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.

Our Allies: Lalka Podobińska

 

Lalka Podobińska, Lalla Stanisława Fedorowicz-Podobińska by full name, was already over fifty, with a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences, a family, academic and professional experience, as well as her own rather unusual interests, including speleology. She had no plans for an activist career. Even less did she plan to become one of the most important allies of transgender people in Poland. It all began in 2006 with ballet. Interested in a performance by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, she began searching for information online. Her search led her to the Crossdressing.pl forum, where she first came into closer contact with the transgender community. It was there that she met Anna Grodzka. Their online acquaintance quickly developed into a friendship, which in turn grew into many years of social activism. In 2008, Lalka, together with a group of co-founders, established the Trans-Fuzja Foundation, one of the first Polish organizations focused primarily on the rights of transgender people. In the years that followed, she led support groups, organized training sessions and workshops, educated students and representatives of various professions, appeared in the media and participated in advocacy efforts for legal change. She also served as president and later vice-president of the Foundation.

 

Her work was not limited to the organization. When Anna Grodzka became a member of parliament, Lalka became the director of her parliamentary office. She soon found herself on the other side of the parliamentary debate as well, representing transgender people during work on the Gender Recognition Act. In 2015, she addressed the Senate Committee on Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Petitions, arguing that requiring a transgender person to sue their own parents was not only legally archaic, but also deeply burdensome for entire families. Lalka was, moreover, an unusual figure within the transgender movement. She is not herself transgender. She is a cisgender woman, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. In the community to which she devoted many years, she came to be called a “transmother”, a term that aptly reflected her natural inclination to care for others. She had done this before as a scout instructor, and later as an academic teacher and mentor to students. Even her nickname has a history older than her activism. “Lalka” was the name her parents called her when she was a child. Officially Lalla, publicly Lalka for decades.

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.