Interview with Juliet Jacques

It is with deep admiration that I welcome Juliet Jacques to this conversation, a woman whose writing is as luminous as her courage. Juliet is not only a pioneering British journalist, critic, and author, but also a gentle voice of intellect and introspection in the complex dialogue surrounding gender, identity, and representation. Known to many through her widely acclaimed Guardian series My Transgender Journey, Juliet became one of the UK's most visible transgender voices, not because she set out to be a role model, but because she wrote with unflinching honesty, grace, and vulnerability. Born in Redhill, Surrey, and raised in nearby Horley, Juliet studied History at the University of Manchester before pursuing Literature and Film at the University of Sussex, where she later completed a Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing. Her academic grounding in narrative and aesthetics gives her writing a rare depth, weaving post-war literary influences into memoir, journalism, and art criticism alike. Whether she is analyzing cinema, unpacking media bias, or reflecting on football with radical tenderness, Juliet does so with a clarity that reveals the emotional and political threads holding our stories together.

 

Juliet has never merely chronicled trans lives, she has challenged who gets to tell them and how. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, and beyond, and she is also the creator and host of Suite (212) on Resonance FM, where she explores the intersections of art, politics, and community. Yet even with accolades such as being longlisted for the Orwell Prize and recognized on The Independent on Sunday Pink List, Juliet’s strength lies not in titles, but in her deep sincerity, humility, and sharp mind. Navigating both the public spotlight and private uncertainty, Juliet has not only written through transition, but transformed the landscape of trans representation in Britain. With her characteristic wit, intellectual poise, and understated resolve, she reminds us that to be a writer is not just to observe the world, but to offer it a gentler, more generous lens through which to be seen. Today, I have the honor of speaking to Juliet about literature, activism, resilience, and the poetic contradictions of being fully human.

 

Monika: Today, I'm truly honored to welcome Juliet Jacques, an inspirational British journalist, critic, author, and longtime contributor to The Guardian and The New Statesman. Juliet was named one of The Independent on Sunday's most influential journalists in their Pink List in both 2012 and 2013, and her writing has shaped conversations around gender, culture, and politics for over a decade. Juliet, thank you so much for joining me today!

Juliet: Hi Monika! Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. 

Monika: Your Guardian series “My Transgender Journey” received widespread acclaim and brought much-needed visibility to transgender experiences in the UK. It was even longlisted for the 2011 Orwell Prize, and many people began to see you not just as a writer, but as a role model and advocate. How did it feel to suddenly find yourself carrying that kind of public significance?

Juliet: It’s been strange. I had a socio-political purpose with the Transgender Journey series, but my background was as a literature and film critic, and my inspirations were post-war authors who wrote first-person novels that focused on the interior life of their protagonists, people like Nathalie Sarraute, Ann Quin, Rayner Heppenstall, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. I hadn’t expected people to call me “an activist” or “a role model,” terms which carry very different expectations and responsibilities to “writer,” which was how I saw myself.

 

ACI Radical Voices: Juliet Jacques (YouTube)

 

Monika: Did the intensity of that attention take a toll on your personal life or mental health?

Juliet: I’d not thought enough about how this would intersect with the practice of writing about my physical and psychological life on a platform such as The Guardian, or how it might change my life, or the type of people it would bring into it. Combined with the other pressures of being precariously housed and employed during my twenties, this had a strong effect on my already shaky mental health, and I spent most of 2012 in psychotherapy, attempting to unravel this intertwining of my public and private, professional and personal lives.

Monika: How did you navigate that shift and eventually regain some control over your public identity?

Juliet: In response, I rethought which subjects I covered, and where, and spent most of 2013 repositioning myself. I wrote about trans issues where it felt necessary, the Julie Burchill debacle in The Observer, the Richard Littlejohn and Lucy Meadows story in the Daily Mail, and Chelsea Manning’s coming out, and otherwise sought to focus more on football, art, literature, and film, sometimes with my transsexual past in the background, often not. This was made easier by the fact that other trans people had established themselves in the British media, sharing some of the responsibility that I felt when the Guardian series was in full swing, in 2010–2011. I should say, too, that the backing of Trans Media Watch was vital, I wasn’t affiliated with them, but they provided invaluable advice when I wasn’t sure how to approach certain subjects. 
Monika: In recent years, we've seen more transgender voices recognized in influential spaces, including The Independent on Sunday’s Pink List. In 2013, you were ranked 60th among the UK's most influential LGBT figures. What did that recognition mean to you, and how do you see the importance of such visibility?

Juliet: Yes, it’s good. Paris Lees was a worthy winner, she’s worked incredibly hard for a very long time, and I was pleased that Jennie Kermode and Helen Belcher from Trans Media Watch made the top twenty. I think their presence, and mine, reflects the recent community concerns with the way that transgender people have been treated by the British media. But there are people doing other work: Sarah Brown, who was the UK’s only openly transgender politician at the time; CN Lester, a musician who co-founded the Queer Youth Network; Natacha Kennedy, who’s particularly concerned with gender-variant children; and Roz Kaveney, an inspiration who still fearlessly challenges transphobia, especially from feminists or elsewhere on the left. In the future, I’d like to see more representation for trans men and people of color.

Monika: As both a journalist and literary critic, you’ve written extensively about trans lives and representation. Do you think we can speak today of a distinct transgender literature? If so, how would you define it?

Juliet: The two main genres that openly trans writers have tended to work in have been autobiography and gender/feminist theory. These both have a recognizable lineage. I was intrigued by the former, as represented from Lili Elbe’s Man Into Woman (a weird text, written pseudonymously and edited by Niels Hoyer, also an assumed name) to April Ashley’s Odyssey, via Conundrum by Jan Morris and my favorite, Jayne County’s Man Enough to be a Woman. The latter inspired me more, Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Viviane K. Namaste, Julia Serano, and other authors who discussed transgender living on a more theoretical level.

 

On LGBT rights and the transgender
experience (YouTube)

 

Monika: What about fiction, poetry, and drama, how have trans lives been represented in those genres?

Juliet: As for fiction, drama, and poetry, there’s a long list of people who weren’t trans, not openly, anyway, using trans characters, some more sensitively than others, to make their work seem more exotic or to illustrate some wider point about gender. This has been a relatively recent development, post-war, after Christine Jorgensen’s fame opened the discourse around transsexual and then transgender people. My favorite was Cobra by Severo Sarduy, a playful avant-garde novel about a transvestite trying to reach a mythical Valley of the Dolls. Roland Barthes wrote The Pleasure of the Text about it, and how it disrupted all sorts of literary and social categories. 

Monika: Looking ahead, how do you see transgender authors shaping literary culture in the future?

Juliet: In the future, I think we will see more transgender literature, as trans writers combine activist and creative work, or feel less need to write in a more directly political way. Roz Kaveney is one example of the former, but I don’t think we can speak of that kind of heritage yet. At present, if there is a ‘transgender literature’, it’s of characters in texts that don’t focus primarily on them: Sarduy’s Cobra and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, from the late 1960s/early 1970s, remain rare in making us protagonists.
Monika: Many artists draw from personal identity in their work. In your view, what does it mean to create art as a transgender writer, poet, or creative? 

Juliet: Canadian author Sheila Heti says that “One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” I think that’s even more true for trans women and men, as well as genderqueer people: we have an identifiable line of theorists, but many of the foundations of trans/genderqueer culture are yet to be laid.

Monika: Do you think the current cultural climate is more open to the voices of trans and genderqueer creators?

Juliet: Most art of note comes from an outsider position, and for various social reasons, trans/genderqueer people are often in that position or have been in their formative periods. People are becoming more prepared to listen to our perspectives, so I think it’s an exciting time to be trans and creative. There’s a hidden history within queer culture for us to build upon, and a new type of art for us to create that draws upon the increased confidence in our identities.

 

At Transformation Marathon(YouTube)

 

Monika: How would you assess the current landscape for transgender women in the UK when it comes to legal protections, healthcare, and social acceptance?

Juliet: Certain legal rights have been secured, some with qualifications. People can transition via the National Health Service, getting hormones and sex reassignment surgery without having to pay, but the government is trying to abolish the NHS, and even if they don’t, there’s a constant fear that this gain will be lost. The media are constantly lying about the costs to the taxpayer in a bid to turn public opinion against it. Employers are not allowed to sack people for transitioning, and gender identity is a protected characteristic in the 2010 Equality Act, but workplaces can make life difficult in subtler ways, and the 2010 Equality Act explicitly draws on radical feminist attacks in stating that there are situations where it is permissible to exclude trans people from services or social settings.

Monika: Beyond legal and medical structures, what social challenges are transgender people still facing in daily life?

Juliet: There’s been a lot of focus on the media in the last few years, and that’s important, but there is a lot of work to do on the way harassment, intimidation, and violence can make trans people feel unsafe at home, in public, or at work. There’s a need for more support and information services for families and friends of trans people, and for trans survivors of domestic violence, and for better education about trans issues in schools. Genuine progress has been made in the last 25 years, but there’s still so far to go.
Monika: When you look back on your coming out, what aspect of the experience challenged you the most emotionally or personally?

Juliet: The knowledge that I’d have to handle the responses of my friends, colleagues, and strangers simultaneously. The hardest group to tell was my family. I think that the longer and more closely you’ve known someone, the harder it is to come out, as the stakes are so high, and the fear that they will disown you is overwhelming.

Monika: During the early stages of your transition, did you have any role models or figures, transgender or otherwise, who influenced or supported you in meaningful ways?

Juliet: There were a few people who I liked, April Ashley or Jayne County, but my life was nothing like theirs. The theorists I read shaped my identity and how I saw it relating to my world, giving me a sense of shared cultural history, which helped. There was a transsexual woman in my day job who got on well enough with everyone, and who provided some support when I came out. She was a card-carrying Thatcherite, though, so it didn’t lead to a long-term friendship.

Monika: Was there a particular moment or event that helped you feel more connected to the trans community?

Juliet: The people who excited me most were the ones I met through London’s performance art scene, and the Transfabulous festival in 2008, less than a year before I began to transition. I interviewed Pia Arber for Trespass magazine and thought her incredible: she refused to be a victim, although she’d experienced a lot of pain, and she was so intelligent, with a perspective and set of references unlike any I’d encountered before.

 

Juliet Jacques : A Transgender Journey. pmilat.
Source: YouTube.

 

Monika: Were there any performances or artists from that time who stood out as especially impactful?

Juliet: The Transfabulous performers were wonderful: so insightful and funny about how being trans complicated ‘everyday’ experiences and opened new ones. Jason Barker’s piece about being a man and having periods was hilarious, and the way the Queer Belgrade artists discussed their lives was striking. Andjela Tomić and Josephine Wilson’s ten-minute talk about their journeys resonated, down to the statement that conforming to their assigned gender had been like “living in black and white,” with their current lives feeling like they were in color, I’d thought the exact same. Jet Moon’s performances were warm, funny, and smart, and every time I met her afterwards, she was friendly, kind, open, and nurturing. I felt so comfortable with her, and so inspired by her. 

Monika: How do you view the way transgender characters and stories have been portrayed in film and television over the years?

Juliet: I’ve written an awful lot about the difference between mainstream feature films with trans characters played by cis people, and how they often have to establish the character’s history by acting out a series of stereotypical vignettes, and queer underground films, in which trans people play themselves, often with improvised scenes where they discuss their experiences in a far more genuine way. I often talk about Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls (1983), my favorite example of this. American mainstream films and TV shows are letting trans people play trans people more. I’ve not yet seen Harmony Santana in Gun Hill Road or Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black, but it’s a positive development. I’ve not seen Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, either, but I’m equally intrigued by how that role is constructed. 

Monika: What about the way transgender people are represented in journalism and literature?

Juliet: I’ve written even more about trans people in newspapers, with this New Statesman piece from last year being the most extensive. There is a long history of sensationalist coverage which hasn’t been left behind, Before and After photos, outing people, bringing up someone’s trans status when it isn’t relevant, and even sympathetic coverage often frames people as victims or uses outmoded or clichéd frameworks. There have been some moves towards letting trans people speak for themselves, but it’s still quite limited, a handful of writers, mostly white trans women based in London, and it needs to be more diverse in terms of race, gender identity, and class.

END OF PART 1

PART 2

 

All photos: courtesy of Juliet Jacques.

© 2014 - Monika Kowalska

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