Interview with Alysha Scarlett

Monika: Today I have invited Alysha Scarlett. Alysha has won 13 writing awards, is an American business owner, wrote a book, and was a screenwriter for a theatrical film. She is the first transgender or non-binary person to get their name and gender legally affirmed in a rural Utah county. Hello Alysha!

Alysha: Hi Monika! Thank you for having me on The Heroines of My Life!

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself?

Alysha: I am 33 years old and from Utah. Accepting myself closes the book on a years-long journey to realize my identity. My accepting myself had a direct connection with me not letting residue from the Latter-day Saint (formerly Mormon) church influence me any longer. I am on hormone replacement therapy. I also look forward to doing all medical transition surgeries this year.

Monika: I have visited the website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have been shocked by their attitude toward transgender people. In short, they do not allow medical, surgical, or social transition among their believers, and they specify that “taking these actions will be cause for Church membership restrictions.”

Alysha: This is one of many, many ways that the church doesn’t deserve to have “Jesus Christ” in its name.

Interview with Kimberly Davis

Monika: Today I have the sheer pleasure of meeting Rebekah Kimberly Davis, the author of "Becoming Kimberly: A Transgender's Journey" (2021), a biographical book that covers different aspects of her transition. Hello Kimberly!

Kimberly: Hi Monika! Thank you for speaking with me today. It is a pleasure.

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself?

Kimberly: I have always known something was different in me but being raised in the rural southern USA, I had to pretend to be someone else for most of my life. I was married twice and fathered three sons. My second marriage ended in 2016 with the death of my wife of 24 years. Her death freed me from a promise I made to her early in the marriage.

The first year Vikki and I were married, she discovered my girl clothes. The first thing on her mind was that I was having an affair. So, I made a full admission of my cross-dressing activities. Vikki, being an old hippie and survivor of the sexual revolution, did her level best to accept this and bring it out into our bedroom. She could not quite accept it.

Interview with Jessie McGrath

Monika: You do not like lawyers? Please do not go away because today I have invited a nice lawyer and an amazing woman. Jessie McGrath has been a prosecutor with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office since 1988. Her areas of expertise include consumer protection, cyber-crime, narcotics, and juvenile law. She has been lead counsel or co-counsel in consumer protection cases against Apple, Uber, Sony BMG, Choice Point, Honda of Santa Monica, McKenna BMW, and Gunderson Chevrolet. In April 2002 she was named Deputy District Attorney of the Month. Ms. McGrath has served on the Board of Directors and was Executive Vice President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the union representing the more than 900 rank and file prosecutors of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. She is the happy parent of five children, three of whom will be lawyers too. Hello Jessie!

Jessie: Hi Monika. Thank you so much for reaching out to me and asking me to participate in your amazing work.

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.

Interview with Mary Ann Horton

Monika: Today I have the pleasure of talking to Mary Ann Horton, PhD, an American transgender activist, computer systems architect, Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, author, and speaker. In 1997, she persuaded Lucent Technologies to become the first Fortune 500 company to add transgender-inclusive language to its nondiscrimination policy, and to add coverage for transition care and surgery. Her work, which was soon replicated at Apple and Avaya, led Out & Equal Workplace Associates to present her with the 2001 Trailblazer Outie Award (since renamed the LGBT Corporate Advocate of the Year).

Mary Ann founded several transgender social and activist groups. She conducted a research study that proved the addition of transgender medical coverage would cost companies virtually nothing. She has been featured in the Daily Beast, Out Magazine, Google Arts and Culture, Salon, Diversity Factor, SHRM, L-Mag, Nokia, Faces of Open Source, and Out TV. Hello Mary Ann!

Mary Ann: Hi, Monika. Thanks for inviting me.

Monika: You give a lot of interviews. What is the most frequent question related to your professional career or transition that you are usually asked and you are already fed up with?

Mary Ann: You know, I get a lot of great questions, but none of them really annoy me. One of the most challenging questions is “Are you treated worse professionally as a woman than you were as a man?” After all, many professional women are talked down to, looked over for promotion, or asked to make coffee.

Interview with Dana Day

Monika: Today I have invited Dana Day, an American transgender woman that documents her transition on social media. Hello Dana!

Dana: Hi Monika! And thank you for your interest in my journey!

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself?

Dana: I'm 42 years old and rebuilding my life. Essentially starting life over but this time, as myself. It's taken me a long time to find self-acceptance, but when I did, the decision to transition was an obvious one. The real me has always been creative and imaginative, but somewhere along my many lost years, I sold my soul for security and financial gain.

I buried my identity because of my desperation for acceptance from others. So in a broad sense, my journey to transition involves much more than just medically transitioning. It is a long walk down a path where I eagerly relinquish my past burdens and expectations and take my newfound energy to grow, to blossom, to finally... buy my soul back.

Monika: What inspired you to share your intimate life moments on social media?

Dana: In my opinion, the most powerful tool for any transgender person, to bring to bear, is simply being visible for others to see. It is a statement so moving, that the foundations of society crumble at the edges. Just the acknowledgment of our existence pushes civilization to grow up.