Interview with Kay Kirkman

Kay Kirkman’s journey towards becoming oneself is inseparable from an entire lifetime. For more than six decades, Kay lived within a life shaped by expectations and responsibilities. She built a career in mental health nursing, became a husband, father and grandfather, and spent forty years married to Julia, the woman she loved. Yet alongside that life was another truth, one Kay had carried since childhood and had never quite been able to silence. It was only after Julia’s death that the walls Kay had built around that hidden part of herself began to come down. Grief, strangely enough, became a doorway. What followed was not a simple story of finally “coming out,” but a deeply human process of questioning, remembering, grieving, accepting and, ultimately, learning how to live as the woman who had always been there.

 

Kay has now captured that journey in her memoir, Becoming Kay: A Story of Identity, Loss, Courage and Self-Discovery, published in August 2026. It is a book about much more than transition. It is about marriage and parenthood, ageing and identity, mental health, prejudice and acceptance. It is also about the people who remain important to us even when life changes beyond recognition. What I particularly love about Kay's story is that it challenges one of the most damaging assumptions surrounding transition, the idea that there is an age by which we must have figured ourselves out. Kay reminds us that sometimes the road to ourselves is extraordinarily long, and that arriving late does not make the destination any less beautiful. There is also something wonderfully warm about the way Kay approaches her story. Alongside the difficult moments, there is humour, honesty and an appreciation for the absurdities of life. She doesn't present herself as someone who suddenly became a completely different person. She presents herself as someone who finally stopped hiding a part of the person she had always been. 

Interview with Jynx de Lygh

Jynx Geneviève de Lygh is a mother of five, a veteran of four combat tours, a helicopter mechanic and cybersecurity specialist, a transgender activist, and now a recording artist, Jynx has lived several lives before arriving at the woman she always knew was somewhere inside her. But perhaps the most remarkable part of her story is not how many battles she has fought, but how she has continued to find new ways to turn those battles into something meaningful. Music was there long before transition. As a young person growing up near Ithaca, New York, Jynx found something resembling peace with a guitar or a microphone in her hands. While the rest of the world seemed to be telling her who she was supposed to be, music gave her somewhere to breathe. Then came 23 years in the military, four combat tours, marriages, motherhood, and decades of trying to fit into a life that never quite felt like her own. At forty, Jynx finally began her transition. And, in what seems almost like a metaphor for her entire life, she refused to do things quietly.

Interview with Kate Hutchinson

Some people wait their whole lives for a defining moment, and some people, like Kate Hutchinson, seem to walk straight into it carrying a 38-foot trans flag and a whole community’s courage on their shoulders. When the Pride Cymru parade in Cardiff was brought to a halt by a handful of anti-trans protesters, Kate did not shout at them, confront them, or give them what they wanted. Instead, she did something far more powerful. She turned to the crowd, trusted her instincts, and invited an entire city to speak up for trans lives. And Cardiff answered. Kate’s story did not begin on that sun-drenched August day in 2022. It began decades earlier, in a school playground in the 1970s, with a child who knew who she was but learned very early that the world could be cruel to difference. It runs through coming out in the 1990s, being pushed back into the closet by violence and fear, and then, years later, stepping back into the light when support, representation, and self-belief finally aligned. 

 

Today, Kate is many things at once: a trans woman living joyfully and authentically, an educator, an activist, a trustee of Pride Cymru and Schools OUT UK, which brought LGBT+ History Month to the UK, a facilitator, a trainer, a rock musician, and, whether she asked for the title or not, a quiet heroine to a lot of people. This interview is not about soundbites or slogans. It is about lived experience, resilience, laughter in between the heavy moments, and what it really means to keep showing up for your community, even when it would be easier not to.

Interview with Zia Varajon

A Chicago-based author and creative, Zia Varajon has turned her own experiences of identity, transition, self-discovery and personal growth into something wonderfully generous: a book that feels less like a manual and more like sitting down with a big sister who has already made a few mistakes, learned a few lessons, laughed at herself along the way, and is now saying, “Come on, I've got you.” Her debut book, Love, Your Trans Big Sister: Advice on the Transfeminine Journey , published in May 2026, is deeply personal. Zia openly admits that putting such intimate details of her transition on paper can be unnerving. I completely understand that feeling. When we write about our lives, especially about transition, we are not simply sharing facts. We are opening doors to rooms that we may have spent years keeping private.

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.