Support my friend Lilith

Some stories are not just parallel, they are intertwined at the soul. Lilith is not only my friend. She is my soul sister. We are women who walked through the same fire, carrying the same wounds, surviving the same battles that many people will never fully understand. We both know what it means to fight for our womanhood in a world that too often treats trans lives as disposable, unfinished, or unworthy of care. And we both know what it means to carry the physical and emotional consequences of surgeries that were supposed to set us free.

 

Twenty years ago, Lilith underwent gender-affirming surgery, an act of courage and survival at a time when trans women were offered far less compassion, information, and medical support than today. Like many from our generation, she was expected to simply endure complications in silence, grateful just to have been allowed access to care at all. But survival is not the same as healing. Today, Lilith urgently needs corrective revision surgery and silicone removal, procedures that are not cosmetic luxuries, but essential medical care that will allow her to finally live without pain, fear, and the burden of a body left without proper aftercare.

Interview with Robyn Gigl

 

Some lives unfold in neat chapters. Robyn Gigl’s reads more like a layered novel, one where law, courage, persistence, and imagination keep circling back to one another until they finally click into place. Born in 1952, Robyn is an American lawyer, writer, and LGBTQ+ activist whose story stretches across courtrooms and bookshelves, personal reinvention and public change. Based in New Jersey, she has worked since the late 1970s as a litigation specialist in commercial and employment law, with forays into criminal defense, building a formidable legal career brick by brick. In 2006, she became managing partner of the firm she had joined decades earlier, began her gender transition three years later, and eventually moved to Gluck Walrath in 2015, a firm that would later merge with Dilworth Paxson. Before her transition, Robyn was married to a woman and raised three children, a reminder that transformation rarely erases what came before, it simply reframes it. Her legal work has never existed in a vacuum. Robyn has been at the center of meaningful change for transgender people in New Jersey, most notably through Sonia Doe v. New Jersey Department of Corrections, a case brought with the ACLU of New Jersey that challenged the placement of a transgender woman in men’s prisons. The 2021 settlement reshaped state policy, anchoring prison placement in gender identity rather than assumption. Beyond the courtroom, Robyn served on the state’s Transgender Equality Task Force and the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement, and in 2020, the New Jersey Law Journal named her one of the “Top Women in Law.” These are not just titles, they are markers of impact.

Interview with Jennifer Diane Reitz

 

Jennifer Diane Reitz moves through culture like a quiet constant, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, always shaping the space around her. Born in Oregon at the end of 1959 and raised in a childhood of perpetual motion, she learned early how to live between places, between definitions, between what is permitted and what is necessary. Science, fiction, music, and imagined worlds became not escapes but lifelines, ways of giving structure to a reality that rarely offered her safety or recognition. Her creative work, from the early days of independent game design to the formative chaos of the early internet, reflects this instinct to build worlds when none exist. With Happy Puppy, she helped define how games were discovered and shared online, and with Boppin’, she insisted that games could be strange, emotional, uncomfortable, and unapologetically adult. Her later webcomics, especially Unicorn Jelly, continue this refusal of simplicity, unfolding as living systems of myth, logic, and transformation that demand patience and curiosity rather than passive consumption.

 

Alongside her work in games and webcomics, including the long-running Unicorn Jelly and other formally inventive projects, Reitz has consistently explored themes of identity, perception, and transformation. As a trans woman who transitioned in the early 1980s under hostile social conditions, her personal history is marked by resilience, conflict, and moments of profound crisis, but also by enduring partnerships and chosen family. She later founded the website Transsexuality as an attempt to systematize and explain trans experience at a time when accessible information was scarce, a project that remains debated and contested. Taken together, Jennifer Diane Reitz’s career forms a singular narrative at the intersection of early internet culture, independent game development, and lived transgender history, making her a compelling and sometimes challenging voice to engage with in conversation.

Interview with Andrea Glose

Some conversations stay with you long after they end, not because they are loud or dramatic, but because they are honest. This interview with Andrea is one of those moments. Andrea Glose is a Bolivian trans woman living in Florida, a barista, a survivor, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and above all, a woman who has learned to keep choosing herself in a world that often makes that choice unbearably costly. What unfolds here is not a polished success story or a neatly wrapped narrative of triumph. It is a life spoken in full sentences, with humor, grief, warmth, and defiance woven together.

 

Andrea talks about sunshine and humidity, coffee orders and gothic style, but also about loss, loneliness, survival, and the quiet miracle of still being here. She speaks with tenderness about her family, with gratitude about chosen community, and with clarity about the political violence facing transgender women today. This conversation moves gently between the everyday and the existential, between laughter and heartbreak. It reminds us that femininity has no single shape, that self-worth is an act of resistance, and that sometimes the bravest revolution is simply continuing to exist, to love, and to hope. Andrea’s voice carries all of that, unfiltered and deeply human, and I am honored to share it with you.

Interview with Christine Psaila

Christine Psaila is a woman whose story unfolds not through spectacle, but through quiet courage, reflection, and an unwavering commitment to honesty. After spending decades living in the shadows of expectation and survival, she emerged with a voice shaped by resilience and compassion, one that speaks gently yet powerfully to anyone who has ever felt unseen. Her memoir, 35 Years in Hiding, is not just a recounting of transition, but a deeply human exploration of self-acceptance, healing, and the slow, often fragile process of learning to live truthfully. Christine’s journey reminds us that authenticity does not always arrive loudly, sometimes it arrives softly, in the form of self-trust, gentleness, and the courage to finally take up space as oneself.

 

At the heart of Christine’s story is a profound sense of emotional clarity and kindness toward both her past and present self. She speaks with rare honesty about vulnerability, not as weakness, but as a strength carefully earned over time. Through her words, readers are invited into the inner landscape of a woman who learned to listen to herself after years of silence, and who now values peace over performance. Christine’s perspective offers reassurance rather than instruction, presence rather than certainty, making her journey deeply relatable to anyone navigating identity, loss, or becoming.

Interview with Vonni

Some lives unfold quietly, like a soft melody in the background of the world. Others crash in like a glittering confetti cannon, leaving everyone breathless and dazzled. Vonni belongs to the latter. Born in Manchester, England, she arrived in Australia at eleven, but it was Adelaide that shaped her, with its sunburnt streets and narrow expectations, where a young girl first learned that being different could be dangerous, and that humour, courage, and imagination were survival tools. From those early days, Vonni’s path was never ordinary. Bullied at school, she learned to navigate a world that often misunderstood her, eventually stepping into the dazzling yet perilous nightlife of Adelaide in the 1970s. Behind the flashing lights of La Belle, she discovered herself, performing pre-surgery, mastering the art of illusion, learning that striptease was theatre, wit, and resilience all rolled into one. Her journey took her to the glittering touring stages of Melbourne’s Les Girls, to the chaotic, high-stakes strip clubs of Kings Cross, and even inside the walls of Long Bay Gaol, always moving, always sparkling, always refusing to be invisible.

Along the way, Vonni found mentors, friends, and family in feathers and diamonds. Debra Legae, her fairy godmother with a ledger and scissors, taught her the art of makeup, stagecraft, and financial survival. Carlotta, the goddess of Australian drag, whose phone call changed Vonni’s life, led to a friendship that has lasted decades. Together, these experiences forged a woman whose career spans half a century, from cabaret and burlesque to international stages, from running nightclubs to making history as the first Australian transgender woman to play Bernadette in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Vonni’s story is glitter-strewn, chaotic, hilarious, and profoundly human. It’s about courage and artistry, heartbreak and triumph, and the way one woman, by sheer force of personality, talent, and tenacity, turned her life into a stage worthy of applause. Tonight, we settle into her world. The lights dim, the sequins catch the glow, and we talk with Vonni, a living archive of Australian queer performance history, still daring, still sparkling, still unapologetically herself.