Elvira Langdon is one of the most accomplished pole dance performers I know. At only 19 years old at the time of writing, she has won 14 titles, created a taboo-defying pole competition, taught many classes and workshops, and campaigned to change the sanitisation of pole dancing that plagues the Italian scene. She also happens to be a young trans woman in a world where trans people’s bodies and minds are a battleground for the culture wars. In this interview, the first since her medical transition, we discuss her journey of self-discovery, identity, pole dancing, activism and her plans for the future.
Who is Elvira Langdon?
Hailing from Alessandria, a small town near Turin, Italy, Elvira Langdon is a goth, petite, very intense, funny trailblazer. After taking up pole fitness at the tender age of 14, she then made her name at heels competitions. She was the overall winner at Exotic Generation Greece 2023, won first place at Exotic Generation Switzerland 2023 and 2024 and second place at Exotic Generation Spain 2024 amongst others, and has judged for Exotic Generation Italy as well as for her own comps.
Frustrated with Italian pole dance competitions, where judgement can be biased against more sexually expressive styles in the name of sanitising pole from its stripping origins, last year Elvira founded Exotic Hell, the first openly transfeminist pole dance competition. Now rebranded as Erotic Hell, the competition was revolutionary in its platforming of panels on the main stage and fighting to centre pole’s sex working origins in Italy, while also welcoming gender fluidity and non-conformity by rejecting gendered categories. Elvira is also behind the Italian edition of Dance Filthy, which she co-organises with Sarah G.
Elvira and I had been following each other for a while when she contacted me about joining the first edition of Exotic Hell. We both liked each other because we danced to rock and metal music, and we admired each other’s work in the pole industry. Because of this, she invited me to speak and guest perform at her comp, an experience I wrote about last year and that I will be repeating this year.
Exotic Hell caused a stir: one of the people Elvira was protesting against took the bait and responded with further transphobic and whorephobic abuse. And while some people in the pole industry have now taken note, others continue to attend their events and work with them.
Now that Erotic Hell is set to come back for a second edition, this time with a panel on trans expression and inclusion within the pole dance industry, I caught up with Elvira about what’s next for her in such a pivotal time in her young life.
Disclaimer
I have come to really dislike the use of the word “brave”. It’s either been over-used to describe people who have published a social media post from the safety of their own home, or as a veiled insult for those who dare to challenge the mainstream, hinting that they may be making fools of themselves. I’d like to reclaim this word in its truest meaning when talking about Elvira though, because she is truly one of the bravest people I know: not just because it takes effort, courage, work and lots of emotional labour to be so openly, unapologetically trans at a time where trans people are increasingly threatened and made unsafe, but also because when she fights, she goes hard and tries to create new platforms for others in the process.
The things she told me for this interview, which was largely conducted in Alessandria last year in the lead up to Exotic Hell with the aim to publish it after her transition, are also very brave because they are extremely personal. Elvira volunteered this information candidly, as it really wasn’t my intention to create a voyeuristic account of her transition for people to pore over, or publish trans trauma porn.
What she told me should be a lesson for anyone believing the kids are transitioning at the flick of a switch. It’s a snapshot into what it means to be a trans woman in the world at this point in time, particularly in our far-right, religious, sexist and homotransphobic Italian society.
It’s shouldn’t be trans people’s job to educate the world about what it means to be trans in order to be accepted, welcomed and kept safe. But the media and governments aren’t providing that education, so I hope that Elvira’s truly brave, personal and detailed account of it can somehow help people understand why trans people’s bodily autonomy is crucial, and very much not gained yet.
Please consider this interview a celebration of who she is and who she has fought to become, tooth and nail.
Elvira on discovering and expressing her identity
Elvira has chosen her name as a homage to Goth queer icon Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. In her earlier teens, Goth culture helped Elvira with her identity, allowing her to see examples of gender fluidity that could help her survive in the lead up to transitioning. Seeing goth guys with make-up, long hair and a fluidity similar to non-binary folks initially helped her present and pass as a Goth, allowing her to express her femininity in a way that felt publicly safe and helped her survive.
“It helped me survive, though. Not live well or thrive,” she says.
Elvira had always known she was trans, even though she didn’t have the words for it.
“I have known I was trans, or at the very least not cis, since kindergarten. I was in the toilet, peeing with two girls and a boy, and we’d seen each other’s genitals. I was shocked to realise I was different from those girls, and I wanted what they had – I didn’t want a penis, I wanted a vulva. I needed to be like those girls, not like that boy.”
This awareness was followed by a lot of trauma, misgendering and derision. She cites a particular example from primary school when, after wearing a Winx bikini she’d bought under her clothes, she undressed to show it off by the swimming pool at a summer school and was teased by everyone. She says: “A bikini was all I wanted to see myself in. I knew wearing it wasn’t normal, but I thought it was right for me, while everyone viewed it as strange and wrong.”
To lighten the mood, I ask her which Winx Club fairy she felt more like – even if I’m way older than Elvira, I remember watching the Italian-born global fantasy cartoon sensation when I was younger. Of course, she says Stella – the Diva. No surprises there.
Her journey to express her identity had different stages. “I first came out as a gay guy, then as non-binary,” she says. “It was a way to survive, enough for me to say, ‘Keep calm, you’re not a man. You are neither gender, you won’t be seen as a man’.” Still, she says that her internalised transphobia made her feel always very triggered when people referred to her through women’s pronouns.
When I met her, Elvira identified as non-binary but didn’t use “they/them” pronouns in Italian: she stuck with “he/him” because it’s hard to use “they” in Italian, a very gendered language. We do use the / ? / (schwa) symbol to give words a gender-neutral ending, but our government has recently prohibited its use in schools (priorities, am I right?).
“Using They/them when I spoke English felt great confidence-wise, but in Italian I just had to use he/him, because if I even started using she/her then I’d become obsessed with it, and I knew I didn’t want to be because I feared transitioning and the problems it would have caused.
If you come out as gay, your life changes, but not always radically so. If you come out as trans, there’s a mental and physical element that makes it challenging.”
So Elvira kept filling her days to keep herself occupied – organising competition after competition, judging, competing, teaching, all the while still going to high school, doing an amount of things no teenage girl should be doing to avoid having enough free time to think about herself. Throughout this, she still managed to graduate from high school with top marks.
Being trans in Italy
What does being trans mean in Meloni’s Italy? As a cis woman, all I can tell you is what I found through my research: that Telegram groups of fascists deliberately target trans content creators and activists with networked harassment to get their accounts shut down by falsely mass reporting them as paedophiles, in order to silence them. I can also tell you that there have been multiple cases of violent hate crimes against trans women in particular. But I don’t have Elvira’s lived experience. She says:
“[Being trans in Italy] means not having power over your body and mind, and giving this power away to a judge or an outsider who decides for you. I’m taking puberty blockers and oestrogen, but I’m lucky enough to do this on private healthcare, which is faster than with public healthcare – all it took was five check-ups and I could get my hormones. Before that, before my face became more feminine, I kept dying inside every time I looked in the mirror – I didn’t recognise myself. If I were to do this on public healthcare, it’d take much longer – this often isn’t sustainable for many trans people.”
Going on this journey with public healthcare takes at least a year, according to Elvira – a wait that is extremely distressing for trans people, who feel they have to pretend to be someone they’re not.
“When I started identifying as a woman, I kept feeling like I was going out in drag, like I was pretending.” Elvira tells me. “You know, you wear a wig, you wear fake tits, you wear a waist cincher, you always have to shave, wear fake eyelashes and lipstick.” Getting out of the house becomes a mission: “It can take me up to two hours to leave the house and be ok with myself!” She says.
Still, Elvira’s transition, which is medical and surgical, isn’t the only way to be trans and to be recognised – it’s just a personal choice. “I am a woman even without hormones or surgery. Even at the start of my journey, I was no less of a woman. Hormones and operations aren’t shorthand for being a woman.”
And the difficulty of accessing them, as well as the impact that they may have on one’s body, makes transitioning medically and surgically a very personal choice. But for some, it’s necessary towards transitioning in the eyes of the state, to avoid constant hurtful misgendering.
However, similarly to the United Kingdom, formalising a trans identity isn’t a piece of cake. And while puberty blockers are still accessible in Italy (our supposedly left-wing, progressive government and its gay health secretary banned them in the UK), the final decision over who Elvira gets to be is still down to a judge. She says:
“If I decide to go through gender reassignment surgery, it’s the judge that decides if I’m enough of a woman, so I have to show up in drag to prove I’m a woman in order to have surgery in Italy or Thailand. And this is wrong, because I’m a woman whether a judge likes it or not.”
She tells me about a trans guy she knows who was refused transition for wearing nail polish, which the judge saw as not manly enough. “We come from a very small town,” Elvira says. “There are very few trans people here, so I can’t go to a judge in Alessandria because they may not be exposed to trans people enough to understand us.”
Her experiences are just a drop in the ocean, showing how anti-trans, Gender Critical “feminists” and their obsessions with trans women transitioning to harm cis women, or with ‘easy’ transitions for kids, are nothing short of a lie. A harmful lie that, as I argued recently, is a moral panic that has been over-reported and under-explained by the media, who continue platforming GCs’ violent rhetoric and putting trans people in danger.
Bodily autonomy in the culture wars
Being Elvira, being a trans woman, means being able to decide for herself about matters pertaining to her body. Bodily autonomy is a struggle that trans women and cis women share: while abortion rights are under threat worldwide, and women are shamed for showing their body, enjoying sex or working in the sex industry, the struggle to be in charge of our bodies should mean cis and trans women can unite. But this is not what the self-defined Gender Criticals believe.
“Cis women who attack trans women, or believe we are not women, either have a very narrow world view or they’re TERFS,” says Elvira. TERF is an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, but I personally do not use this term because the GCs love to play the victim and say it’s a “slur”… as if the bile they and their kingpin, JK Rowling, post everyday were not.
“TERFS hurt,” says Elvira. “In 2024, it seems absurd to have a set of feminists fight for abortion but not for trans people.” She adds:
“Being a woman is political. This includes identifying as one, and you’d hope having more people in your camp could bring in a form of solidarity among us. We were brought up with values, roles and rules that harm us – yet TERFs are not protecting trans women even though we face several legal and societal battles that ultimately mean we face a similar struggle for bodily autonomy.”
Elvira’s affirming journey through pole dancing
Elvira’s experience is quite unique, particularly in Italy – and a lot of it is down to her incredibly supportive family, including her grandparents and her mother, Lella. I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Lella at Exotic Hell last year. We bonded immediately as soon as I stepped into her car, when she picked me up at Alessandria’s main station when I arrived to meet Elvira for rehearsals.
The first woman mechanic in her company, Lella is both extremely badass and kind. “I’m still messing the pronouns up,” she confessed to me in the car. “But I’m so incredibly proud of Elvi, of how much she’s fought, of the event she’s creating. É stata bravissima,” meaning she did really well.
It’s also thanks to this family that Elvira can have a private transition, and it’s thanks to this family that she has been able to explore her identity through pole dancing, which she found revolutionary and helpful towards her survival.
Elvira took up pole at 14, and was immediately pigeonholed as a man doing pole sport. She says: “I was sent to compete doing fonjis, flips, deadlifts, strength stuff that I like but that is often linked to gender stereotypes about men as strong beings.”
A whole world opened up to her when she started doing heels. “I was 15,” she tells me. “My mum knew I was doing it, but we’d agreed it was better for me not to mention it to anyone and to hide my heels.”
When she started educating herself about the origins of pole through videos and classes, she realised heels allowed her to explore and express her sexuality in ways that almost anaesthethised her need to transition and all her worries about it. The idea of transitioning scared her at the time, but she needed to know she could play with gender.
“I started performing in categories like Hard Style / Theatre – a style that isn’t really me! That was like a mask, pretending and creating a character, like when I performed as Yolandi Visser from Die Antwoord. I pretended to be sexy, but in ways that allowed me to detach myself from it.
Soon though, I started wanting to lose the character because dancing as myself made me feel better. At competitions, I kept seeing girls dance Old School and wanted to be like them to feel pretty, more sensual, more feminine. In trying to mimic that though, I realised it wasn’t the style that I liked – I wanted to be a woman like them. That’s when everything changed, and I really admitted who I was to myself.”
Filthy style
“Now my style is filthy – it makes me feel good, it feels really ‘me’ both as a performer and an activist,” says Elvira. And filthy she has been.
To protest against narrow and sanitised judging criteria, she performed at a recent competition with a butt plug – a performance that led the organiser to zoom in on her ass and post pictures containing homophobic and transphobic insults in the caption to shame her online. She experimented with tucking, bringing a gender-bending, iconic performance to Exotic Generation Spain starting out in a wide-legged pantsuit to finish up in a teeny thong. She got fully naked at Exotic Hell, performing the filthiest routine ever in front of her mum.
In short, she’s been busy.
She says: “Pole dancing has been crucial to my transition and expression. All the confidence I have now – to go out with a bodysuit, a dress, heels, long nails – wouldn’t have existed without pole for me. I may not even ever have left the house as myself, or exorcised my fears of the world, without pole.”
Now, tricks aren’t her priority. She recently posted that recovering from operations has meant losing some strength, and that she doesn’t love teaching or competing as much – she prefers performing. But what she may have lost in physical strength, she has gained in confidence and in wellbeing. “Pole gave me the confidence to be and perform as who I am – what else do I need?” She says, adding: “I know I’m pretty and sexy, and I bring this confidence with me everywhere: I stopped walking with my head down, because now I know how much I’ve suffered to be who I am, and I’m proud of who I am.”
Elvira’s competition and events
This new-found confidence has been crucial towards creating events that go against the Italian current, where dancing in heels has to be “elegant” and “classy” to avoid whorephobic abuse… perpetrating the patriarchy’s stigma against sex work in the process.
“You can’t perform an art by ridding it of everything that makes it what it is, that makes it unique,” says Elvira about Italy’s conservatism in pole. “Very few other disciplines come from a struggle that includes gender, racial, class and labour rights. The origins of pole are about women, and struggle. This needs to be celebrated. If you don’t appreciate it, change hobby.”
Her events are part of a fight to remove this sanitisation and whorephobia from the Italian pole industry. But having joined transfeminist unions and collectives since a young age, Elvira is used to fighting:
“I am used to fighting in Italy in general, and in pole, where sex workers are massively discriminated against. I’m a sex worker myself, having started at 18. Since I’m always fetishised due to my job and as a trans woman, I find it enraging that pole dancers try to sanitise pole dance from its origins, because it goes against pole as a discipline. We’re guests of strippers in this art. We’re not real dancers. The real dancers are people who worked in the industry and worked their ass off – a lot of trans and Black women – who are too often not centred in our industry.”
From Exotic to Erotic Hell
This centring of Black, trans sex workers in the narratives surrounding pole is partly why, on the back of discussions in the English-speaking pole world, Elvira was the first organiser in Italy to stop using “exotic” in her event’s name. Following a panel in Italian where she, I, Chlotichilda and sex education platform Ovo discussed everything from the origins of pole to different styles, Elvira put her money where her mouth is and changed the comp’s name into Erotic Hell.
She says the comp will be bigger and better this year, with more guests, more talks and more showcases. Given that last year it only targeted the Italian pole public, which continued to share misinformation alleging pole dance originates from Mallakhamb, we focused on the basics. This year, the panel will instead centre trans people in the industry.
“Erotic Hell is a political pole dance competition. This year we will focus on trans people because we’re not represented enough in this industry – and it’s important to provide education about us in a public forum because people still fetishise us in strange ways, and ask invasive questions. How weird is it to have women ask me, when I do a round of questions asking for song recommendations on Instagram, about whether I’ve had my vagina reconstructed? It’s embarrassing.”
Judges include trans stripper, performer and instructor Calypso, queer stripper Kiwi, trained dancer, pole instructor and studio owner Marta Mea, instructor and studio owner Sarah Gallo, old school legend Kellyane Santos, hard style instructor and performer Pole Kitten, former stripper, old school dancer and criminologist Berenika, as well as instructor and performer (and last year’s winner) Love Cervere.
With 110 entries, the competition will now be split over two days. Elvira is also tightening up the organisational aspect of Erotic Hell, having learnt from the stress faced last year: she has started delegating more and is attempting to provide more and more information to those who enter and who attend. “It’s strange to move from grassroots activism to event organising – it all seems so official and commercial, it sometimes feels like I am losing the activist element of things. But it’s important towards giving people a better experience.”
Given the upheaval caused by her transition, I was glad to hear that Elvira incorporated the Erotic Hell Ball, which was going to be its own standalone event celebrating trans culture and voguing by blending it with pole dance, into Erotic Hell. This way, she hopes that a talk and party about ballroom culture can substitute the standalone event as part of the two-day festival.
What’s next for Elvira
I caught up with Elvira again to check in on her and get her latest updates following the interview I recorded with her in Alessandria last October. Now, she says she feels much better after a tumultuous time. When I last spoke with her in Italy, she hadn’t yet come out as a trans woman. Now she has, and has started transitioning through surgery and hormones. She has stopped feeling like she’s going out in drag, and has begun feeling more like herself.
Although she cites December, the month before receiving authorisation to start her hormonal treatment, as the worst time of her life – “I was dying inside,” she tells me – she is now calmer, and is starting to manage her changing appearance. Waiting for formal recognition through official documents still hurts though, and she has been placed on a speedier review process because she has been classed as at-risk – meaning her suffering from being refused formal recognition has been judged as heightened and more dangerous risk to her safety.
At only 19 years old, Elvira Langdon’s pole dance career already brought her more than many of us hope to achieve. As she continues running events and thriving as a trans woman in a world where trans joy is political, I just really hope she takes a break – she’s too precious (and too young) to burn out! For now, she hopes to continue organising competitions, to get married and start a family in peace, and I really hope she gets to follow her dreams.
Find out more about Elvira Langdon
- Follow Elvira Langdon at @elvira_langdon_
- Find out more about Erotic Hell here and follow them at @er0tic_hell_championship_
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