Lois Gibson has a rare gift: A gift for accurately drawing people she’s never seen before, from fragmented descriptions from traumatised witnesses. And that gift is incredibly useful to the Houston Police Department.

Lois is the world’s most successful forensic artist. Over 40 years, on more than 5089 cases, she’s worked with victims and witnesses to painstakingly piece together a likeness of a suspect. And in more than 1313 cases, her drawings have nailed it with a conviction - case closed.

This is the story of how she found this talent in one of the very darkest moments of her own life.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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Miss saHHara was born to be a beauty pageant queen. As a child at home in Nigeria she would wrap herself in a mosquito net and sashay along a make-believe cat walk, delivering inspirational speeches to an imagined audience.

But when she grew up and started to compete, she found that not only was she rejected from all the mainstream pageants she tried to enter, even trans beauty pageants seemed to celebrate all the cliched cisgender beauty norms.

So, Miss saHHara decided to do something about it: She founded Miss Trans Global, a pageant where everybody is welcome, and where your advocacy and community work mean much more than the lightness of your skin or the bounciness of your hair.

Related Resources

Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Big Door Brigade - Mutual Aid Toolbox

Transgender Law Centre

Trans Rescue

The Gender Reveal Podcast

Jesse Lou Lawson - Media consultancy

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is not affiliated to any of these organizations and we are not in a position to endorse them.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

For more from Novel visit Novel.Audio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phyllis Omido is just a few months into a new job, when her infant son starts to get sick. Fevers, dehydration, hospitalisation - Phyllis is scared. Then the doctors give her some shocking news: Her son has lead poisoning. The metal smelting plant where Phyllis works, just outside Mombassa, Kenya, is leeching toxic chemicals into the water of the nearby river. And her son isn’t the only one who’s unwell: she believes the factory is poisoning the whole community.

So Phyllis turns campaigner, and starts gathering stories from all over town. Children with skin burned off, babies dying in the womb, women with mysterious fatal illnesses… And she’s going to force her employer, and the Kenyan government, to pay attention. It’s a fight that will see her life threatened, and her dubbed ‘The Erin Brockovich of East Africa’.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

For more from Novel visit Novel.Audio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.