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.

Interview with Deanna Haynes

 

Deanna Haynes holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatrical Design & Technology from Louisiana State University and spent over twenty years as a Professor of Theatre and Speech, lending her talents to more than eighty theatrical productions across nearly every discipline of the craft. Today, she works as a standardized patient in Nashville, Tennessee, and is training to become a certified Life Transition Coach serving the LGBTQ+ community. She lives in Middle Tennessee with the best boy in the world, a black Lab mix named Poncho.

In January 2026, Deanna published her first book, Aunt Joan's Cabin: A Year's Journey to Joy, a collection of journal entries written during her first year of social transition. Rather than the hostility she braced herself for, she found that most people met her with curiosity rather than contempt, asking questions about what being trans means, what it feels like, and whether love is still possible. She began sharing her journal entries to help answer those questions, and the response from trans, non-binary, and cisgender readers alike encouraged her to gather them into a book. Written by a trans woman, her stories carry lessons in fear, privilege, sexism, hard-won insight, and awareness that speak to anyone trying to reframe their life, hold their footing, and find joy. It is my pleasure to welcome Deanna Haynes to The Heroines of My Life.

Interview with Laurie Lee Hall

Laurie Lee Hall is an American architect, author, and transgender woman whose professional life was closely interwoven with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Raised in New England, she studied architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before spending roughly a decade practicing in New York. In 1996, she moved with her family to Utah to work for the Church, eventually becoming its chief architect and overseeing the design and construction of temples around the world. Alongside her career, Laurie served in several Church leadership roles, including bishop and stake president, all while quietly wrestling with a gender identity she had carried since childhood.

 

In 2011, while still serving as stake president, Laurie began studying gender identity in earnest and started coming to terms with who she was. Her transition eventually cost her a career she had built over decades and, in 2017, her Church membership through excommunication. She has since become deeply involved with Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families & Friends, receiving its Paul Mortensen Award in 2023 as its first transgender recipient. Her memoir, Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman, was published by Signature Books in November 2024. Laurie continues to practice architecture, write, and speak publicly, and lives in Kentucky with her partner, Nancy Beaman, and their combined family of nine children and twenty-four grandchildren. It is my great pleasure to welcome her to The Heroines of My Life.

Interview with Ai Haruna

 

Ai Haruna (はるな愛, Haruna Ai), born on 21 July 1972 in Osaka, is one of Japan's best-known transgender women, a television personality, singer, actress, stage performer and entrepreneur whose extraordinary journey has taken her from a bullied child dreaming of becoming an idol to international fame and, most recently, to seeing her own life adapted for Netflix. From an early age, Haruna was drawn to femininity, music and performance. She loved Japanese idols and appeared in singing and impersonation programmes as a child, developing her passion for entertainment long before she had the language or freedom to fully understand herself. Away from the stage, however, her adolescence was marked by severe bullying and pressure to behave in a way others considered properly masculine. In her autobiography, Subarashiki, Kono Jinsei (This Wonderful Life), she later revealed a far more difficult private life behind her glamorous public image, including her father's debts and violence, bullying so severe that she contemplated suicide, the awakening of her sexuality, working as a hostess from the age of fourteen, a broken engagement and years of financial struggle. As a teenager, Haruna discovered Japan's newhalf stage world, where glamorous performers were living and working publicly in feminine roles. At seventeen, she entered that world herself, developing the skills that would later define her career, singing, dancing, impersonation, comedy and the ability to command an audience. She also tried to build a conventional music career, making an early record debut under the name Onishi Kenji. Her dream, however, was not simply to become known as a transgender entertainer. She wanted to become an idol and be recognised as an artist in her own right.

Interview with Jamie DeCoursey

 

For seven decades, Jamie DeCoursey lived behind a carefully constructed facade, existing inside what she evocatively calls a “windowless house.” Raised in a devout Catholic family alongside five brothers in the mid-1950s, an era defined by rigid binary gender roles and deep societal intolerance, she knew from early childhood that something fundamental set her apart. As young as four, she harbored quiet dreams of magically transforming into a girl, later finding brief, fleeting moments of recognition in front of the bathroom mirror. Yet without the vocabulary, examples, or safety to express her feelings, she locked the doors to her inner world. She coped by suppressing her identity, channeling her energy into becoming an active, sports-loving, people-pleaser, and keeping her true self hidden from even those closest to her. To the outside world, Jamie built an exemplary, highly accomplished life. She enjoyed a long, successful career as a healthcare executive, raised two sons, and fulfilled every role expected of her. Yet performing her assigned male role functioned as a secret prison for her female soul. She survived by cycling through extended periods of hiding and guilt, occasionally allowing her true identity to quietly surface in small, hidden ways, wearing female clothing beneath her business suits, shaving her skin smooth, or trying on makeup in moments of solitary expression.

Renée Richards: Beyond the Icon

 

In 1975, at the age of 41, Renée Richards underwent gender-affirming surgery and began living openly as a woman. Two years later, she would become one of the most consequential figures in the history of transgender participation in sport. Born in New York in 1934, Richards had already lived an extraordinary life before becoming a public symbol: she was a highly accomplished tennis player, captain of the Yale men's tennis team, and an ophthalmologist. In 1976, after she was outed as transgender by broadcaster Richard Carlson, she was barred from entering the U.S. Open women's competition because she refused to submit to the chromosome test demanded by the United States Tennis Association. She challenged the decision in court, and in August 1977 the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor. At the 1977 U.S. Open, the 43-year-old Richards finally entered the women's draw. She lost her opening singles match to Virginia Wade, but reached the doubles final, where she and her partner lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stöve. Richards subsequently became a coach, working with players including Navratilova, and her name became inseparable from one of the earliest and most important legal battles over transgender participation in professional sport.

 

Yet the woman at the center of this history is far more complicated than the historical shorthand of "transgender tennis pioneer" suggests. Now in her nineties, Richards remains a deeply contradictory figure. The person who once went to court to establish her right to compete as a woman now argues that trans women who experienced male puberty should not compete in women's sport. That tension is at the heart of Finding Renée Richards, because the book is not interested in turning Richards into a convenient icon. Instead, it tries to recover the complicated human being behind the headline, the lawsuit and the history-making moment. And it is this woman, with all her contradictions, achievements, struggles and complexities, that journalist and author Julie Kliegman set out to find. Kliegman has spent much of their career exploring the places where sport, identity and the human stories behind public controversies intersect. Their work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, Slate, The Verge, Vox and Texas Monthly. They have worked as a reporter, editor and fact-checker, served as Copy Chief at Sports Illustrated, and written extensively about transgender athletes, women's sports and mental health. And now that Julie Kliegman has published Finding Renée Richards, I am delighted to welcome them to The Heroines of My Life to talk about the woman they spent years trying to understand, the extraordinary journey of researching and writing her story, and what they discovered along the way.