“I’m done trying to make people feel comfortable”: May Lifschitz on trans visibility and upturning expectations

When May Lifschitz arrives on our screen via Zoom, the Danish actress and model immediately radiates warmth and calm. “I just came back home from walking my dog,” she says casually as soon as she connects. And sure enough, a furry black and white nose suddenly comes into view, closely followed by a pair of huge puppy dog eyes. It’s a surprising yet friendly opening to our conversation and one that typifies the relaxed manner in which the Warrior Nun star fields our questions. Lifschitz is down-to-earth and forthright, despite the natural distance that Zoom can sometimes impose upon a conversation – and the caginess that can often accompany rising celebrity status.

Born in Argentina to an Argentinian father and a Danish mother, Lifschitz spent the first years of her childhood in South America, but at the age of seven her family relocated to the Danish peninsula of Jylland. “Being a queer kid in a really small town in Denmark was tough,” she says of a childhood that she describes as “uncertain”. She didn’t come out until her teens, crediting her work as a fashion model with helping her “find herself” – and her brother with helping her find modelling. “When I was in high school, I saw my brother modelling and I always thought ‘he gets to go everywhere, he gets to travel’, and I was stuck in that little sh*tty town,” she says. Lifschitz decided to look into modelling herself, and when a school trip took her to New York at the age of 16, she decided to explore some extra-curricular opportunities. “While I was there, my agent told me to go see some people, and so I stopped by Steven Meisel’s office,” she says. “At first I met his sixth assistant, and then the third assistant and then the second assistant, and then they were like, ‘OK, Steven wants to see you’.” Meisel offered Lifschitz the opportunity to swap her school obligations and the YMCA with “literally rats” for several days of shooting an ad campaign and a stay in a nice hotel in Soho. She jumped at the chance. “So that was my first campaign,” she says with a smile.

Related: Norwegian model Ceval becomes the first trans woman to pose for YSL Beauty

Lifschitz would spend the next two years modelling, travelling back and forth to New York. At first, her gender was fluid for the purposes of her work. “I would start the day as a male model, and then at the end of the day I’d be the female model,” she says. “They could just add some makeup you know, and the hair.” Although she eventually grew tired of giving clients two models in one, she remains thankful for the opportunity as it enabled her to realise that she felt more at home whenever she portrayed the ‘female model’. “I just felt so much at home and I felt like, ‘wow, if these people can succeed in life and even in being themselves, then I can do that too’.”

Not that it was a wholly positive experience. Reflecting on her time in the industry now, Lifschitz feels she was exploited. “I was working for really low pay and I feel like I wasn’t taken seriously,” she says. In one case she confronted a well-known brand (she remains tight-lipped about exactly who) when she found out she was being paid less than other models and they simply told her that she should be happy for the exposure. “I’m not in it to be famous, I’m in it to be visible,” she says of the incident. “I have that energy and I want to share this visibility, it’s a privilege not a lot of trans people have. But I still got to pay my rent and I still got to feel worth what I am, you can’t just tell me to live off of exposure.”

Nevertheless, her modelling work ultimately gave Lifschitz more confidence, and two years after that fateful school trip, she decided to belatedly return to Denmark and embark on an entirely new journey. “I moved to Copenhagen and started my whole transition while working at M.A.C [Cosmetics],” she says. “I quit my modelling agency because they only wanted to have me as both a male and female model, and I was like, ‘I can’t do men’s stuff anymore. It doesn’t feel right.’ And so I quit.”

Lifschitz credits a close friend with helping inspire her path. “She’s also a trans woman and she’s always told me ‘be the thing you wish to see’, and I think that stuck with me somehow.” Lifschitz references landing her first cover, for a Danish magazine called Cover. “Now it’s closed, but it was like one of the big print fashion magazines back then, and when I saw the magazine in my hand, I was like, this might be the first time there’s a trans woman on the cover of a magazine in this country because I didn’t see that growing up – I just remember that: ‘be the thing you wish to see’.”

Since then, Lifschitz’s career has expanded into acting, with a slew of roles coming her way after she was discovered by a casting director while working at M.A.C Cosmetics. “Modelling was so tough, I didn’t always have the exact measurements, and I always had problems with my hands and my feet, the shoes were never the right size,” she says, reflecting on the two industries. “With film I could just use my transness, I could use the features that are odd about me and use them in a fictional setting where they make sense, you know?”

Related: How trans models are shaping the future of fashion

After roles in Danish productions Wild Witch and Yes No Maybe, Lifschitz secured a major breakthrough in 2020 when she was cast as Chanel in Netflix’s Warrior Nun. Lifschitz says she reads into each acting role she’s offered to ensure trans people are being represented in the right way and to ensure that she can voice her opinion if needed. “If it’s a trans character, what kind of transness is being portrayed? Who has written this story? How much can I influence the narrative?”, she says. She believes that although visibility is crucial, and that not all trans characters need to be openly defined as trans. “By playing a female character or a character that’s not defined, by not defining the gender, it creates a space where we can detach people from our conception of their gender, and then it’s just the person that comes through instead of the gender.” She points to Laverne Cox’s portrayal Kacey Duke in Inventing Anna, where the role was played by a trans woman without the character herself being trans, as an important example.

Hopefully, such representation will help young people who may find themselves experiencing the same ‘uncertainty’ that Lifschitz went through in her childhood. “I’d tell myself to be less afraid,” she says when asked what message she’d like to deliver to her younger self “I think I’ve been really scared and wanting to please everybody, I just really wanted to make people feel comfortable. I think I’m done trying to make people feel comfortable. If my presence provokes you or makes you unsettled, then maybe that’s not my issue.”

Related: Opinion: Sweden is in need of a new gender recognition law - here's why

She says that she has experienced issues with cis men and women alike, where some cis women more or less tell transgender women that “you’re not female, don’t think you’re like me”, while cis men often think transgender women challenge their sexuality. Even so, Lifschitz sees change in the way the feminist movement is being uprooted in Denmark. “I definitely feel like feminism is moving towards the direction where we’re actually defining what system we’re opposing and not just what gender we’re proposing to. We can unite as all minorities, all identity character categories. And that’s where intersectionality is being brought into the light. How can you fight for equality for some without fighting equality for all?” She cites having been invited back to her hometown to speak at a library on International Women’s Day this year – “It felt like we’re really moving towards something, finally.”

Lifschitz, too, is clearly moving toward something on a personal level. Her calm and warmth mask a busy, ambitious character with a lot of things up her sleeve, whether it be a new TV show, pursuing her career in art, or finding work where she can utilise her MA in modern culture. “I know, I want it all,” she says.