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 Jynx de Lygh

Jynx Geneviève de Lygh is a mother of five, a veteran of four combat tours, a helicopter mechanic and cybersecurity specialist, a transgender activist, and now a recording artist, Jynx has lived several lives before arriving at the woman she always knew was somewhere inside her. But perhaps the most remarkable part of her story is not how many battles she has fought, but how she has continued to find new ways to turn those battles into something meaningful. Music was there long before transition. As a young person growing up near Ithaca, New York, Jynx found something resembling peace with a guitar or a microphone in her hands. While the rest of the world seemed to be telling her who she was supposed to be, music gave her somewhere to breathe. Then came 23 years in the military, four combat tours, marriages, motherhood, and decades of trying to fit into a life that never quite felt like her own. At forty, Jynx finally began her transition. And, in what seems almost like a metaphor for her entire life, she refused to do things quietly.

Interview with Nikita Carter

For nearly 55 years, music was Nikita Carter’s language. As an avant-garde improvising saxophonist and composer, she thrived in a world of sound, vibration, and connection, creating bold, unconventional music that spoke directly to the soul. In August of this year, she added a new title to her creative résumé: published author. Her debut book, a project nine years in the making, grew out of a period of solitude when she had no one to confide in and was trying to make sense of her life. Much of it reflects on her gender transition in her 60s, placing her among the relatively small number of people who transition later in life. She describes that experience as carrying both the advantages and the scars of living for decades in a privileged role, and then stepping into an identity with profoundly different societal power dynamics. The transition brought significant losses. Many former friends, collaborators, and professional contacts disappeared from her life, and her career in music suffered as a result. She also faced risks that had not been part of her life before, including ridicule, social invisibility, and even the threat of physical violence. Among the most frightening episodes she recalls was being wrongfully arrested and imprisoned in Mexico. 

Interview with Sarafina Maraschino

Sarafina Maraschino is a multifaceted individual whose journey encompasses military service, legal advocacy, musical innovation, and activism within the transgender community. Sarafina pursued higher education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in History. She furthered her academic credentials by obtaining a Master of Jurisprudence in Indian Law from the University of Tulsa College of Law. Sarafina's commitment to public service is evident through her 20 years of federal service. She served six years in the U.S. Air Force, followed by fourteen years in the Office of Counsel for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, San Francisco District. In her role as the District’s Tribal Liaison, she developed partnerships between her agency and Indian tribes in Northern California, particularly in the Klamath Basin, focusing on ecosystem restoration, watershed assessment, and water infrastructure.

Interview with Alessandra Alferes

Monika: My lovely guest today is Alessandra Alferes, a transactivist, content creator, pianist, and mother of two children from São Paulo, Brazil. She is a screenwriter, producer, director, and editor of the TransSaber channel and presenter of the VídeoCast “Café Trans”. Hello Ale! Thank you for accepting my invitation.

Ale: Hello, Monika! Thank you for the opportunity!

Monika: You are a woman of many talents. Could you say a few words about yourself?

Ale: I am a musician, conductor at UNESP, and professor of Music, Languages, Public Speaking and Performance. I have a specialization in Teaching and another in Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations. I give lectures on the LGBTQIAPN+ agenda at universities and schools and participate in podcasts as a guest, in addition to producing my own podcast through the TransSaber Channel. I am also the "mama" of a 6-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl.

Interview with Lily Gist

By the time Lily Gist picks up a guitar, there is already a lifetime of music inside her. A lifelong cellist, she describes melodies learned from composers such as Bach, Elgar, Bloch, Bartók, Schumann and Grieg as something that freely rattles around in her mind before finding its way into her guitar playing. That classical sensitivity to tension, release, timbre and emotional weight has found an unexpected home in the raw, restless world of Brooklyn punk. Lily is a visual artist as well as a musician. Her work has explored the ways people measure and understand experience, including questions of social bias, self-perception and the blind spots that shape how we see one another. Her artistic life has moved between visual art, technology and music, with earlier work and professional experience connecting her to institutions and creative communities in New York. Then there is Frida Kill, the Brooklyn feminist punk quartet she shares with Maria Lina, Jeanette D. Moses and Gaby Canales. The band's music is deliberately unruly, drawing from post-punk, garage rock, noise and riot grrrl, but beneath the distortion is something deeply human: four women with different histories learning how to make space for one another. They trade instruments, share vocals and songwriting, and bring their individual experiences into a collective sound. Gist has described that process as complex, sometimes argumentative, but ultimately grounded in listening, learning and having each other's backs.

For Lily, punk is not simply an aesthetic. It can be a place where difficult experiences are allowed to become sound. On Frida Kill's 2022 EP, EP 1,, she takes the lead on "Get Over It", a song born from an encounter in which a friend misgendered a trans performer. What began as an uncomfortable question about whether she was "overreacting" eventually became a song about the impossibility of simply swallowing hurt and moving on. Another track, "Here's Hoping", confronts the cruelty she encountered while transitioning even more directly. Yet there is nothing one-dimensional about Frida Kill's anger. Their songs can move from immigration and the treatment of undocumented street vendors to gender, friendship, nightlife and the ordinary absurdities of surviving in New York. Their first recordings, the 2020 Demos and 2022's EP 1, captured a band still discovering itself, learning instruments, switching roles and finding its voice in the Brooklyn rock scene. There is a particularly striking contrast at the heart of Lily Gist's story: the precision of a cellist, the curiosity of a visual artist and the uncompromising volume of a punk guitarist. Her music does not try to smooth those worlds into something neat. Instead, it lets them collide, producing something noisy, vulnerable, thoughtful and alive. And somewhere between the classical melodies in her head and the amplified chaos of Brooklyn, Lily Gist has found a language of her own.