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.

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.

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.

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.

Interview with Jamie DeCoursey

 

For seven decades, Jamie DeCoursey lived behind a carefully constructed facade, existing inside what she evocatively calls a “windowless house.” Raised in a devout Catholic family alongside five brothers in the mid-1950s, an era defined by rigid binary gender roles and deep societal intolerance, she knew from early childhood that something fundamental set her apart. As young as four, she harbored quiet dreams of magically transforming into a girl, later finding brief, fleeting moments of recognition in front of the bathroom mirror. Yet without the vocabulary, examples, or safety to express her feelings, she locked the doors to her inner world. She coped by suppressing her identity, channeling her energy into becoming an active, sports-loving, people-pleaser, and keeping her true self hidden from even those closest to her. To the outside world, Jamie built an exemplary, highly accomplished life. She enjoyed a long, successful career as a healthcare executive, raised two sons, and fulfilled every role expected of her. Yet performing her assigned male role functioned as a secret prison for her female soul. She survived by cycling through extended periods of hiding and guilt, occasionally allowing her true identity to quietly surface in small, hidden ways, wearing female clothing beneath her business suits, shaving her skin smooth, or trying on makeup in moments of solitary expression.

Renée Richards: Beyond the Icon

 

In 1975, at the age of 41, Renée Richards underwent gender-affirming surgery and began living openly as a woman. Two years later, she would become one of the most consequential figures in the history of transgender participation in sport. Born in New York in 1934, Richards had already lived an extraordinary life before becoming a public symbol: she was a highly accomplished tennis player, captain of the Yale men's tennis team, and an ophthalmologist. In 1976, after she was outed as transgender by broadcaster Richard Carlson, she was barred from entering the U.S. Open women's competition because she refused to submit to the chromosome test demanded by the United States Tennis Association. She challenged the decision in court, and in August 1977 the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor. At the 1977 U.S. Open, the 43-year-old Richards finally entered the women's draw. She lost her opening singles match to Virginia Wade, but reached the doubles final, where she and her partner lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stöve. Richards subsequently became a coach, working with players including Navratilova, and her name became inseparable from one of the earliest and most important legal battles over transgender participation in professional sport.

 

Yet the woman at the center of this history is far more complicated than the historical shorthand of "transgender tennis pioneer" suggests. Now in her nineties, Richards remains a deeply contradictory figure. The person who once went to court to establish her right to compete as a woman now argues that trans women who experienced male puberty should not compete in women's sport. That tension is at the heart of Finding Renée Richards, because the book is not interested in turning Richards into a convenient icon. Instead, it tries to recover the complicated human being behind the headline, the lawsuit and the history-making moment. And it is this woman, with all her contradictions, achievements, struggles and complexities, that journalist and author Julie Kliegman set out to find. Kliegman has spent much of their career exploring the places where sport, identity and the human stories behind public controversies intersect. Their work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, Slate, The Verge, Vox and Texas Monthly. They have worked as a reporter, editor and fact-checker, served as Copy Chief at Sports Illustrated, and written extensively about transgender athletes, women's sports and mental health. And now that Julie Kliegman has published Finding Renée Richards, I am delighted to welcome them to The Heroines of My Life to talk about the woman they spent years trying to understand, the extraordinary journey of researching and writing her story, and what they discovered along the way.

Interview with Sofía Diéguez

 

Sofía Diéguez is an Argentine transgender actress, singer, performer, playwright and cultural worker. She was born on December 8, 1986, in Buenos Aires and grew up in Lanús. She began studying acting at the age of thirteen and later trained in theatre, musical theatre, ballet and singing, including studies at the Teatro Colón. Her acting training also included work with Alicia Zanca, Ana María Campoy, Pepe Cibrián and Julieta Vallina. At sixteen, she was cast in Pepe Cibrián's El fantasma de Canterville, appearing in the production during the 2003 and 2004 seasons. She subsequently continued her theatrical training and toured Latin America with children's theatre productions. At the age of twenty-five, Sofía began her gender transition and temporarily stepped away from acting and performance. She later returned to the profession with a role in Un gallo para Esculapio.

 

Her subsequent television work included El Marginal, where she played La Luli, and Telefe's Pequeña Victoria, where she played Violeta. Her theatre career includes Crianzas, el musical, based on the work of Susy Shock, for which she received the 2021 ATINA Award for Female Performer. She later wrote and starred in Magenta, una sirena más allá del mar, a children's musical inspired by the figure of the mermaid and addressing identity and freedom. Her later theatrical work has included Estar System, in which she also participated in the creative and dramaturgical process, and Teoría de la Sirena, a musical biodrama and autobiographical work combining theatre, music and elements of her own life. In 2023, she made her feature-film debut in Natural Arpajou's Unicornio. In 2025, she appeared in El suelo que sostiene a Hande, a Buenos Aires theatre production inspired by the life of Turkish transgender activist Hande Kader. Alongside her acting career, Sofía is a singer and songwriter who performs under the artistic identity La Sirena. In 2022, she released her first single, La Sirena, followed by an EP featuring La Sirena, Medusa, Sola and La Poderosa. She writes her own lyrics and melodies and has also participated in musical performances and live cultural productions. Outside the stage and screen, Sofía has worked as a tutor at the Mocha Celis educational project. Her career encompasses theatre, television, cinema, musical performance, songwriting, dramaturgy and autobiographical work, alongside public work on transgender visibility, representation and trans childhoods.

Interview with Stevie Bennett

Stevie Bennett is a British transgender woman, writer, software architect, former quantitative trader, Ironman finisher and father of three. After spending decades suppressing her gender identity, she transitioned in middle age and has since documented her experiences through her writing and social media. Stevie built a long career in software development and architecture and also worked in quantitative trading. Before transitioning, she was married and became the parent of three children. She met her future wife in Dublin when she was thirty-six, and the family later lived in London and rural Ireland. Endurance sport became another important part of her life. After taking up cycling and triathlon, Stevie completed a full Ironman in 2016. Medical investigations into her hormone levels later became an unexpected turning point in her life. After discovering unusually low testosterone and experiencing subsequent hormonal and physical changes, including feminisation, she began confronting the transgender identity she had spent much of her life trying to suppress.

 

Her transition brought both profound personal fulfilment and significant upheaval. Her marriage ended, and she has written openly about the joy of finally living as herself, alongside the grief and loss connected with the changes to her family life. Stevie has since undergone gender-affirming surgery and continued to document her experiences through her publication, Fast Track Femme, where she writes about transition, family, divorce, surgery, ageing, dating, technology and artificial intelligence. Alongside her writing, she continues to work in technology and has explored the use of AI agents in software and creative projects. Today, at fifty-seven, Stevie is continuing to build a new life while remaining a parent, technology professional, endurance athlete and writer. Her story is an unusual combination of a decades-long hidden transgender identity, family life, elite endurance sport, an unexpected hormonal journey and a rapid public transition later in life.

Interview with Luly Arias

Luly Arias is an actress, activist, educator and nurse from San José, Catamarca, Argentina. She began her gender transition during adolescence and, at 16, was expelled from her family home. She later studied Pedagogy and Social Education, graduating in 2009 before moving to Buenos Aires, where she continued her education in nursing. Her professional and artistic trajectory developed alongside her activism. She became involved in Cooperativa Arte Trans, a pioneering theatre collective created to provide transgender and travesti people with opportunities in the arts, and appeared in productions including Made in Lanús. She was also one of the protagonists of Guillermo Bergandi's documentary Reina de Corazones and later joined the cast of Telefe's prime-time series Pequeña Victoria in 2019. Education has remained central to Arias's work. She taught at the Bachillerato Popular Travesti Trans Mocha Celis, where she worked with trans and travesti students, and later worked within the diversity area of the Buenos Aires Province Ministry of Health, including training healthcare professionals in inclusive care.
 

Luly has also participated in projects such as Unides por la Música, bringing together trans, travesti and non-binary artists from Argentina and Uruguay, and has written extensively about trans representation, employment, housing, healthcare, cultural inclusion and historical memory. Her work combines artistic practice with activism, with particular attention to the opportunities available to transgender people outside the stereotypes traditionally imposed on them. From a small town in Catamarca to theatre, television, public health and activism in Buenos Aires, Luly Arias's trajectory has crossed many of the institutions from which transgender people have historically been excluded, while she has continued working to make those spaces more accessible to others. 

Remembering Liz Eden

 

Long before it was safe, or even really possible, to live openly as a trans woman in America, Liz Eden did it anyway, loudly, unapologetically, and on her own terms. Born Ernest Aron in Brooklyn in 1946, she lost her mother at fourteen, left home at eighteen, and remade herself in Greenwich Village, taking a new name after Elizabeth Taylor and finding a chosen family among the drag balls and after-hours clubs of the city's queer underground, in the same orbit as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. Fate handed her a strange kind of fame: her partner John Wojtowicz's botched 1972 bank robbery, carried out in part to fund her surgery, became the basis for Dog Day Afternoon (1975), one of the most celebrated films of the decade. Yet Liz herself was reduced to a deadnamed, misunderstood footnote in it. She refused to stay a footnote. She used the notoriety to pay for her own transition, told her story in her own words in a 1977 magazine piece, and kept living boldly and openly through the rest of her life, eventually settling in Rochester. She died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, at just 41, but not before insisting, in her own writing, that hers was a story worth telling. This interview, and Anni Arbour's research behind it, are an answer to that wish.

 

Anni Arbour writes Trans Ascending , a Substack publication devoted to telling transgender history and contemporary trans lives with the depth and accuracy they're too rarely given elsewhere. Her subjects have ranged from Lynn Conway, the pioneering computer engineer who transitioned decades before it was safe to do so publicly, to working artists, activists, and everyday trans women whose stories don't usually make it into print at all. The Herstory of Liz Eden , published across eight parts in late 2025, is Anni's most ambitious project to date. It is a full-length reconstruction of a woman who has spent fifty years as a footnote in someone else's story, first as a side character in a magazine article, then in a Hollywood film, and now, finally, as the subject of her own. Built from archival research, original manuscripts, and interviews others overlooked, the series recovers Liz Eden's own voice from underneath five decades of secondhand telling. I am so happy and grateful that Anni agreed to sit down and chat with me about this work.

Interview with Cassandra Cass

 

Cassandra Cass is the kind of woman who seems to have stepped out of a dream and decided to make that dream real. An actress, showgirl, burlesque performer, glamour model and television personality, she has spent decades creating herself as both a woman and an artist, with a career that has taken her from the drag bars of the American Midwest to the stages of San Francisco and, eventually, to Hollywood. Audiences came to know her through productions including CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2004), Trantasia (2006), Wild Things (2010), What's the T? (2012), Strut (2016) and Hooked on the Look (2017). But behind the larger-than-life blonde bombshell is a story that began with a little girl in Iowa who simply knew there was another version of herself waiting to emerge.

 

Cassandra was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, in a family with four boys. From childhood, she gravitated toward traditionally feminine toys and activities, including My Little Pony and Cabbage Patch dolls. Her mother encouraged her to explore those interests, while her father initially struggled to understand and accept her femininity. Her mother would eventually become an important figure in Cassandra's life, and her death from cancer would leave another lasting mark on her story. As a teenager, Cassandra discovered the world of drag and began sneaking into gay bars to perform. Drag gave her something precious, a place where femininity was not something to hide but something she could explore, celebrate and transform into art. At approximately 18, she left Iowa for Florida and began attempting to live as a woman. The reality was far less glamorous than the dream. She struggled to find employment while presenting as a woman and was even confronted with offers of sex work, which she refused.

Interview with Petra Hristova

Petra Hristova is a Bulgarian transgender woman, writer and activist whose personal struggle for legal recognition became one of the most significant transgender rights cases in Bulgaria. Born in 1998, she grew up in northern Bulgaria, moving between Veliko Tarnovo, Lyaskovets, Kozarevets and Gorna Oryahovitsa. Her childhood was marked by isolation and bullying, including physical violence, and she has spoken publicly about growing up without the freedom and security that many children take for granted. At the age of twelve, Petra came across an interview with a Bulgarian transgender woman living abroad. It was a turning point. At a time when little information about transgender identities was available in Bulgarian, she began researching the subject herself, often relying on English-language sources to understand feelings she had struggled to name. Education became an important part of Petra's life. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Applied Linguistics, studying English and Korean, followed by a Master's degree in English Philology. She also obtained a professional qualification in organisational psychology. Later, she enrolled in studies in midwifery, inspired by the idea of helping bring new life into the world. Petra began her medical transition after her first year at university and started hormone therapy in September 2015. Finding appropriate medical care proved difficult, as she encountered specialists who lacked experience with, or were unwilling to treat, transgender patients. In January 2022, she underwent gender-affirming surgery at a private clinic in Greece. 

Interview with Barbara Herr

Barbara Herr is a transgender woman, actress, cabaret artist, showgirl and activist whose remarkable life spans more than five decades of LGBTQ+ performance history. Born Robert Hernández in the Bronx, New York, in 1955 to Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrant parents, she grew up between New York and Puerto Rico, an experience that would shape both her identity and her extraordinary artistic career. Barbara moved to Puerto Rico as a teenager and began performing in 1973 under the name Bobby Herr. During the 1970s and 1980s, she became part of the island's vibrant world of drag, cabaret and nightclub entertainment, performing in venues such as Bachelor in Santurce and Stars in Condado. She also worked in theatre and television and toured with a revue connected with the legendary Héctor Del San Juand and Ed Vachan. Later, she toured the Caribbean as a solo artist, headlining her own show during hotel residencies in the Dominican Republic. Two important figures helped shape her artistic life. Antonio Pantojas, one of Puerto Rico's most celebrated entertainers, became her mentor, teacher and close friend, while the legendary Lady Catiria became an important artistic influence. Through them and many other performers of her generation, Barbara became part of a rich Puerto Rican and Nuyorican tradition of transgender and drag performance that has only recently begun to receive the historical recognition it deserves.

Interview with Martina Sobková

When I first spoke with Martina Sobková, I talked to a woman who was redefining what beauty, ambition, and femininity could look like. At 36, she had already made history as the first transgender woman from the Czech Republic to compete at Miss Trans Star International in São Paulo, where she earned the title of Miss Evolution. But even then, it was clear that Martina’s journey was only beginning. Now, she has stepped onto another, even bigger stage: Miss International Queen 2025, one of the most prestigious and internationally recognized pageants for transgender women. Getting there required far more than a beautiful gown, a polished catwalk, and a sash. Martina had to prepare a national costume and talent, balance intense preparation with her career in finance, and somehow keep going even when she was physically exhausted. What makes this second chapter particularly interesting, however, is that Martina does not look back on Miss International Queen simply as a glamorous achievement. Beneath the glitter, she discovered something much more personal. She learned how easily the pursuit of perfection can make us lose sight of ourselves, and how important it is to remember that our lives cannot be reduced to one competition, one appearance, or one moment on stage.

Interview with Catherine Burton

 

Catherine “Cat” Burton has spent most of her life navigating worlds in which she was never expected to belong. Born into an aviation family, she began flying professionally in 1972, at a time when there were no female professional pilots in the United Kingdom. What followed was an extraordinary career spanning some 45 years, during which she flew everything from Vickers Viscounts to Boeing 747s and eventually became a long-haul captain with British Airways. Yet while aviation gave Cat a life she loved, it also provided a remarkably effective place to hide a part of herself that she had not yet fully understood.

 

Cat eventually came out as transgender in her late fifties and returned to the flight deck as herself, supported by British Airways and, as she discovered, by many of the colleagues she had feared might reject her. Her story is not simply about transition or aviation. It is about identity, courage, humour and the extraordinary freedom that comes from finally stopping the exhausting work of pretending to be someone else. It is also a story about what happens when a workplace chooses not merely to tolerate difference, but to recognise the value of the person standing in front of them. Cat went on to become a diversity champion, an advocate for women and minorities in aviation and, after retiring from British Airways, a flying instructor who clearly has no intention whatsoever of slowing down. As she puts it rather succinctly, there will be “plenty of time for that when I’m dead.”

Interview with Kay Kirkman

Kay Kirkman’s journey towards becoming oneself is inseparable from an entire lifetime. For more than six decades, Kay lived within a life shaped by expectations and responsibilities. She built a career in mental health nursing, became a husband, father and grandfather, and spent forty years married to Julia, the woman she loved. Yet alongside that life was another truth, one Kay had carried since childhood and had never quite been able to silence. It was only after Julia’s death that the walls Kay had built around that hidden part of herself began to come down. Grief, strangely enough, became a doorway. What followed was not a simple story of finally “coming out,” but a deeply human process of questioning, remembering, grieving, accepting and, ultimately, learning how to live as the woman who had always been there.

 

Kay has now captured that journey in her memoir, Becoming Kay: A Story of Identity, Loss, Courage and Self-Discovery, published in August 2026. It is a book about much more than transition. It is about marriage and parenthood, ageing and identity, mental health, prejudice and acceptance. It is also about the people who remain important to us even when life changes beyond recognition. What I particularly love about Kay's story is that it challenges one of the most damaging assumptions surrounding transition, the idea that there is an age by which we must have figured ourselves out. Kay reminds us that sometimes the road to ourselves is extraordinarily long, and that arriving late does not make the destination any less beautiful. There is also something wonderfully warm about the way Kay approaches her story. Alongside the difficult moments, there is humour, honesty and an appreciation for the absurdities of life. She doesn't present herself as someone who suddenly became a completely different person. She presents herself as someone who finally stopped hiding a part of the person she had always been.