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.” 

Interview with Kristine Turowska

 

Kristine Turowska doesn't just tell one story. She carries several, woven together like the layers of a poem she's still writing. By day, she sits in the boardroom of an international corporation, immersed in finance. In the evenings, on weekends, and on stage, she becomes someone the world took decades to fully meet: a poet, a novelist, an actress, a woman named Kristine. Born in 1976, she began quietly reckoning with the idea of transition about ten years ago, after already building a life, a career, and a marriage that has now lasted 26 years, more than half of that shared life. Fittingly, her path back to herself started with a return to theatre: she completed a two-year program at the Lubuska Academy of Acting, where she and her ensemble brought two graduation productions to life. Her writing followed close behind, tender and unflinching in equal measure. In 2022 she self-published Myśli innej kobiety ("Thoughts of Another Woman"), a poetry collection illustrated by Damian Drewniak.

 

A year later, in 2023, came her debut novel Listy do E. ("Letters to E.") with publisher NovaeRes, a 19th-century tale of a woman named K., trying to outrun her past and finding it waiting for her anyway. On stage, she created and performs the sole role in Nigdy nie będę kobietą ("I Will Never Be a Woman"), a monodrama built from the words of Sylvia Plath and Adrianna Alksnin's play Smutna dziewczyna Sylvia Plath ("Sad Girl Sylvia Plath"), directed by Alicja Wróbel. It's a piece about the impossible standards placed on women, and the added weight carried by a woman who is transgender. She is married, with two grown sons, one of whom is also transgender, which makes her story not only about becoming herself, but about a whole family learning, side by side, how to hold onto each other through change. So let's sit down together, and let her tell you the rest, in her own words.

Interview with Anni Arbour

 

My guest today is Anni Arbour, an award-winning, bestselling author and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She studied at both Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan and is a member of the Trans Journalists Association. She writes for Pride Source Media, where her work covers transgender issues, politics, history, popular culture and the lives of transgender people in Michigan and beyond. Anni is also the author of Trans Ascending, a publication dedicated to stories of transgender people who have overcome prejudice, succeeded in hostile environments and become inspirations to others. Through her writing, she has explored the lives of transgender pioneers and historical figures, as well as transgender representation in comics, film and popular culture. Writing and art have been important parts of Anni's life since childhood. She has written that, while growing up, she was drawn to reading, writing and art and dreamed of becoming an artist. Her mother supported those ambitions and recognised that her child was different, while Anni also experienced criticism from other members of her family for her preference for what she describes as softer pursuits rather than traditionally masculine activities. Anni's mother died when Anni was a teenager after a long illness with lung cancer. Anni was her main caregiver, and after her mother's death she remained at home, helped care for her younger sister and endured a difficult relationship with her older brothers. She later married, became a parent, divorced and raised her child alone. 

 

Throughout those years, Anni continued to suppress her gender identity. In her own words, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be among the girls at school, but she lived according to the expectations of her family and society. She has described her eventual recognition of herself as a woman as a gradual process rather than the result of a single defining event. Today, Anni is openly living as a woman and has also become active in creating connections within the transgender community. She moderates the Reddit community MI_Transgender_Friend, which was created to help transgender people find friendship and community. Her own writing has also addressed the importance of connection with other transgender people, as well as the loneliness that can accompany a life spent feeling different and misunderstood. Alongside her personal writing, Anni continues to report on issues affecting transgender people in the United States. Her articles have examined topics including transgender rights, political attacks on the community, transgender athletes, activism, representation and the experiences of transgender people in Michigan.