Interview with Avianna Raczko

 

Avianna Raczko is an American transgender woman who began her transition at the age of 60, after building a successful career in marketing, business development, and financial services. With academic degrees in economics and finance, she went on to become a prominent marketing leader, helping establish one of the first digital-only banks in the United States and supporting the growth of early-stage fintech companies. During her career, she also held leadership positions at major global financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, and takes particular pride in seeing former colleagues develop into successful leaders themselves. During Pride Month, Avianna publicly introduced herself under a name inspired by her lifelong affinity for birds and their freedom of flight. Derived from Latin words associated with birds, Avianna represents a new beginning and the opportunity to express her authentic self. Her transition brought profound changes to her personal life, including the separation from her wife of more than 30 years, with whom she shares a son. 

 

Despite these challenges and the loss of many longstanding friendships, she found acceptance and renewed confidence through LGBTQ+ allies, former high school classmates, and the unwavering support of her family. Avianna’s journey has been marked by both difficult moments and extraordinary personal growth. Supported by her sister, therapist, and close friends, she committed to living openly as herself. Her experiences have reshaped her understanding of identity, relationships, and the courage required to transition later in life. Today, she embraces new opportunities for friendship, romance, and self-expression, finding joy in fashion, theatre, and music. As her professional career winds down, she is also turning toward volunteer work, with a particular interest in supporting the transgender community. In this interview, Avianna reflects on her late-in-life transition, the meaning behind her chosen name, the relationships that have sustained her, and the freedom of finally spreading her wings.

Interview with Bea Groves-McDaniel

 

Bea Groves-McDaniel’s story brings together several worlds that do not always meet comfortably: education, personal identity, public service, political activism, and the lifelong search for a more honest way of living. A British educator with more than four decades of experience in post-compulsory education, she has built a career around helping people learn, develop, and find their way through complex systems. She has also served as President of the Institute for Learning and as an NHS governor, bringing her experience and perspective into public institutions. Born in 1955, she grew up in a Britain where the language, visibility, and public understanding of transgender lives were very different from today. In a personal essay published in 2026, she reflects on a lifelong sense of difference, the absence of accessible information during her childhood, and the difficult process of moving away from a carefully constructed male identity towards a life in which she could finally feel at home as herself. She describes that earlier life not simply as a lie, but as a way of coping with circumstances she did not yet know how to change. Her intellectual curiosity extends well beyond autobiography. On her blog, she writes about transgender history, philosophy, education, social justice, and the relationship between personal experience and public policy. Her essay on Ludwig Wittgenstein explores the transgender experience through questions of identity, language, and the self, while her more recent writing takes on the legal and political debates shaping transgender lives in Britain. 

 

Bea has also brought that commitment into institutional life. In her role as an NHS governor, she has raised concerns about the long waiting times faced by transgender patients and the potential consequences for their wellbeing. In 2025, she contributed to discussions about the anxiety experienced by transgender people following the UK Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender, emphasising the importance of ensuring that trans people’s voices are heard when public services develop policies affecting their dignity and everyday lives. There is another, perhaps unexpected, dimension to her story: Bea is an educator who continues to experiment with new ways of making knowledge accessible. Her work on Learning Map, a digital learning tool designed to let learners navigate topics through interconnected ideas rather than a rigid sequence of lessons, reflects a longstanding interest in how people think, communicate, and learn. What emerges is a woman whose life cannot easily be reduced to a single label. She is a teacher, a thinker, a public advocate, and a transgender woman who has spent decades navigating the distance between the person society expects to see and the person she knows herself to be. Her reflections combine personal candour with a willingness to challenge conventional thinking, and her story offers a valuable opportunity to explore identity, ageing, education, and the responsibilities of speaking up for others. I am delighted to welcome Bea Groves-McDaniel to share the experiences, convictions, and discoveries that have shaped her remarkable journey.

Remembering Coccinelle

 

Coccinelle, born Jacqueline-Charlotte Dufresnoy in Paris on 23 August 1931, became one of the most famous entertainers of postwar France and one of the first transgender women to achieve widespread public recognition. Her stage name, meaning “ladybird” in French, reportedly came from a red dress with black polka dots that she loved to wear. From an early age, she was drawn to femininity, although growing up in a working-class family with an authoritarian father presented challenges to her ambitions and self-expression. Before entering show business, she worked in a hair salon, but the world of Parisian nightlife would soon offer her a chance to build a life on her own terms.

 

In 1953, Coccinelle made her stage debut at Madame Arthur, the celebrated cabaret in the Pigalle district of Paris. She quickly attracted attention for her beauty, elegance and stage presence, moving on to the Carrousel de Paris, where she became one of its leading performers. Unlike many entertainers whose female appearances were confined to the stage, Coccinelle lived publicly as a woman, challenging the conventions and restrictions of an era when transgender lives were poorly understood and often subjected to discrimination. Her rise coincided with the golden age of Parisian cabaret, when elaborate costumes, musical revues and glamorous performers attracted audiences from across Europe and beyond. She developed her own performances, singing and dancing while cultivating the image of a blonde, glamorous star who could command the stage.

Interview with Michelle Grace Herman

 

Michelle Grace Herman emerges from the public record as someone who has turned a deeply personal journey into a life of movement, advocacy, education, and community building. A trans creator, entrepreneur, social worker, and activist, she has spent years documenting her transition and using her public voice to advocate for inclusion, equity, and empowerment. Her story has also taken an unexpected geographical turn. After years of LGBTQIA+ advocacy in the United States, Herman left the country in 2025, first moving to Phnom Penh and then to northern Thailand, and now lives in Bangkok, where she teaches English. She has written candidly about the emotional and political reasons behind that decision, including her feeling that she had reached a point where leaving was necessary for her physical and emotional well-being. In Cambodia, she described an experience of everyday dignity and safety that had become increasingly difficult for her to take for granted in the United States.

 

But there is more to this chapter than simply escaping somewhere else. Michelle has approached life abroad as an opportunity to learn, teach, travel, and reconsider what makes a place feel like home. Her writing about Thailand explores cultural ideas such as kreng jai, respect and consideration, and reflects her curiosity about the ways different societies understand community, individuality, and belonging. She has also been developing an identity around travel and cultural immersion through her Michelle Overseas project, while exploring teaching and work-exchange opportunities as part of her new life abroad. At the same time, her activism has not stopped at the border. Herman has been creating Bloom, a soon-to-launch digital mental health and wellness membership community for transgender and gender-diverse people. She has written about why trans-only communities can function as infrastructure for connection, safety, learning, and leadership. Her journey raises questions not only about transition, but also about what happens when someone who has spent years fighting for change decides she needs to build a life somewhere new. Those questions form a natural starting point for our conversation.

Interview with Rosalyne Blumenstein

 

Thirteen years is a long time in any life, and yet some people seem to carry themselves through the years with an almost mischievous refusal to surrender to time. When I first spoke with Rosalyne Blumenstein in 2013, she was already a woman whose life seemed to contain several lifetimes: New York nightlife, survival, recovery, social work, activism, filmmaking, performance, friendship, love, and the fierce work of making space for people whose voices were routinely ignored. Born in Brooklyn, Rosalyne dreamed of becoming an actress, and from an early age she was drawn to places that offered theatricality, excitement, and the freedom to experiment with who she could be. She began visiting gay clubs as a teenager and started her transition at sixteen, finding her own way in a world that offered little reliable protection to young trans women. By seventeen, she had left home and was learning to survive in the vivid, often dangerous world of New York’s nightlife, where friendships could become lifelines and chosen family could mean the difference between isolation and belonging.

 

Those early years could easily have become a story defined entirely by hardship, but Rosalyne’s personality has always resisted such a narrow interpretation. There was glamour and performance, certainly, but also wit, audacity, ambition, and an irrepressible love of being seen. She worked in peep shows, appeared in modelling photographs, entered beauty contests, and performed onstage in spectacular outfits, including a silver corset and matching gloves made by Lynda Roberts, the older woman who took her in and taught her how to navigate the world. The clubs and their colourful characters became part of her education, although the losses were devastating. Friends such as Sugar Belane and Soy, whose lives ended far too early, remain woven into her memories of that era. Rosalyne’s photographs preserve this world with unusual intimacy, capturing not just the glamour of the night but the people, relationships, and fragile communities behind it.

Remembering Christine Jorgensen

 

Christine Jorgensen entered American public life at a moment when the very idea of changing sex seemed to belong somewhere between medical experiment, scandal and science fiction. Born George William Jorgensen Jr. in New York in 1926 to Danish-American parents, she grew up in the Bronx, the second child in a family that offered her a conventional upbringing but could not resolve the growing distance she felt between herself and the masculine role expected of her. She later recalled childhood feelings of being different and her longing to live as a girl. After graduating from Christopher Columbus High School in 1945, she was drafted into the United States Army near the end of the Second World War. Military service brought her into direct contact with the expectations of conventional masculinity, but it did not resolve her sense of herself. After her discharge, she returned to New York, studied photography and searched through medical and philosophical literature for an explanation of her feelings. Eventually, she learned that hormones and surgery might make possible the life she had imagined.