Lisa Scheps was born on October 2nd, 1958 to an upper middle class Jewish family in Houston, Texas. Her parents signed her up for a variety of activities, from competitive swimming to judo, but none stuck. She then tried performing at a local theater school, which Lisa described as an outlet for teamwork, tight-knitted mentorship, and a place to live in another person’s skin for a while, mirroring her relationship with her trans identity. Lisa moved on to working in theater crew; she eventually worked on Broadway and was a director, producer, and stage manager for industrial shows.

Lisa described her gender experience in her early years, not as feeling like “a girl trapped in a boy’s body,” but rather as wanting to be a girl more than anything – a desire she had to suppress due to the traditional environment of her upbringing. She experimented with cross-dressing with her sister’s clothes during her teen years, but was caught by her father, who ordered her to take them off.

During her 30s, Lisa’s exploration of her trans identity began when she joined a queer cross-dressing listserv and her world opened up to a larger trans community. While in New York, she attended meetings at a heterosexual crossdresser community in New Jersey called Tri-Ess, confirming that she was a woman. It wasn’t until she moved to Chicago that she began to accept her cross-dressing and gender exploration through therapy. When she confided in her business partners at their communications agency, Concentrix. Lisa was forced out of her company in 2000 due to her gender identity, igniting her commitment to activism. Advocating for freedom of gender expression and identity, she joined the board of the International Foundation of Gender Education, got involved with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and became a founding board member of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

After Chicago, Lisa moved to Austin in 2002, to reconnect with family and settle down; however, life soon picked right back up again. Within weeks, she was meeting with the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby of Texas (now Equality Texas) to add gender identity to the human rights ordinance in the city of Austin. She attended City Council and Human Rights Commission meetings to advocate for trans inclusion, and forming Austin Transgender Ordinance Initiative (a small collective later named TACT, the Transgender Advocates of Central Texas), their edits to the ordinance were passed. Lisa, with other TACT members, later formed TENT, the Transgender Education Network of Texas, which still supports gender-diverse advocacy efforts today.

Lisa has since focused on anti-bias spaces—working with the Anti-Defamation League (she currently sits on their board of directors) and the city of Austin’s Travis County Hate Crimes Task Force—and her lifelong love, theater. She founded Ground Floor Theatre, a black box theater that concentrates on and produces works focusing on historically underrepresented communities, in 2014. The theater has changed, adapted, and grown since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and 2020 activist movements, increasing diversity efforts through community building, EDI training, and expanding access to audiences of different backgrounds. In her interview, Lisa’s commitment to constantly evolving and learning comes across powerfully, as does her dry wit.