would rather face the stares from fellow soldiers the first time she showed up in women’s clothes at a cookout, and the awkward conversation to warn them she would wear a bikini to the group rafting trip, than go back to a disingenuous life. “It’s still easier to change the whole outside than the inside,” she said. “I’ve tried.”