The biography Lola, written by Lola Lorenzo together with journalist Barbara Lybeck, stands as an unfiltered portrait of the first Somali woman to publicly come out as transgender. It is a book that moves with the force of lived truth and the determination of someone who has survived nearly every form of exclusion that society can inflict. Through its pages, the reader is invited into the life of a woman who has faced racism, bullying, violence, and exploitation, yet has never stopped fighting for her right to exist exactly as she is.
Lola’s story begins in Mogadishu, where she was born in 1990. Soon after her birth, civil war made daily life unbearable and her family fled to Finland in search of safety. But safety is a complicated word for Somalis who arrived in Finland in the early 1990s. Lola describes a childhood marked by constant reminders that she did not belong. The slur beginning with the letter N was hurled casually in the streets. At daycare, at school, and eventually in the workplace, structural racism quietly and loudly shaped every interaction. Children in the Somali community grew up with an acute awareness of their outsider status. They learned to be alert, to move through the world apologetically, to brace themselves before walking into a store. Lola recalls someone refusing to touch a carton of milk because her mother had moved it. These moments were not rare outliers but the daily pulse of life for many Somali families. Trust in Finnish institutions eroded early, pushing people to rely more heavily on their own community for survival.
