Remembering Eva-Lisa Bengtson

 

Born in Sweden in 1932, Eva-Lisa Bengtson understood from childhood that she was a girl, long before she had the language or the freedom to explain what that meant. In a society where being transgender was scarcely understood and where homosexuality itself could carry enormous stigma, she spent much of her life searching for places where she could simply be herself. In 1964, she finally began reaching out to others like her. An advertisement placed with Erika Sjöman brought more than eighty responses from Sweden and Finland, revealing a hidden community that had been waiting, often in isolation, to find one another. Eva-Lisa became a remarkable connector. Through Transvestia, which grew from correspondence into meetings and parties, she created one of Sweden’s earliest spaces where trans people could meet, exchange experiences and recognize themselves in one another. She later became involved in the wider queer and feminist movements, including Lesbisk Front and the building of Kvinnohuset in Stockholm. Yet her story was never a simple journey from exclusion to acceptance. She was sometimes welcomed and sometimes pushed aside, including by movements she had helped build. Her experiences reveal the complicated history of solidarity, belonging and boundaries within Sweden’s LGBTQ movement.

 

There was another side to Eva-Lisa that is just as important. She preserved. Photographs, letters, magazines, meeting records, invitations, membership cards and countless other fragments of queer life accumulated around her. She understood, perhaps more clearly than most, that people who are forgotten by official history have to preserve their own evidence of having been there. After Eva-Lisa’s death in 2018, artist and researcher Sam Hultin found themselves entrusted with this extraordinary archive. But Hultin did more than preserve it. Through Eva-Lisa’s Monument, the archive became a living encounter with a woman whose life had intersected with some of the most important chapters in Swedish trans, lesbian and feminist history. Hultin has transformed Eva-Lisa’s documents and memories into exhibitions, performances, city walks, films and now a book, allowing her story to return to the streets and communities where it once unfolded. What emerges is not only the portrait of a pioneering trans woman, but of someone who spent decades creating connections in a world that repeatedly told people like her that they were alone. In speaking with Sam Hultin, we can look beyond the dates and milestones to discover the woman behind the archive, the friendships and disappointments, the parties and protests, the moments of belonging and exclusion, and the extraordinary determination that made Eva-Lisa preserve a history that she could not know would one day be so valuable. And that is where I would like to begin.

Interview with Kizzy B

 

Kizzy B is a Scottish trans woman whose public presence is built around something both intimate and quietly radical: allowing people to see a life unfolding in real time. At 42, she describes her online work as a way of promoting “trans visibility and positivity,” while her main Instagram account documents her transition and advocacy. Alongside that, she maintains a separate space devoted to cosplay and has also connected her social presence with writing on Medium, suggesting a woman whose interests reach well beyond a single story of identity. There is a particular warmth in the way Kizzy's online presence moves between the personal and the ordinary. Her posts are not simply statements about being trans. They include the small negotiations of everyday life: clothes, body shape, finding something that fits, the excitement of discovering a beautiful dress, and the very familiar frustration when reality does not quite match the promise of a size label. In one recent post about a dress bought second-hand, she writes with humour about sizing, tailoring and the practical challenges of dressing a body that does not always fit neatly into the assumptions built into women's clothing.

 

That mixture of advocacy and everyday honesty may be what makes her presence particularly compelling. Visibility does not always have to arrive as a speech or a political statement. Sometimes it is a photograph, a joke, a dress, a cosplay character, a glimpse into transition, or simply the decision to be present and recognisable. Kizzy's own description of her social-media work places that presence in the service of trans visibility and positivity, while her separate creative interests allow a fuller personality to emerge beyond the label of “trans woman.” Her story also sits within a wider reality familiar to many trans women: the process of becoming visible can be deeply personal while simultaneously becoming a source of encouragement for other trans women. For this interview, then, the interesting question is not simply what it means to transition, but what happens when a private journey becomes a public one, when advocacy can coexist with humour and fashion, and when visibility becomes an everyday act rather than a single defining moment.

Interview with Lea de Vries

 

Lea de Vries is an inspiring artist and lives in Harderwijk, in the Netherlands, where music has become both her lifeline and her voice. Four years ago, Lea came out as a trans woman and began her transition, a journey that started with a single, terrifying visit to her doctor and has since carried her through hormone therapy, bottom surgery, and countless smaller, quieter victories along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Lea found songwriting. Her original songs, including “Reflection” and “Missen wat ik nooit had,” carry the weight of everything she’s lived through: grief, dysphoria, hope, and the fierce will to keep going. She has taken that music to stages at Paradiso, and multiple Pride events, turning pain into performance and performance into connection. 

 

Lea’s story is not just one of transition. In 2019, she and her ex had to go through losing a son twice, Evan and Levi, one in February and one in December, both born too early to survive. It took her years to find the words, but she eventually turned that loss into a song, and with it, some long-awaited closure. Alongside the joys of her music career, Lea has also faced real hardship: housing insecurity, financial strain, and the exhausting, everyday battle of simply being seen and believed. Through it all, she has kept showing up, on stage and online, asking for nothing more than to be heard and to help others feel less alone. This is a conversation with someone who has turned nearly every hard chapter of her life into something honest, something shared, and something that might just help someone else keep going too.

Interview with Sarah Savage

 

More than a decade ago, viewers first encountered her as a 29-year-old woman from Jersey on Channel 4's My Transsexual Summer. She had only recently begun living full-time as herself, had never knowingly met another trans person, and was still searching for confidence, community and a sense of what her future might look like. What happened next was not supposed to be a career plan. Sarah Savage moved to Brighton, found other trans people and, in late 2012, joined Fox Fisher and others in asking a deceptively simple question: why shouldn't there be a Pride specifically for trans and non-binary people? In July 2013, that idea became Trans Pride Brighton. The organisers expected perhaps 50 people. Hundreds came. Today, Sarah is CEO of the organisation she helped create, which has grown from a grassroots protest into a major annual event, a political platform and a permanent community centre. She has become a prominent speaker and activist on trans rights, visibility and belonging. But perhaps the best way to understand Sarah's activism is to look at what she lost before she began building.

 

Growing up in the insular community of Jersey, she knew little about transgender lives. After transitioning, she has spoken openly about her family disowning her and described transition as being "about loss," followed by years of finding a new family and learning what it meant to belong. Eventually, Trans Pride became more than an organisation she helped run. It became her home. That may explain why Sarah sees visibility not as an abstract political concept but as something deeply personal. A crowd of thousands matters, but so does the person who approaches her at Trans Pride in tears because it is the first time they have ever gone outside dressed as themselves. For Sarah, creating those moments is the point. There is another unexpected chapter to her story. The woman who once did not think of herself as particularly creative became a children's author. With Fox Fisher, she created Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?, followed by She's My Dad! and He's My Mom!, bringing questions of gender, transition, family and identity into children's literature. It is a natural extension of her activism: if Trans Pride creates a place where people can be visible, her books help make that visibility understandable to the next generation.

Interview with Didirella

 

DIDIRELLA Diego Bragà is a Brazilian trans-travesti composer, filmmaker and actress from Belo Horizonte. Trained in dance and theatre, she studied at the Theatre School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and at the London International School of Performing Arts. She holds a master’s degree in Criticism, Curatorship and Art Theory from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Her career spans theatre, cinema and music. Her music has been produced by Boss In Drama and Diana XL, and in 2026 she will release her first LP, produced by Chico Neves. As an actress, she has worked with artists and groups including Grupo Galpão, Julie Beauvais, Susan Worsfold, Mickäel de Oliveira, Jérôme Bel and Tiago Rodrigues, as an actress with École des Maîtres. In 2021, she was supported by the Sundance Institute. Her films include Think About The Beautiful Future Ahead, released as a New York Times Op-Doc, and Cleópatra & António, a queer and decolonial reimagining of Shakespeare, mentored by Céline Sciamma and Lucrecia Martel.

 

As DIDIRELLA, she has released Geografia do Amor (2022), SUPERPUTA SPIRITUAL (2023), Onda de Amor (2024) and Minha Infância Acabou (2024). Her work combines pop and hyper-pop with theatre, cinema, eroticism and spirituality, while exploring gender, transition, sexuality and queer ancestry. A major thread throughout her work is the archive of her uncle Ricardo Wagner Braga, a gay man who died from AIDS-related causes in 2011 and left her around 1,000 personal objects, including photographs, letters, postcards and diaries. The archive became the basis for Geografia do Amor and later works, including the hyper-pop opera A Gente na Boate Sofre Junto, which premiered in 2025. Based in Lisbon, DIDIRELLA continues to work across music, film, theatre and contemporary art. In 2026, she was selected for the CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva artistic residency programme in Porto.

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.”