Our mission was to record a snapshot of what it’s like to be trans/gender nonconforming in Louisiana in the early 21st Century. To that end, we focused heavily on interviewing community members. We asked folks about their lives – where they were born, how they find community, where they’re finding joy, what their challenges and successes are. 

We’ll never know exactly how many interviews we did because sometimes folks decided they didn’t want to participate after all and we deleted the files. We’re pretty sure we did at least 40 though. 

In addition to our “full life” interviews, we also recorded conversations with people around specific events, such as resistance to Louisiana’s anti-trans legislation during the 2021 and 2022 legislative sessions.

We interviewed folks in at least five different parishes, and a wide variety of occupations, including doctors, teachers, professors, farmers, therapists, lawyers, musicians, artists, actors and students. We aimed to gather stories from different parts of the state and from people with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. On this front, we only did okay. The majority – though by no means the entirety – of our interviewees were white. We have some theories as to why we had more white participants, but it has certainly been a shortcoming of the project. 

For interviewees who want, we’re donating interviews to the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University for long-term preservation and storage. These interviews will become a permanent part of the LSU Libraries collection and will be available for anyone to listen to into the future. For interviewees who want, we’ll delete all files related to their interviews.