Interview with Marianne Oakes

 

Marianne Oakes spent decades building what looked like a conventional life. She became a carpenter and joiner, worked in the construction industry, built a successful exhibition contracting business, married her teenage sweetheart, raised two sons and eventually became a grandmother. From the outside, there was little to suggest the woman she had always known herself to be. Except that she had always been there. Marianne grew up in Britain at a time when being transgender was barely imaginable, let alone something a young person could discuss openly. At 12, she encountered the word “transvestite” in a library book, but it offered no real explanation and certainly no map for the future. The world around her supplied plenty of warnings about people who stepped outside gender boundaries, and almost none about how they might find happiness on the other side. At 25, she travelled to a transgender support group in Manchester, but never made it through the door. Intimidated by the hostile atmosphere of the time, she turned around and went home. Instead, she became very good at living in the world she had been given. There is something almost novelistic about the contrast. The closeted transgender woman became a carpenter in one of Britain’s most traditionally masculine working environments. Later, she became an entrepreneur, running a company with dozens of employees. She was, by any conventional measure, successful. 

 

And yet another life was waiting underneath it. She met Vicki as a teenager. Before they married, Marianne told her that she liked being a girl, although she did not yet have the language to explain what that meant. Vicki stayed. They married, built a family and remained together through the extraordinary transformation that would come decades later. Then, in her fifties, Marianne began changing the direction of her life. After an experience with an employee in distress, she decided to become a counsellor. She qualified in 2015 and soon began working with transgender clients, eventually becoming lead counsellor at GenderGP. There was a remarkable irony in this: Marianne was helping other people navigate gender transition while still negotiating her own. She approached the NHS in 2015 and entered a long, frustrating journey through Britain’s gender-care system. Finally, in July 2018, at 56, she began hormone therapy. The years that followed were about much more than hormones or clothes. They were about discovering what it felt like to stop treating her own existence as a secret. She has written movingly about finally being able to say, without shame: “I am transgender, and that’s OK.” 

Interview with Kristine Turowska

 

Kristine Turowska doesn't just tell one story. She carries several, woven together like the layers of a poem she's still writing. By day, she sits in the boardroom of an international corporation, immersed in finance. In the evenings, on weekends, and on stage, she becomes someone the world took decades to fully meet: a poet, a novelist, an actress, a woman named Kristine. Born in 1976, she began quietly reckoning with the idea of transition about ten years ago, after already building a life, a career, and a marriage that has now lasted 26 years, more than half of that shared life. Fittingly, her path back to herself started with a return to theatre: she completed a two-year program at the Lubuska Academy of Acting, where she and her ensemble brought two graduation productions to life. Her writing followed close behind, tender and unflinching in equal measure. In 2022 she self-published Myśli innej kobiety ("Thoughts of Another Woman"), a poetry collection illustrated by Damian Drewniak.

 

A year later, in 2023, came her debut novel Listy do E. ("Letters to E.") with publisher NovaeRes, a 19th-century tale of a woman named K., trying to outrun her past and finding it waiting for her anyway. On stage, she created and performs the sole role in Nigdy nie będę kobietą ("I Will Never Be a Woman"), a monodrama built from the words of Sylvia Plath and Adrianna Alksnin's play Smutna dziewczyna Sylvia Plath ("Sad Girl Sylvia Plath"), directed by Alicja Wróbel. It's a piece about the impossible standards placed on women, and the added weight carried by a woman who is transgender. She is married, with two grown sons, one of whom is also transgender, which makes her story not only about becoming herself, but about a whole family learning, side by side, how to hold onto each other through change. So let's sit down together, and let her tell you the rest, in her own words.

Interview with Anni Arbour

 

My guest today is Anni Arbour, an award-winning, bestselling author and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She studied at both Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan and is a member of the Trans Journalists Association. She writes for Pride Source Media, where her work covers transgender issues, politics, history, popular culture and the lives of transgender people in Michigan and beyond. Anni is also the author of Trans Ascending, a publication dedicated to stories of transgender people who have overcome prejudice, succeeded in hostile environments and become inspirations to others. Through her writing, she has explored the lives of transgender pioneers and historical figures, as well as transgender representation in comics, film and popular culture. Writing and art have been important parts of Anni's life since childhood. She has written that, while growing up, she was drawn to reading, writing and art and dreamed of becoming an artist. Her mother supported those ambitions and recognised that her child was different, while Anni also experienced criticism from other members of her family for her preference for what she describes as softer pursuits rather than traditionally masculine activities. Anni's mother died when Anni was a teenager after a long illness with lung cancer. Anni was her main caregiver, and after her mother's death she remained at home, helped care for her younger sister and endured a difficult relationship with her older brothers. She later married, became a parent, divorced and raised her child alone. 

 

Throughout those years, Anni continued to suppress her gender identity. In her own words, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be among the girls at school, but she lived according to the expectations of her family and society. She has described her eventual recognition of herself as a woman as a gradual process rather than the result of a single defining event. Today, Anni is openly living as a woman and has also become active in creating connections within the transgender community. She moderates the Reddit community MI_Transgender_Friend, which was created to help transgender people find friendship and community. Her own writing has also addressed the importance of connection with other transgender people, as well as the loneliness that can accompany a life spent feeling different and misunderstood. Alongside her personal writing, Anni continues to report on issues affecting transgender people in the United States. Her articles have examined topics including transgender rights, political attacks on the community, transgender athletes, activism, representation and the experiences of transgender people in Michigan.

Interview with Lilit Martirosyan

 

Lilit Martirosyan is not simply someone who became an activist; she is someone who, very early in life, discovered that survival itself could become a political act. She has spoken about knowing she was a girl from childhood, about leaving her village at 13 after discrimination made home feel unsafe, and about eventually finding her way into Armenia’s civil-society movement. She later founded Right Side, the country’s first community-based organization created by and for transgender people and sex workers. Then, on April 5, 2019, she walked into Armenia’s National Assembly and did something no transgender person in the country had done before: she stood at the parliamentary podium and described, in brutally direct terms, what life could mean for a transgender Armenian. She deliberately presented herself not merely as Lilit, but as a collective figure carrying the experiences of people who had been assaulted, impoverished, excluded and left without protection. The speech made history and triggered an extraordinary backlash, including threats against her life.

 

What followed is revealing about the particular kind of activist Martirosyan became. She did not leave Armenia permanently, despite having to flee temporarily with her family after the threats. She returned because, as she explained, she did not want to become a refugee elsewhere while the people she represented remained in Armenia. Her activism has therefore been remarkably practical: changing the procedure for legal name changes, building community structures, fighting discrimination and hate crimes, and creating spaces where people could receive legal, psychological and social support. In 2020, the Dutch government awarded her the Human Rights Tulip, recognizing both her persistence in the face of death threats and her commitment to peaceful change. The prize was not merely symbolic: it gave her the means to expand the infrastructure of the movement she had spent years building.

Interview with Diane Sauer

 

Diane Sauer has spent much of her life around games, the kind played on tables, the kind played in arcades, and, eventually, the kind she began inventing herself. A lifelong resident of Hamilton Square, New Jersey, she has been part of a weekly gaming group since 1982 and, together with her husband, Nick, has accumulated a collection of thousands of games. Before becoming a game designer, she worked in video production, computer systems and corporate management. She later ran a pinball restoration business, turning the machines she loved into another chapter of her professional life. In 2014, Diane and Nick founded Shoot Again Games. Since then, she has designed and co-designed games involving cryptozoological creatures, conspiracy theories, superheroes looking for restaurant jobs and, in Pinball Showdown, the peculiar experience of actually being the pinball. She has also served repeatedly as a judge for the Cardboard Edison Award, evaluating games created by designers who are still trying to find their own way through the maze of rules, mechanics and possibilities.

 

There is a certain symmetry to Diane's story. Much of her creative life has been concerned with systems, roles and the rules that determine what happens next. Her own life, meanwhile, has required her to reconsider some of those rules. Diane is a transgender woman who has built a life and a marriage, a career and a creative identity over decades, while continuing to move between worlds that might at first seem unrelated. Today, she remains involved with Shoot Again Games. After retiring from pinball restoration in 2022, she began a new professional chapter as a personal trainer. It is another turn in a life that has never stayed in one category for very long. For The Heroines of My Life, Diane spoke about growing up with games, the strange appeal of pinball, designing worlds of her own, marriage, reinvention, and what it means to finally stop playing a role that was never quite yours.

Interview with Jana

 

Jana is a Belgian soldier, trans woman, traveller and storyteller whose life brings together worlds that are not often seen side by side. Through her public presence and her project Jana Says Yes, she has been sharing her experiences of transition, military life, travel and the search for places where trans people can feel safe. Her social media offer glimpses of both her everyday life and the experience of navigating the world as a trans woman with a military background. For many years, Jana lived the life expected of her as a soldier while privately carrying the knowledge that the woman she was inside had been there for as long as she could remember. She has described coming out as the most difficult mission of her life. Her transition brought not only personal freedom, but also the challenge of discovering how differently institutions and individual people can respond to a transgender person. Rather than rejecting the person Jana once was, she has spoken about that earlier life with respect, recognising it as part of the journey that ultimately brought her to where she is today.

 

Alongside the serious questions of identity and acceptance, her social media presence also reveals a playful and adventurous side, from experimenting with her appearance to documenting her travels and encounters with the trans community. Her project Jana Says Yes has taken that sense of mission in an unexpected direction. Together with her drone, Guilty Spark, Jana explores different parts of the world, looking at potential safe havens and danger zones for trans people. It is a fascinating extension of her previous experience: skills once associated with military missions are now being used to explore how trans people can navigate the world more safely. Behind the uniform, however, is much more than a soldier. Jana is also a woman, a parent, a traveller and a storyteller, with a deeply personal journey of becoming herself. In this interview, she talks about her childhood, military career, transition, family, travel, the lessons of her past and the mission she has chosen for herself today.