Some lives unfold in neat chapters. Robyn Gigl’s reads more like a layered novel, one where law, courage, persistence, and imagination keep circling back to one another until they finally click into place. Born in 1952, Robyn is an American lawyer, writer, and LGBTQ+ activist whose story stretches across courtrooms and bookshelves, personal reinvention and public change. Based in New Jersey, she has worked since the late 1970s as a litigation specialist in commercial and employment law, with forays into criminal defense, building a formidable legal career brick by brick. In 2006, she became managing partner of the firm she had joined decades earlier, began her gender transition three years later, and eventually moved to Gluck Walrath in 2015, a firm that would later merge with Dilworth Paxson. Before her transition, Robyn was married to a woman and raised three children, a reminder that transformation rarely erases what came before, it simply reframes it. Her legal work has never existed in a vacuum. Robyn has been at the center of meaningful change for transgender people in New Jersey, most notably through Sonia Doe v. New Jersey Department of Corrections, a case brought with the ACLU of New Jersey that challenged the placement of a transgender woman in men’s prisons. The 2021 settlement reshaped state policy, anchoring prison placement in gender identity rather than assumption. Beyond the courtroom, Robyn served on the state’s Transgender Equality Task Force and the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement, and in 2020, the New Jersey Law Journal named her one of the “Top Women in Law.” These are not just titles, they are markers of impact.
Yet long before her books received critical acclaim or legal honors, Robyn wanted to be a novelist. She began a manuscript in 1979, one that never quite found its ending, and it would take decades and encouragement from her son Colin, during National Novel Writing Month in 2010, for her to return to fiction with renewed determination. Out of that persistence came By Way of Sorrow, published in 2021, a legal thriller introducing transgender lawyer Erin McCabe. The New York Times called it “quietly groundbreaking,” and the quiet did not last long. The series grew with Survivor’s Guilt in 2022, Remain Silent in 2023, and Nothing but the Truth in 2024, earning major acclaim along the way. Survivor’s Guilt won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ Crime Writing and was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best mystery and thriller books of all time, while Remain Silent became a finalist for the same award. What binds Robyn’s worlds together is a deep belief in the power of human stories. She has said she does not want to preach through her novels, but to help readers understand what they may not yet know by letting them see the human face of an issue. That philosophy echoes through her activism, her legal work, and her fiction, all of it rooted in empathy rather than instruction. This interview sits at that intersection. In the conversation that follows, we talk about justice and storytelling, transition and timing, and the long patience sometimes required to become fully yourself.
Monika: Your most recent Erin McCabe novel, Nothing but the Truth, came out in 2024. What has life looked like for you since then, and how are you spending your time these days?
Robyn: Hi Monika. Nice to meet you. I’m still practicing law, still writing and still engaged in my advocacy for the transgender community here in New Jersey.
Monika: After four intense, high-stakes books in a row, did you feel a need to step back creatively, or was the pause after 2024 more about letting the dust settle?
Robyn: Actually, there really hasn’t been a pause, it only looks that way. What happened was that in 2023, as I was finishing the fourth book in the Erin McCabe series, Nothing but the Truth, my publisher, Kensington, decided that they didn’t want to continue the series, basically because it wasn’t selling as well as they had hoped. Since it’s almost unheard of for another publisher to pick up an existing series, especially if it’s not selling well, there was no point in me writing book five.
So as soon as the editing of Nothing but the Truth was finished, I started on a new book. I completed that manuscript shortly after Nothing but the Truth was published in June 2024 and my agent started shopping it to publishers in the fall of 2024. Two months later, it was acquired by Soho Press. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the publishing process moves slowly, but I’m happy to say that my next novel, All We Hide, will be published on August 4, 2026.
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| "Most of the time the fact that I’m trans is not a factor in how I’m perceived as a lawyer or in court." |
Monika: Has your relationship with Erin McCabe changed now that some time has passed since the last book, or does she still feel very present in your daily thoughts?
Robyn: I wouldn’t say Erin is with me daily, especially since I’ve been busy with a new main character, but I am incredibly proud of Erin. For me, Erin will always be like a first love. Someone who, even after you’ve moved on, holds a special place in your heart.
I love Erin as a character. I feel bad that she didn’t reach as many people as I had hoped, but I do know that she touched a number of people, and, at least based on my emails, helped some cis folks get a better understanding of trans folks. And who knows, never say never. If someone decided to make a TV or streaming series out of Erin McCabe (hint, hint), maybe she’ll come back. Between you and me, I’d love to write another book with Erin in it.
Monika: Are you currently working on something new, whether it’s another Erin McCabe story, a different kind of project, or something entirely unrelated to writing?
Robyn: When Kensington decided not to continue the series, I knew I had to come up with a different idea. I also knew that, as one of only a handful of trans authors in the U.S. writing in the crime/mystery genre, I still wanted to have a trans protagonist because we need positive trans characters.
But I wanted to avoid the new character being too close to Erin McCabe, so she couldn’t be a lawyer. Of all the options open to me, I decided on what probably is the most problematic, a cop. Even though I’ve never been a prosecutor, I have represented several county prosecutors’ offices and worked with individual law enforcement officers in civil cases. That experience provided me with a bit of an insider’s knowledge on how things work in law enforcement. That’s how Lieutenant Lauren Kelly was born.
She’s a lieutenant in a District Attorney’s Office in an unnamed “red” state. In creating Lauren, I knew that with all the homophobia and transphobia embedded within the law enforcement community, and the way many LGBTQ+ people have been treated by the police, Lauren was going to be a controversial character. I suspect there may be LGBTQ+ readers who won’t read the book because Lauren’s in law enforcement and they can’t root for a cop even if she’s trans.
But, as an author, I wanted to be able to explore that dynamic from the inside out, especially in the context of the “us versus them” mentality that many in law enforcement develop and how that dynamic shifts for Lauren when she transitions. Lauren has to deal not only with her gender transition, but transitioning from an “us” to a “them.” Since I know a number of LGBTQ+ law enforcement officers, I wanted to poke around and explore what that’s like for a trans cop.
Monika: Let’s dig into your Erin McCabe series. She enters the series already shaped by transition and its aftermath, rather than having her trans identity framed as a beginning or a reveal. Why was it important for you to write a transgender protagonist whose story starts after that profound personal change, rather than making transition itself the central plot engine?
Robyn: I started writing Erin in 2015. By then, Laverne Cox had been on the cover of TIME Magazine and Caitlyn Jenner had come out on national television. The public was generally aware that trans people existed. Because of that, I didn’t want to write about the process of transitioning.
I wanted to focus on what I perceived the public lacked and still lacks, an understanding of trans people and empathy toward the personal and societal issues we face. My goal was to establish Erin as a woman in the reader’s mind and then have them learn that she was trans and had transitioned. Other than a few mental flashbacks, you never see Erin before she transitioned.
I wanted the reader to focus on the everyday aspects of trans lives and let the reader appreciate the fact that being trans is just one part of Erin’s life. She’s still a daughter, sister, aunt, lawyer, friend, woman, all the things that help define who we are.
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| Available via robyngigl.com |
Robyn: I think both aspects are in play. Certainly, there’s no doubt in Erin’s mind that she can bring something to the representation of Sharise that other lawyers may not have, the shared experience of being trans.
When Erin and her law partner, Duane Swisher, first get into the case, Erin believes that the defense is going to be built around the fact that the dead man attacked Sharise when he discovered that she was trans. That’s the shared identity component. But Erin never questions what will happen if it turns out that Sharise wasn’t justified in killing him. Erin is still going to defend Sharise because that’s what defense lawyers do, you do the best you can even if your client is guilty.
Monika: Across the series, Erin repeatedly defends clients whose cases are labeled “open and shut,” particularly when those clients are transgender. What does Erin see, instinctively or professionally, that others in the system consistently fail to notice, and how does her trans experience sharpen that perception?
Robyn: I think most criminal defense attorneys will tell you that clients don’t always share the truth with their lawyers. Sometimes that’s because they’re guilty and don’t want to admit that to their lawyer for fear the lawyer won’t try their best and sometimes it’s because they think no one will believe them.
In both By Way of Sorrow and Survivor’s Guilt, where Erin represents trans clients who are accused of murder, her clients aren’t candid with her because they don’t believe anyone, in particular a jury, will believe the truth. I think most lawyers can sense when a client isn’t being fully candid, but because Erin is trans, she brings an additional understanding of her clients’ dilemma that other attorneys might not have.
Monika: Erin is deeply competent, cautious, and often painfully aware of how visible she is in every courtroom. How did you balance portraying her legal authority with the constant calculation required of a transgender woman navigating hostile or skeptical spaces?
Robyn: Let me start by saying that most of the time the fact that I’m trans is not a factor in how I’m perceived as a lawyer or in court. For me, being trans rarely enters my mind in a courtroom. I think the reason why I was able to navigate Erin’s perspective was based on the few times when being trans has been relevant.
So, for example, in your very gracious introduction of me, you referenced that I was co-counsel with the ACLU-NJ in the Sonia Doe case where we represented a trans woman incarcerated in a NJ men's correctional facility. One of the reasons the ACLU asked me to be involved in the case, and one of the things I brought to the case, was my lived experience as a trans woman.
Monika: There’s something powerful about those moments when lived experience quietly shifts the balance of a room, not through argument alone, but through presence.
Robyn: I also had the advantage that the attorneys from the Attorney General’s Office who were representing the Department of Corrections knew who I was because I had done training on trans issues for their office. So, I was able to sit with those attorneys and say, would you lock me up in a men’s prison? If not, you can’t do that to our client.
In another case, I was co-counsel with what was then the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (now A4TE) representing a trans man whose duties included monitoring men in a drug treatment program when they did urine tests. The reason he was terminated was because he “wasn’t assigned male at birth.” I think my involvement made it harder for the company’s attorneys to argue that our client could be terminated because they’d in essence be telling the court that since I was assigned male at birth I could do the job.
It was hard for them to look me in the eye and say that to the court. It was actually that experience that helped shape the scene in By Way of Sorrow when Erin argues with the judge for misgendering Sharise and tells him that whatever pronouns he uses for Sharise he has to use for Erin because they were both assigned male at birth. That’s the wonderful thing about writing fiction, you take a nugget of a real-life experience that made you feel a certain way and craft it into something different.
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| "Erin is not me." |
Robyn: It wasn’t so much exploring how fragile safety can be as much as it was about how the justice system could be perverted and used against a perceived enemy. That’s something happening routinely in this country now, but was not as widespread when I wrote Remain Silent.
I call Remain Silent my angry book. I wrote it in 2022 when things here in the U.S. started to get crazy with various states passing laws banning trans healthcare, bathroom bills that prohibited trans people from using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity and of course, Florida’s famous “Don’t say gay” legislation.
So, I wanted a vehicle to vent my anger at the way the trans community was being mistreated. At the same time, I wanted to provide a cross section of trans people over the span of my lifetime to show that we’ve always been here. In addition to Erin, the book has three other trans characters and one nonbinary character, ranging in age from their sixties to eleven years old.
Of course, I had to do all of that while still writing a legal thriller. Putting Erin in the crosshairs provided me with that opportunity to accomplish all my goals. It’s ironic that Remain Silent, a book that I’m personally very proud of, received the least critical acclaim of all my books.
Monika: Readers and critics often note the clear authenticity in Erin’s voice and choices. Where do you draw the line between Erin McCabe as a fictional construct and the lived experiences you bring to the page as a transgender lawyer yourself?
Robyn: Let’s start with the easy part, Erin is not me. Erin is thirty-five, attractive, bisexual, I’m none of the above. Also, the cases that Erin handles in the novels aren’t real or based on any cases that I’ve handled as a lawyer. I made them all up.
The things that are authentic are the dynamics of what takes place in handling a criminal case, the interactions between the lawyers, both in the courtroom and the informal “off the record” interplay with judges, and the procedural jockeying that takes place between the prosecution and defense.
Where Erin is my stand-in is in giving voice to the issues facing the trans community. I unabashedly admit that Erin does represent my point of view on those issues.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Robyn Gigl.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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