#Robina Asti

[yourdailyqueer]

Robina Asti (deceased)

Gender: Transgender woman

Sexuality: N/A

DOB: 7 April 1921  

RIP: 12 March 2021

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Flight instructor, activist, veteran, makeup artist

Note: Her advocacy changed government rules to allow transgender people to receive Social Security survivor benefits. In July 2020, Asti was awarded two Guinness World Records for being the oldest active pilot and active flight instructor.

[telomeke]

Robina Fedora Asti (April 7, 1921 – March 12, 2021). She died just about a month short of her 100th birthday. An amazing life well-lived, and such an inspiration to us all. 💖

This incredible 95-year-old transwoman flight instructor found love late in life– only to be denied social security benefits by the government because she’s not cisgender

A beautiful interview with a woman who transitioned in 1976 shows how life for transgender people has changed over the years, although some terrible consequences remain the same.

Gifs: Lambda Legal

FOLLOW REFINERY29

[avakining]

ID: A Mastodon post from @LadyDragonfly@universodon.com. It includes a picture of an elderly white woman wearing a pink shirt and pale blue cardigan. The post reads:

On July 23, 2020, at the age of 99, Robina Asti gave her last flight lesson at Riverside Municipal Airport in California, setting a new record for world's oldest flight instructor. She would pass away peacefully in her sleep less than a year later at the home of her daughter, where she had moved during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During her more than 70-year aeronautics career, she was stationed at Wake Island, and later Midway Island in the run up to WWII, where she flew reconnaissance planes in order to detect Japanese ships. She was later promoted to test pilot, and finally discharged after the war with the rank of lieutenant commander.

Then she began teaching others to fly.

After transition, she became chairperson of a women's aviation organization known as The Ninety-Nines. Working with that group, she successfully petitioned the FAA to change their rules for women seeking a pilot's license, dropping the requirement for a highly invasive internal physical exam.

[equalityspeaks]

Robina Asti, the transgender woman who flew missions as a pilot in World War II before transitioning in the 1970s, passed away peacefully in her sleep on Friday, March 12.

“Recognized as a 2020 Out 100 honoree, Asti became an activist in her 90s, setting a precedent that rewrote the government’s policy for transgender widow benefits and creating the Cloud Dancers Foundation to support the “invisible” members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Rest in Power, Robina 🏳️‍⚧️

[tranxiolytic]

She was a veteran. A tireless trans pioneer. A flight instructor. A “little jerk” (her words). A person willing to take on government agencies. A Guinness World record holder hopeful. A TedX speaker. And the founder of an LGBT+ outreach group.

To her family, she was “mum” and “grandmother”, a woman who “lived her life fully and in vivid colour”, her daughter, Coca Astey, told the publication.

“The kid from New York grew up to chase rainbows, hurricanes, and travel across purple mountains as an aviator. She worked with artists and political leaders and as an activist for the LGBT+ community.”

[askanonbinary]

i know that this is article is two years old at this point but i still find it extremely inspiring. remember it’s never too late to come out or be yourself! 

-stevie

[blairemclaren]

Robina Asti Death - Obituary : Robina Asti Has Died

Robina Asti Death - Obituary, Funeral, Cause Of Death Our hearts are with the loved ones of Robina Asti...click link to learn more

Robina Asti Death – Obituary, Funeral, Cause Of Death Our hearts are with the loved ones of Robina Asti, who made history when she successfully fought for her husband’s Social Security benefits, and last year became the world’s oldest active flight instructor. She died earlier this month at the age of 99. Through a social media announcement, DeadDeath learned on March 24th, 2021, about the death…

[kiramoore626]

Robina Asti (1921–2021), WWII veteran and transgender advocate

Robina Asti (1921–2021), WWII veteran and transgender advocate

Robina Asti (1921–2021), WWII veteran and transgender advocate Asti served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, installing radios in aircraft in the Pacific Theater. After the war, she operated a supper club with friends and later worked for mutual fund company E.W. Axe. In was in the 1970s that Asti began her transition, and she later married Norwood Patton. After his death in 2012, she filed…

[freenewstoday]

New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2021/03/21/robina-asti-who-made-history-on-the-ground-and-in-the-air-dies-at-99/

Robina Asti, Who Made History on the Ground and in the Air, Dies at 99

Robina Asti, a World War II veteran and mutual-fund executive who inspired a generation of transgender people in the 2010s with her successful fight for her husband’s Social Security benefits, and who just last year became the world’s oldest active flight instructor, died on March 12 in San Diego. She was 99.

Her death, at the home of her daughter Coca Astey, was confirmed by Ms. Astey.

Ms. Asti had been living quietly as a woman for nearly 40 years when she applied for survivor benefits from the Social Security Administration in 2012, a few months after her husband died. It took a year for the agency to deny her application, on the grounds that she was not legally a woman at the time of her marriage.

Though most of her government-issued documents, including her pilot’s license and even her Social Security card, recognized her as a woman, the agency’s determination of survivor benefits was based on her birth certificate, which identified her as a man.

Ms. Asti was livid. She searched online for help and found Lambda Legal, a nonprofit law firm that specializes in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

“It was an amazing day when she walked into our offices,” M. Dru Levasseur, who ran Lambda’s transgender rights practice at the time and now works for the National LGBT Bar Association and Foundation, said in a phone interview. “We could feel her energy, her anger at the system.”

Lambda took the government to court in June 2013. Eight months later, on Valentine’s Day 2014, Ms. Asti checked her bank account and found a large deposit: nearly two years of back pay from the Social Security Administration.

Not only did Ms. Asti win her case; the administration changed its rule regarding transgender survivors — and the documentation requirements for proving one’s gender in the first place.

Ms. Asti’s fight made her a celebrity in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, at a time when transgender rights were just beginning to be a national issue. She embraced her newfound role — giving speeches, marching in pride parades and simply living a full life as an older transgender woman. In November 2020, Out magazine named her to its annual “Out 100” list.

“Her telling her story had a huge impact for the transgender community,” Mr. Levasseur said. “Because of violence against transgender people, many of us don’t get to grow old, but here she was, enjoying her life in her 90s.”

Ms. Asti’s greatest enjoyment came in the air. A licensed pilot and instructor since her 20s, she continued to fly every weekend well into her 90s, traveling from her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey.

She moved to San Diego at the beginning of the pandemic, having lived most of her life in New York. She took her last flight, with a student, in July, and was in the process of establishing a Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest active pilot and oldest flight instructor.

“What do I like about flying?” she said in “Flying Solo,” a 2018 documentary about her life. “I guess it’s being a bird.”

Robina Fedora Asti was born on April 7, 1921, in Manhattan and raised in Greenwich Village. Her father, David Astey, was a featherweight boxer who had Anglicized his surname after his manager said he needed to sound less Italian. Ms. Asti began using the original spelling after she transitioned. Her mother, Helen (Jund) Astey, was a homemaker.

Along with her daughter Coca, Ms. Asti is survived by another daughter, Eamonn Gunther; a son, Trevor Astey; and five grandchildren. Another son, Pepe, died in childhood.

Ms. Asti showed an interest in electrical devices from an early age. By the time she was a teenager, she had a steady business fixing radios around her Greenwich Village neighborhood.

She attended Brooklyn Technical High School but dropped out at 17 to join the Navy. Her training in electrical engineering took her to Wake Island, a military outpost in the Pacific Ocean, where she installed radios in naval aircraft, a priority as war with Japan loomed.

Ms. Asti served throughout World War II and was discharged as a lieutenant commander after the war ended. She returned to New York, where she and three of her Navy pals opened a supper club in White Plains, north of New York City.

But she soon grew tired of the restaurant business. She sold her stake and took a job with E.W. Axe, a mutual fund company operating out of the Carrollcliffe mansion, a Romanesque castle overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. She married Evangelina Diaz-Perez in 1958.

Ms. Asti began to transition in the mid-1970s, at a time when transgender people were poorly understood, even in New York City. She would dress as a man at work, then come home and change into women’s clothing. Eventually the pressure of leading multiple lives got to be too much; she quit her job, came out as a woman and amicably divorced Ms. Diaz-Perez.

To more fully inhabit her new gender expression, she took a series of jobs viewed as typically female: For several years she worked as a makeup artist at Bloomingdale’s, a housekeeper and an off-the-books hairdresser. She also began trading stocks, eventually earning enough money to make that her full-time source of income.

In 1980 she met Norwood Patton, an artist, at a bar on the Upper East Side. They married in 2004 in an airplane hangar at the Orange County Airport in upstate New York. He died in 2012.

By her own account, Ms. Asti was no activist. She lived largely outside the movement for L.G.B.T.Q. rights of the 1980s and ’90s, despite its significant presence in New York City. But she took a stand when it was necessary.

Soon after her transition, her doctor told her that as part of her application to renew her pilot’s license, he had to give her an internal physical exam, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration. She found the requirement invasive and demeaning. With the help of the Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots, she petitioned the government to change its rule — which it promptly did.

After her husband died, Ms. Asti grew especially close to one of her grandsons, Erik Hummel, who lived with her for six years after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She became something of a den mother to his friends, fixing them Sunday dinner and regaling them with stories about growing up during the Great Depression or fighting in World War II.

In 2019 she and her grandson founded the Cloud Dancers Foundation, which provides assistance and awareness for older transgender people.

“She would say that she had been through a depression, through a world war, and that she had learned to just keep living,” Erik Hummel said. “She wanted to remind other transgender people who feel alone that there are people who care about them.”

Cloud Dancer is a nickname for an acrobatically inclined pilot, and Ms. Asti seemed to see a strong connection between flying and living as a transgender person.

“One of the unique things about flying,” she said in 2018, “is that you’ve got to be able to move from one position to another, because you can’t accept where you are.”

Source

[wazafam]

By BY CLAY RISEN from U.S. in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/us/robina-asti-dead.html?partner=IFTTT As a transgender veteran in her 90s, she challenged government bureaucracy. She then set a record as the oldest working flight instructor. Robina Asti, Who Made History on the Ground and in the Air, Dies at 99 New York Times

[javierpenadea]

"Robina Asti, Who Made History on the Ground and in the Air, Dies at 99" by BY CLAY RISEN via NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cO1tF6

[blairemclaren]

Robina Asti Death - Obituary | Robina Asti Has Died

Robina Asti Death - Dead,  Obituary, Funeral, Cause Of Death, Passed Away: On March 20th, 2021, InsideEko Media learned about the death of Robina Asti through social media publications made on Twitter. Click to read and leave tributes.

Robina Asti Death – Dead,  Obituary, Funeral, Cause Of Death, Passed Away: On March 20th, 2021, InsideEko Media learned about the death of Robina Asti through social media publications made on Twitter. InsideEko is yet to confirm Robina Asti’s cause of death as no health issues, accident or other causes of death have been learned to be associated with the passing. This death has caused a lot of…

[qaos-system]

The current world record holder for the oldest pilot & flight instructor is 99 year old trans woman called Robina Asti (the first article is older, and tells her story):

[tabloidtoc]

National Examiner, August 31

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: John Travolta’s last gift to dying Kelly Preston 

Page 2: Raquel Welch reveals all at 80 -- surprising secrets behind her beauty and amazing career 

Page 4: Jeff Goldblum is a designers dream -- the supercool star never just throws something on 

Page 6: A little girl who likes to paint is having a big brush with kindness -- she is selling her art and donating all her earnings to charity 

Page 7: Liam Neeson and his son Micheal Richardson relive their own tragedy in new movie Made in Italy, Kathie Lee Gifford has two ironclad rules for a new man if he wants to stick around: he’s got to share her Christian views and he has to have all his teeth, Tony Danza and Alyssa Milano are reuniting for a reboot of Who’s the Boss, three years after the death of Glen Campbell he’s being memorialized in the best way: his great-grandson will carry his name 

Page 8: When 21-year-old football fan Jack Roche heartbreakingly died in a car accident his favorite NFL quarterback Mitch Trubisky of the Chicago Bears sent his grieving family a signed jersey 

Page 9: Best public bathroom safety tips 

Page 10: Robina Asti at age 99 just became the world’s oldest flight instructor and active pilot 

Page 12: Queen Elizabeth plans her own funeral -- minute-by-minute schedule from how news will break to her final procession 

Page 14: Dear Tony -- help is always available when you’re ready for it 

Page 15: Larry McCool has been at the Portland protests with a pal who’s helping everyone feel just a little less tense: Caesar the No Drama Llama 

Page 16: Stars Who Beat Booze -- inspiring stories of how they turned their lives around -- Kristin Davis, Melanie Griffith, Tim McGraw, David Hasselhoff, Ewan McGregor, John Stamos 

Page 17: Brad Pitt, Matthew Perry, Alec Baldwin, Jessica Simpson, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Robert Downey Jr., Bradley Cooper, Daniel Radcliffe 

Page 18: A Los Angeles artist poured his heart out in his paintings and sent them nearly 3000 miles across the country to thank front-line workers in New York City for their courageous efforts during the coronavirus pandemic 

Page 19: They look so alike even their husbands can’t tell them apart sometimes but Dawn and Cher Hubsher are not twins or even sisters -- they’re mother and daughter

Page 20: Cover Story -- John Travolta kept Kelly Preston’s cancer secret to the end -- the pilot star flew her to doctors himself 

Page 22: An adopted teen is so grateful for the second chance she got at life that she is giving back by helping older dogs find forever homes 

Page 24: Joan Collins has slammed the lack of social distancing in the South of France and the English government for ageism 

Page 25: Baby powder has household power 

Page 28: The Good Doctor 

Page 30: Comic Critters 

Page 34: Tony’s Mystic World -- find peace through forgiveness 

Page 44: Eyes on the Stars -- Gordon Ramsay and wife Tana and son Oscar enjoy a U.K. beach day (pictures), Simon Cowell has nothing but kind words for the medical staff who cared for him following an electric bike crash outside his Malibu home, Kelly Clarkson and husband Brandon Blackstock divorcing and she’s fighting to keep the details of their split under wraps, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a grandpa as his daughter Katherine Schwarzenegger and her husband Chris Pratt welcomed a daughter, Luke Bryan is regretting planting a big plot of sweet corn on his Tennessee property because he’s $30K in the hole after only selling $1100 worth of sweet corn, flames tore through the upstate New York home of Rachael Ray but she and her husband and dog are safe, Jennifer Grey has signed on to star in and produce a new Dirty Dancing set in the 1990s, Kiefer Sutherland says he’s open to reprising his 24 character Jack Bauer six years after he left the role behind, Oliver Stone cast Charlie Sheen in his breakout role in Platoon but he believes the star could have been an even greater actor

Page 45: Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez dine with family in NYC (picture), masked Katie Holmes strolls around downtown Manhattan (picture), Tiger Woods at a San Francisco tournament (picture), Leonardo DiCaprio and girlfriend Camila Morrone take a dip in Malibu (picture), actor James Hong has more than 650 acting credits to his name since beginning his career in the 1950s and now Daniel Dae Kim started a fundraising campaign to get James a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 

Page 46: Hand sanitizer do’s and don’ts 

Page 47: Playful License Plates