Monika: There is a whole education that girls receive, often informally, about navigating the world as women. How did you approach teaching Luna things you might once have assumed every girl simply learns along the way?
Jeneen: Luna was teaching me things first. She’s always loved make-up and uber girly things, so she would practise on me, trying to teach me how to contour when she was 10 and I was 40! I’ve always had the knowing that there are many ways to be ‘woman’, so I think that gives her freedom to explore what it means for her in terms of dress and outward appearance. She’s exploring an alt phase at the minute, and it’s beautiful to see this freedom and creativity in her.
Monika: That sounds like a lovely reversal of roles. Yet the education girls receive also includes much harder lessons about safety. How did that part come into your lives?
Jeneen: Regarding safety as women, we learnt the hard way. Luna was attacked and seriously sexually assaulted by a cis man when she was 11. She had snuck out of a local youth club during an afternoon in summer 2022 and was taken down an alleyway. As you can imagine, a lot of education came after that. She looks older than her years, but we are acutely aware of how men have looked at her since that age, and we have continuous conversations about being safe in a world where men are predatory. I teach her self-defence techniques, and when we talk about bodies, we talk about ALL bodies, not just binary male/female, because she needs to know both.
Monika: Luna is a teenager now, which inevitably brings dating into the picture. What conversations have you had about the additional risks she may face as a trans girl?
Jeneen: As she is getting older, we also had to have conversations about the extra risks of dating as a trans female, and my knowledge is limited, so I call on my trans sisters. When she wants to meet a new boy she fancies, I’m always lurking in the background, unknown to him, sussing out his energy and investigating his social media. She knows to carry her keys in her hand if it gets dark, that bi/queer men are statistically going to be safer, and that other girls won’t always be her sisters.
We have had to chat about the police not always being safe people, countries she cannot travel to, the list goes on. I’m very risk averse when it comes to her safety and Luna thinks I’m overbearing, but the risks are real, so I am explicit when I give her information on how to be safer, but we are both still learning and trying to find a balance between safety and living.
Monika: How much of yourself do you recognise in Luna? Are there mannerisms, stubbornness, humour, creativity or other little pieces of yourself that you see looking back at you?
Jeneen: Yes, absolutely. She’s as wild as I was! Hates rules and expectations, curious and determined. My mum (Luna’s nan) and I have a running joke where I say, “Can you please remove the curse that you wished my child would be as wilful as I was?” It also takes her a few occasions of getting something wrong before she learns a lesson too.
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“Luna was teaching me things first.” |
Monika: Is there anything about her that is unmistakably hers, where you think, “That definitely didn’t come from me”?
Jeneen: Her humour. She is the funniest person I know, quick-witted. That definitely doesn’t come from me. She also has a deep love of music, and I adore how she brings so much music and song into our home. She has tougher boundaries at a younger age than I did, and she’s less forgiving than I am, which I don’t think is a bad thing.
Monika: Has becoming closer to Luna changed the way you remember her childhood? Do you ever look back at old memories and reinterpret them through what you know about her now?
Jeneen: Again, Luna was young when she transitioned, so there weren’t many years before ‘Luna’.
Monika: At what point did you stop thinking primarily about protecting Luna from the world and start thinking about helping her become confident enough to navigate the world herself?
Jeneen: I’m not fully there yet. Because of what happened to her at age 11, and at the same time we were fighting for affirming healthcare (blockers) and she was being diagnosed with autism and ADHD, we had begun home educating, and Luna spent a lot of time refusing to leave home or engage with much outside of immediate close people. We became quite co-dependent and rarely had time apart. As time passed, blockers were prescribed, we worked on trauma and improving her mental health, and she wanted to start living again.
We started family therapy and were supported to work on increasing independence for us both. We’ve made huge strides, and Luna is more confident in her abilities to stay safe than I am. I think that could be common in a lot of parents, wanting to keep their teen safe. I fill her pockets with protective sigils, and there’s a tracker on her phone. It is a constant state of negotiation and meeting in the middle. In lots of ways Luna is more mature than her years, but in other ways, she isn’t. It’s a work in progress.
Monika: Do you think being Luna’s mother made you an activist, or did it reveal an activist who was already somewhere inside you?
Jeneen: I was already an activist. I have six planets in Libra, so a sense of justice has always run through my life. I trained to be a learning disability nurse because I wanted to advocate for people with learning disabilities who, up until the 1980s, were still kept and abused in institutions. I had already started to learn about racism and how to be anti-racist. I have photos of Luna before she was Luna, at demos for refugees and human rights.
I’m embarrassed to say this, but when it was clear that Luna was trans and I was just getting over an abusive relationship, I remember in my exhausted state thinking ‘why me?’, but not long after knowing that of course it had to be me. Advocating for marginalised groups of people, often on the margins, is where I’m supposed to be, and what I’m supposed to do.
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| “Always a mother first.” |
Monika: Your activism has also found its way into your art and music. What can art express about trans lives and trans families that political arguments simply cannot?
Jeneen: My activism has continually changed, and I hope it always does. I think the change comes when the reason and intention of your activism changes. I had spent many years as an activist as a body to make up numbers, to be loud during chants, to connect with others doing the same. Anger and fear were the main emotions that spurred me forward. But as I’ve said before, if you are in activism for longer periods of time, the fear and anger leave you exhausted, and I’ve come to realise that it doesn’t affect the change I want to make. There is room for all the various ways we stand up for what we care about, and there will always be room for necessary anger at injustice, but for me personally, I needed to explore what I wanted from it and how I can do that in a healthier way for me.
Monika: You mention wanting to reach people who are neither openly supportive nor hostile, but who may have misconceptions about transgender people. How do you use your art and music to connect with this audience?
Jeneen: I would like to reach the group of humans in the middle. I have no desire to engage with bigots who don’t want to change their minds, but there is a group in the middle who hold and act on inaccurate information or who haven’t had any positive life experience of trans people. It’s through connecting with those people that I feel I can have an impact. As soon as I start shouting, they shut down and we can’t converse, so I ask myself, how can I be approachable? How can I share our story and make it human and accessible for people to learn through? Art and creativity often reach people outside of explicitly political environments. It can in some ways appear initially gentler and non-confronting. As artists, we know that art and music in its many forms is often political, but a lot of people won’t immediately recognise it as such until after the message has been delivered.
Monika: You wrote and performed a protest song after the Supreme Court ruling. When you were standing there performing it, were you thinking like an artist, an activist, a mother, or all three at once?
Jeneen: Always a mother first. Luna was stood at the very back and didn’t want to be seen or perceived, so I was conscious of her. I am always conscious of the many people in our trans communities who don’t have affirming parents, so I take their calling me ‘mother’ very seriously. And it’s the mother’s love that drives me, because standing in front of hundreds of people is not something I enjoy at all. My legs had buckled, hence the swaying you can see on the video, and immediately afterwards I was overwhelmed with tears. But it delivered a message of love and affirmation to those who needed it, and music always changes the energy of a space, so it was worth it for that.
Monika: Supporting Luna apparently made you question some assumptions about your own identity as well. Without putting words in your mouth, what did your daughter’s journey reveal to you about yourself?
Jeneen: Haha, another running joke, this one about Luna being trans turning me queer. I thought it was quite a natural thing to explore gender as a construct, seeing as I was raising a trans teen. I wanted to explore any gender stereotypes I might have subconsciously put on her and unpick where that came from. And then, like with a lot of learning, there is an invitation to apply theory to practice, so I started to explore what gender meant for me. What were my beliefs and behaviours around being ‘woman’, and what were they around ‘man’?
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“I have six planets in Libra, so a sense of justice has always run through my life..” |
Monika: That sounds like a very honest piece of self-examination. What did you discover when you looked at your own relationships through that lens?
Jeneen: I looked at my relationships with men and realised I had a lot of daddy issues that I sought to heal within the men I had chosen to be in intimate relationships with. I had a few experiences of intimate relations with women that had been based on attraction and pleasure, but it wasn’t common knowledge, and I hadn’t ever had a loving relationship with a woman. A lot of my relationships with men had been based on very fixed ideas of the gender binary and my expectations of them being protective and providing. The reductive ideas of feminine and masculine had played out in unhealthy ways, and I came to realise that I didn’t require a man to be what I needed. I could be all of those things for myself, and therefore could be free to explore what felt natural rather than what I thought I needed.
Monika: And once you allowed yourself that freedom, what did you learn about who you are attracted to?
Jeneen: I learnt I’m attracted to humans based on who they are as people: kind, adventurous, interesting, authentic and fun, rather than what genitals they had. This makes me pansexual. I’m more interested in how our energies merge rather than how we serve each other based on gender binary expectations. Whilst I’m still attracted to some cis heterosexual men, I think my life is far too queer for any of them to integrate into, so I have got a blanket ban on being open to dating them, and when I’m ready to openly date, it will probably just say queer.
Monika: You and Luna also travel and create together. What are you like when you are simply two people having an adventure, with no activism, no explanations and no one needing to educate anyone?
Jeneen: Most of our life and relationship is like other mother/daughter relationships. We are both headstrong, so we argue, and we can both be silly, so we laugh and giggle. We love movies and going to the cinema and are absolute geeks when it comes to Disney and Marvel fandoms. She loves music and horror things and tries to share them with me, and I love books and art, so I try to share that with her.
We have a close family, so there is always gossip, and we love food, so we are always inviting people for dinner. I’ve tried to take her travelling as much as possible so that she knows there are many ways to live this life, and I feel proud that she understands other cultures and ways of being. She isn’t into activism. She might be as she grows, or it might never be her thing, and that’s okay too. She’s finding things outside of me, which is gorgeous to watch, and I’m finding parts of myself that have been dormant for a long time. It’s very precious.
Monika: And finally, you and Luna have already shared some adventures together. What countries or places that you have never visited before would you most love to discover together?
Jeneen: Oh, this is interesting, because I’ve just been writing about countries and places that we can’t visit because they aren’t safe for trans people. I don’t think a lot of people realise that having free rein to travel the world is a privilege. But we’ve travelled Italy, Mexico, Croatia and France extensively, and she’s also been to Florida (when it was safe), Norway, Denmark, Spain, Cape Verde, Belgium and Greece. We have a family Spain and Portugal trip booked for over Christmas and New Year, and I’m trying to book a trip for Luna’s 16th birthday next year, which led me to writing about the places we can’t have on our list. We would love to explore the Greek isles some more, and places we haven’t been to but are on our list are Iceland, Japan, Romania, Canada/Alaska, and the Dominican Republic. Always open to recommendations too, though!
END OF PART 2
All photos: courtesy of Jeneen Lilith.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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