Interview with Lilit Martirosyan

 

Lilit Martirosyan is not simply someone who became an activist; she is someone who, very early in life, discovered that survival itself could become a political act. She has spoken about knowing she was a girl from childhood, about leaving her village at 13 after discrimination made home feel unsafe, and about eventually finding her way into Armenia’s civil-society movement. She later founded Right Side, the country’s first community-based organization created by and for transgender people and sex workers. Then, on April 5, 2019, she walked into Armenia’s National Assembly and did something no transgender person in the country had done before: she stood at the parliamentary podium and described, in brutally direct terms, what life could mean for a transgender Armenian. She deliberately presented herself not merely as Lilit, but as a collective figure carrying the experiences of people who had been assaulted, impoverished, excluded and left without protection. The speech made history and triggered an extraordinary backlash, including threats against her life.

 

What followed is revealing about the particular kind of activist Martirosyan became. She did not leave Armenia permanently, despite having to flee temporarily with her family after the threats. She returned because, as she explained, she did not want to become a refugee elsewhere while the people she represented remained in Armenia. Her activism has therefore been remarkably practical: changing the procedure for legal name changes, building community structures, fighting discrimination and hate crimes, and creating spaces where people could receive legal, psychological and social support. In 2020, the Dutch government awarded her the Human Rights Tulip, recognizing both her persistence in the face of death threats and her commitment to peaceful change. The prize was not merely symbolic: it gave her the means to expand the infrastructure of the movement she had spent years building.

Interview with Diane Sauer

 

Diane Sauer has spent much of her life around games, the kind played on tables, the kind played in arcades, and, eventually, the kind she began inventing herself. A lifelong resident of Hamilton Square, New Jersey, she has been part of a weekly gaming group since 1982 and, together with her husband, Nick, has accumulated a collection of thousands of games. Before becoming a game designer, she worked in video production, computer systems and corporate management. She later ran a pinball restoration business, turning the machines she loved into another chapter of her professional life. In 2014, Diane and Nick founded Shoot Again Games. Since then, she has designed and co-designed games involving cryptozoological creatures, conspiracy theories, superheroes looking for restaurant jobs and, in Pinball Showdown, the peculiar experience of actually being the pinball. She has also served repeatedly as a judge for the Cardboard Edison Award, evaluating games created by designers who are still trying to find their own way through the maze of rules, mechanics and possibilities.

 

There is a certain symmetry to Diane's story. Much of her creative life has been concerned with systems, roles and the rules that determine what happens next. Her own life, meanwhile, has required her to reconsider some of those rules. Diane is a transgender woman who has built a life and a marriage, a career and a creative identity over decades, while continuing to move between worlds that might at first seem unrelated. Today, she remains involved with Shoot Again Games. After retiring from pinball restoration in 2022, she began a new professional chapter as a personal trainer. It is another turn in a life that has never stayed in one category for very long. For The Heroines of My Life, Diane spoke about growing up with games, the strange appeal of pinball, designing worlds of her own, marriage, reinvention, and what it means to finally stop playing a role that was never quite yours.

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.