Good evening and welcome to Downstream, Navarra Media's interview series about all things

politics, culture and political culture. Tonight I will be joined by Julia Jakes, who is a

longtime friend of Navarra Media and author of Trans a Memoir and tonight we will be talking about

her new book Variations, which I really must abuse my position as host and say it's great,

you should go out and you should get it and you should recommend it to all your friends as well.

Julia, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me and your nails match the cover of the book. I don't know

if you've done the other hand pink. I mean, I don't actually have pink nail polish and it also

doesn't suit me. So I only get like, you only get like one half of the trans flag, you know,

the bit that suits my colouring. Thank you so much for joining us. So this collection of short

stories variations has just come out and personally I think it's really great. It's really tender,

it's just this really beautiful immersive experience and it takes the reader on a journey from mid 19th

century up to the present day through letters and diary entries and fragments from screenplays

and blog posts in order to weave stories of trans experiences through snapshots of British cultural

life and it just does the amazing work of breathing so much life and humanity into police records

and all this kind of, you know, archival, flotsam and jetsam and takes it on this journey from

Victorian theatres to the British punk scene, Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool, London, Manchester and there

is just so much in here for literally anyone who's interested in our cultural history. So

just a really basic question, Julia. How did you come to write this? Like, where did the idea start?

Yeah, that's that's a really interesting question. A beautiful summary of the book, thank you.

I mean, I wrote a lot of short fiction in my teens and early 20s and

increasingly fell myself putting trans characters into those stories. At that time, I knew

I was trans, I hadn't started transitioning yet, I didn't really quite know what my gender

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