Langan was born Peter Kevin Langan in 1958 on Saipan in the South Pacific Islands. She grew up in Vietnam, where her father served in the military and CIA, before moving to the United States when Langan was 6 years old. In 1974, at age 16, Langan was sentenced to up to 20 years for robbing a man of $78 and fleeing police. Langan moved to Ohio in 1988, where she converted to Mormonism and became an ordained minister at what authorities describe as a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated church. During the early 1990s, Langan and her childhood friend Richard Guthrie formed the Aryan Republic Army, a white supremacist group with motives to overthrow the US government. The group turned to robbing banks in order to fund their movement. On January 18, 1996, the FBI arrested Langan. Langan, a transgender woman, who publicly renounced her political and racist views, served 18 years in a male prison before being transferred to a female penitentiary after a legal fight in 2014 during the Obama administration. In 2017, Langan and 435 other transgender inmates from federal prisons led an LGBT activist group in an effort to challenge the Trump administration's positions regarding transgender prisoners.
