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.

Interview with Chloe Kelly

 

Some life changes arrive slowly. Chloe Kelly’s arrived through a phone filter. In October 2023, at 45, she tried a gender-swap FaceApp expecting something strange and unconvincing, much like the gender-swap program that had disappointed her at London’s Science Museum back in 2000. Instead, her heart raced, her breathing went shallow, and she kept going back to the images, in the bathroom at work, and again on the sofa at home. What she saw, she says, was something she had secretly hoped for all her life without realizing it. What followed was a transition lived at speed and in public. After weeks of sleepless nights and online research, she told her GP first, then her wife on an unplanned Friday morning, then her parents, and eventually everyone else through a Facebook post. She spent months choosing the name Chloe, searching through the most popular baby names of 1978 until she found one that felt right. For anyone wondering about “Lucy,” that was originally just a placeholder name she used online, but it began to stick on social media, hence her Instagram handle: @lucyseekelly. Faced with a long NHS waiting list, she turned to private care on Harley Street, and this November she travels to Thailand for surgery. Along the way she has written about identity, femininity and transformation on her Substack.

 

There has been joy and grief in equal measure. Chloe has spoken about the thrill of rediscovering fashion, from Debbie Harry to Stevie Nicks, and about learning makeup through trial, error and the occasional mascara wand to the eye. She has also spoken about mourning the girlhood she never had, the lingering question of whether she passes, and the moments of dysphoria that can still catch her off guard. Her relationship with her mother has grown into the closeness of mother and daughter, and she is clear that her journey is about being herself rather than meeting anyone else’s ideal. Today Chloe is separated from her wife, who she says is still her best friend (they both like boys), and she is dating, travelling and writing. Her solo travel journey through Europe and Asia from October 2025 to January 2026 is becoming a travel memoir, Girl:Avanting - Solo Travel Adventures of a 47-year-old Trans Woman, and she has already finished a novel, Trans-Atlantic. Her motto at the moment is “wander and wonder, live with kindness and joy, look up at the stars but look out for the lampposts.” It is with that spirit, and with a lot of honesty, that our conversation begins.

Interview with Denise Winkelman

 

Denise Winkelman has built a life that seems almost too improbable to fit neatly into one biography. A girl who knew from an early age that something about the life expected of her did not fit, she grew up in rural northern Minnesota in a conservative evangelical environment, throwing herself into sports and eventually professional wrestling, while carrying a private understanding of herself that she could not yet fully express. That path eventually led her through transition, a new life in Los Angeles and, unexpectedly, comedy. Winkelman brings an unusually rich collection of experiences to the stage: former professional wrestler, writer, model and now stand-up comedian, with her debut special Bougie on a Budget turning stories about her Midwestern upbringing, gender journey, dating life and reinvention into something both hilarious and deeply personal.

 

There is a striking contrast at the heart of her comedy. She can talk about getting hit with folding chairs and body slams, then pivot into the vulnerability of finally allowing herself to live authentically. Her first time performing stand-up was an eight-minute set, and the response was enough to convince her that comedy was where she needed to be. She has since developed a style that combines storytelling, self-awareness, warmth and an instinct for finding the absurdity inside difficult experiences. As she has explained, the deeper message behind Bougie on a Budget is ultimately simple: be yourself. Her story also carries the texture of someone who has spent years performing different versions of herself, first because she felt she had to, later because performance became an art form. Today, Denise can turn that history into laughter without reducing its complexity. Her comedy is not simply about being transgender, or being a former wrestler, or growing up in Minnesota. It is about what happens when all those seemingly contradictory pieces of a person finally belong to the same life. And perhaps that is what makes her such an intriguing person to talk to: the journey from hiding to performing, from trying to fit a prescribed identity to creating a stage persona entirely on her own terms, and from surviving her past to finding material in it.