Interview with Lisa Olsson

Lisa Olsson is a Swedish transgender advocate, activist, and photographer. She is not only passionate about capturing the world through her lens but also dedicated to raising awareness and promoting visibility for the transgender and broader LGBT+ community. She works as an unemployment agent while continuing her academic pursuits at the university level, purely for the joy of learning. Never one to sit idle, Lisa is always engaged in activities that challenge her intellect and creativity. Beyond her professional and academic life, Lisa has recently launched her own company, focusing on lectures, courses, and personal coaching to enhance LGBT+ inclusion in the business sector and public administration. With a strong voice in advocacy and a keen eye for photography, particularly in macro and nature photography, she is a woman of many talents. Lisa’s journey as a transgender woman has been shaped by resilience, self-discovery, and an unwavering sense of confidence. Unlike many, she did not find solace in traditional transgender role models, instead forging her own path and embracing her background as an integral part of her identity. Her perspective on transgender issues is refreshingly positive, emphasizing personal empowerment and the importance of visibility.

Interview with Aeris Houlihan

 

Aeris Houlihan is a British transgender woman, football player, musician and video blogger who documented her transition on YouTube. Born in Dublin, she moved to England at the age of around three and spent the rest of her childhood there. Outgoing and sociable, Aeris has always enjoyed keeping fit, experimenting with fashion and makeup, producing music and working with video special effects. Like many transgender women, Aeris knew from a very young age that something about the gender expected of her did not feel right. For years, however, she tried to suppress those feelings, believing she could somehow control them, only to find that doing so brought unhappiness and internal suffering. Eventually, she decided that living authentically was more important than continuing to hide a part of herself. One of Aeris's greatest fears when coming out was the possibility of hurting or losing her family. Fortunately, she also experienced considerable support in another important part of her life: her workplace. Working in a large office with hundreds of people, she remembers the anxiety of arriving for her first day as herself, only to discover that, after the initial period of adjustment, her transition gradually became simply another part of everyday life.

 

Aeris is also passionate about visibility and believes that openly sharing transgender experiences can help replace fear and misunderstanding with knowledge. She has a particular love of fashion, describing clothes shopping as one of her favourite hobbies, and enjoys mixing high-street fashion with designer pieces. A self-described social butterfly, she moves easily between different communities and enjoys meeting new people and trying new experiences. Looking ahead, Aeris is preparing for another important milestone in her transition while also hoping to return to the live music scene and develop the songs she had been recording in her home studio. Above all, her journey is about finally being able to look in the mirror and recognise the woman she had always known was there. And with so many plans, passions and ambitions still ahead of her, I was delighted to sit down with Aeris and learn more about her remarkable journey.

Interview with Ellen Krug

Ellen Jean Krug is a lawyer, author, and transgender activist whose life story is one of resilience, honesty, and transformation. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1956, she grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she graduated from Coe College in 1979 before earning her Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School. After building a successful career in civil trial law, Ellen made history in 2009 when she became the first attorney in Iowa to conduct jury trials in separate genders following her transition. Two years later, she began serving as the first executive director of Call for Justice, LLC, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps low-income individuals connect with legal resources, making her the only transgender person at the time to lead a nonprofit in the city not specifically focused on LGBT issues. In addition to her legal and nonprofit work, Ellen has shared her personal journey with remarkable candor in her memoir Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty and Gender Change, published in 2013.

 

She also became a columnist for Lavender Magazine, where her award-winning series Skirting the Issues reached a wide audience and offered a thoughtful voice on gender, identity, and inclusion. By 2013, Ellen had established herself as a sought-after speaker, appearing at universities, community events, and national platforms, including Iowa State University’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. Ellen’s visibility has also extended to national and local media, where she has been featured in the Huffington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lion’s Roar, and on Iowa Public Radio. She has spoken openly about the challenges and rewards of her transition, offering a deeply personal perspective that resonates far beyond the transgender community. Her journey highlights the power of authenticity and the importance of creating space for compassion and understanding in society. Through her work and her words, Ellen has become not only an advocate for transgender rights but also a voice for human connection and dignity.

Interview with Sammy12534

 

Phoebe is a young American transgender woman and video blogger who shares her transition journey on YouTube under the name Ask Phoebe, having previously used the channel name Sammy12534. Outgoing and outspoken on the surface, she describes herself as a shy girl who has learned to push herself beyond her comfort zone by sharing her experiences with others. Her YouTube channel became a way to break the isolation she once felt, connect with people around the world, and offer encouragement to others who may not yet have the courage to speak openly about their own journeys. Phoebe’s story begins in childhood, when she gravitated toward traditionally feminine interests, playing with Barbies and Bratz and dressing in her mother’s clothes. By college, she was increasingly living openly as herself, despite encountering looks and comments from others.

 

Fashion, beauty and self-expression are important parts of Phoebe’s femininity, although she prefers affordable clothes that make her feel cute and confident rather than expensive designer labels. She also admires transgender women such as Carmen Carrera and sees transgender beauty pageants as an empowering form of visibility. At the same time, she speaks candidly about the difficulties of finding acceptance, dealing with family members who still use her former name and male pronouns, and searching for genuine love and companionship. She does not pretend that every day is easy, but she draws strength from her friends and her growing YouTube family. Looking ahead, she hopes to begin hormones, build a stronger online presence, find love, and continue encouraging other transgender women to express themselves and live authentically.

Interview with Eden Dintsikos

 

Born in Greece and raised in Belgium, Eden Dintsikos spent much of her early life hiding parts of herself, experimenting with makeup privately before eventually finding the confidence to express herself openly through an androgynous, goth-inspired style. Around the age of twenty, as her body became more masculine, Eden began questioning whether she could become a woman. Fear of rejection kept her awake at night until she finally confided in her boyfriend, who became one of her strongest sources of support. She later began hormone replacement therapy and underwent facial feminization surgery, describing the changes as small victories and saying that, for the first time, she was beginning to love her body.

 

Eden also chose to document her transition on YouTube, hoping to help other trans women while educating people who had little understanding of transgender experiences. Her story carries both painful memories of family rejection and a profound appreciation for the love she found in her relationship with Do. She dreams of becoming a nurse, creating a home together, and building the happy family she always wanted. Open, determined, and unafraid to speak about both the difficult and joyful parts of transition, Eden’s message is ultimately one of self-belief: other people may judge you, but they should never decide your worth or your happiness.

Interview with Casey Plett

 

Casey Plett’s writing emerged from a place where transition, humor, uncertainty, desire, family, and ordinary life could exist on the same page. Born in Winnipeg and living in Canada after years in the United States, Plett has made a distinctive mark through her candid writing about transition, particularly in her Balls Out: A Column On Being Transgendered series for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Beginning in 2010, those essays followed the intimate, sometimes awkward, sometimes hilarious realities of her early transition, from starting hormones and navigating changing relationships to hair, clothes, family, sex, and the strange process of discovering how differently the world can respond to you. But Plett was already moving beyond memoir. Her short story “Other Women,” published in Topside Press’s 2012 anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, marked an important step into fiction, allowing her to explore trans women not as symbols or lessons, but as complicated people with friendships, lovers, histories, conflicts, flaws, and desires. The anthology brought together 28 transgender writers, placing Plett among a growing literary community determined to create space for stories that had too often been missing from mainstream fiction.

 

In this interview Casey describes the beginning of her writing life almost mischievously, remembering that she had imagined being a writer since childhood, then suddenly, at nineteen, sat down in Seattle and began writing about everything that had happened to her in the preceding months. She recalls periods when writing gave way to drinking and smoking, but that weekend remained, in her mind, the moment when she decided to take writing seriously. By then, she was also developing a larger body of short fiction and wrestling with a memoir-like nonfiction project she had not yet figured out how to finish. For her, fiction should make room for people in all their messiness, humor, contradictions, relationships, and specificity. She has also spoken of being excited by the emergence of a genuine trans literary community, with writers and editors creating work on their own terms. There is an unmistakable intimacy to Plett’s voice, but also a sharp comic instinct. Her transition writing could move from vulnerability to absurdity within a few sentences, finding humor without making the underlying experience feel trivial. Her fiction similarly grew from questions about how trans women relate to cis women, to lovers and friends, to family, and to one another, while drawing on the emotional territory of her own life without reducing fiction to autobiography. By this point, Casey Plett is still at the beginning of her literary journey, but the voice has already been unmistakably her own.