About the event
What does it mean to serve a country that questions whether you belong? Bree Fram draws on 23 years of military service, her role in helping establish the U.S. Space Force and her experience navigating changing policies on transgender service to explore leadership, belonging and the meaning of service.
Free and open to everyone. Registration is required. General seating.
Please note no bags will be allowed at this event.
About Bree Fram
Bree Fram is a retired U.S. Space Force colonel, astronautical engineer, author and speaker. During her 23 years in uniform, she deployed to Iraq and Qatar, helped establish the Space Force as a separate military service and became the first openly transgender officer selected for and promoted to colonel in the U.S. military. She came out publicly in 2016, on the day the military first lifted its transgender service ban, and was forced into retirement in 2025 under a renewed ban.
Fram is co-editor of With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words and With Valor and Visibility: The Next Chapter of Transgender Military Service, and co-author of Forging Queer Leaders: How the LGBTQIA+ Community Creates Impact from Adversity. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Military Times. A 2024 Out100 honoree, she speaks nationally and internationally about leadership, service and inclusion.
Plan your visit
Please bring a digital copy of your ticket and arrive early enough to complete security screening.
No bags will be allowed inside the venue.
Recording of any kind is prohibited and may result in the revocation of admission.
About Educating the Whole Human
Educating the Whole Human is a University Libraries speaker series featuring accomplished scholars whose acclaimed work, shaped by lived experience, expands how knowledge is created and understood.
The series invites students, faculty and community members to explore how these speakers combine expertise and lived experience to ask new questions, create original work and put knowledge into practice—and to consider what those approaches could make possible in their own studies, research, careers and lives.
This program is supported by a University of Colorado Boulder Impact Grant.