Hannah Graf

Captain Hannah Graf is a former officer of the British Army and a transgender rights activist. Graf was a captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the highest-ranking transgender officer in the British Army, overseeing a company of a hundred soldiers. After she came out as transgender in 2013, she advised the army on transgender issues.

Biography While training as an officer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Graf openly identified as a gay man, however she felt the identification was "never particularly satisfactory" and "never found much solace in the gay male community". In 2012, she was stationed at the Camp Bastion airbase in Afghanistan. Although her colleagues were supportive of her decision to transition, she felt unsure how others would view her after her transition. After coming out, she additionally served as an advisor for transgender issues in the army. She received an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2016 for her work with the two organisations. In 2018, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge for "services to the LGBTQ community in the military". After receiving the honour at Buckingham Palace, she voiced her support for the British Army's "embrace" of transgender individuals and criticised recent bans of transgender personnel in the United States military. The LGBT rights organisation Stonewall named Graf their "Trans Role Model of the Year" in 2019. and married the following year. In 2020, the couple had their first child; their experience as transgender parents was broadcast later that year in the Channel 4 documentary Our Baby: A Modern Miracle. Coronet Books published a memoir by the couple, titled Becoming Us, in 2023.