Interview with Robyn Gigl

 

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.

Interview with Jennifer Diane Reitz

 

Jennifer Diane Reitz moves through culture like a quiet constant, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, always shaping the space around her. Born in Oregon at the end of 1959 and raised in a childhood of perpetual motion, she learned early how to live between places, between definitions, between what is permitted and what is necessary. Science, fiction, music, and imagined worlds became not escapes but lifelines, ways of giving structure to a reality that rarely offered her safety or recognition. Her creative work, from the early days of independent game design to the formative chaos of the early internet, reflects this instinct to build worlds when none exist. With Happy Puppy, she helped define how games were discovered and shared online, and with Boppin’, she insisted that games could be strange, emotional, uncomfortable, and unapologetically adult. Her later webcomics, especially Unicorn Jelly, continue this refusal of simplicity, unfolding as living systems of myth, logic, and transformation that demand patience and curiosity rather than passive consumption.

 

Alongside her work in games and webcomics, including the long-running Unicorn Jelly and other formally inventive projects, Reitz has consistently explored themes of identity, perception, and transformation. As a trans woman who transitioned in the early 1980s under hostile social conditions, her personal history is marked by resilience, conflict, and moments of profound crisis, but also by enduring partnerships and chosen family. She later founded the website Transsexuality as an attempt to systematize and explain trans experience at a time when accessible information was scarce, a project that remains debated and contested. Taken together, Jennifer Diane Reitz’s career forms a singular narrative at the intersection of early internet culture, independent game development, and lived transgender history, making her a compelling and sometimes challenging voice to engage with in conversation.

Interview with Andrea Glose

Some conversations stay with you long after they end, not because they are loud or dramatic, but because they are honest. This interview with Andrea is one of those moments. Andrea Glose is a Bolivian trans woman living in Florida, a barista, a survivor, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and above all, a woman who has learned to keep choosing herself in a world that often makes that choice unbearably costly. What unfolds here is not a polished success story or a neatly wrapped narrative of triumph. It is a life spoken in full sentences, with humor, grief, warmth, and defiance woven together.

 

Andrea talks about sunshine and humidity, coffee orders and gothic style, but also about loss, loneliness, survival, and the quiet miracle of still being here. She speaks with tenderness about her family, with gratitude about chosen community, and with clarity about the political violence facing transgender women today. This conversation moves gently between the everyday and the existential, between laughter and heartbreak. It reminds us that femininity has no single shape, that self-worth is an act of resistance, and that sometimes the bravest revolution is simply continuing to exist, to love, and to hope. Andrea’s voice carries all of that, unfiltered and deeply human, and I am honored to share it with you.

Interview with Alicia Sainz Arballo

Alicia Sainz Arballo is a woman shaped by time, patience, and a deep willingness to look inward. A lifelong educator, counselor, and advocate, she spent 36 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District supporting students, mentoring teachers, and quietly building safer spaces through her school’s GSA and LGBTQIA+ professional development work. Long before she had the language or freedom to live openly, Alicia was already listening, observing, and caring, skills that would later become central to both her poetry and her transition. A musician since the age of six, with a formal background in music and counseling, Alicia has always understood emotion as something felt in the body before it ever becomes words. Poetry became her way of holding what could not yet be spoken, grief, longing, confusion, accountability, and eventually joy.

 

Her poem Grief weaves together the experiences of aging veterans and trans lives, offering a powerful meditation on loss, listening, and the difficult work of letting go of systems that once felt unquestionable. Alicia medically transitioned at 62, decades after first coming out and after a long period of detours, pauses, and self-protection. Her book Transition is not a story of sudden revelation, but of endurance, honesty, and the courage to begin again later in life. Writing with vulnerability about family, love, separation, and self-awareness, Alicia speaks to a generation of trans people whose stories are often overlooked. She continues to advocate for trans-affirming healthcare for all ages, reminding us that becoming yourself is not bound by youth, but by readiness, compassion, and truth.

Interview with Bobbie Dodds Glass

 

Teaching is basically a family business for Dr. Bobbie Dodds Glass, so much so that if you traced her family tree, it might look more like a school staff directory. Her four grown children are all teachers, their spouses are all teachers, and somehow, this doesn’t even begin to capture her influence on students, colleagues, and the broader education community. To date there are nearly 9,000 teachers, principals, counselors and central office administrators spread across the world who have spent a minimum of 8 weeks training with Dr. Glass on their way to becoming licensed and certified to work with the most extreme and marginalized students in their school districts. Bobbie’s journey in Special Education started back in 1977, right when P.L. 94-142, what we now know as IDEA, was changing the landscape for students with disabilities nationwide.

 

Bobbie has taught every grade level from K-12 and every level of higher education from undergrad to doctoral students. She has worked with students who are blind or visually impaired, pioneered the use of assistive technology with funding and support from Apple, IBM, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, and even led a state agency ensuring access to education, healthcare, and more for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. On top of that, she’s a licensed K-12 teacher, a full-time Special Resource Teacher, an advisor for LGBTQ+ programs in schools and medical curriculum, and a devoted mom and grandmother of 10. When she’s not shaping young minds, Bobbie is exploring Kentucky’s back roads, camping, off-roading, or navigating the great outdoors in her RV. She’s an inspiration for educators, families, and adventurers alike.

Interview with Patti Spangler

Patti Spangler’s life reads like an American road movie rewritten by truth, courage, and hard-earned self-understanding. Known to many as “Trucker Patti,” she has lived multiple lives across decades, identities, highways, and closets, not as an act of reinvention, but as survival. Born intersex with XXY chromosomes, Patti spent much of her life carrying a secret that shaped every decision she made, from love and marriage to career and geography. She was a Bourbon Street showgirl under the neon lights of New Orleans, a long-haul truck driver crisscrossing America in deliberate anonymity, a Navy musician navigating fear and loss, and a woman who spent 25 years passing flawlessly as “ordinary” while paying the price in silence.

 

Patti’s story is not about spectacle, it is about endurance, honesty, and the slow reclaiming of joy. Through satellite radio conversations on SiriusXM OutQ, Patti found community while driving alone through the night, and eventually the courage to come out again, this time with intention and purpose. Her story, captured in Beau J. Genot's documentary Trucker Patti (2014) and shared through activism and education, challenges not only straight audiences, but also LGBTQ communities, to expand their understanding of gender, intersex experiences, and the cost of invisibility. This is a conversation about closets and courage, glamour and grief, love and regret, fear and freedom, and what it really means to live an authentic life when the world keeps telling you to hide.