Born and raised in rural Normandy, Jill Leflour – data scientist, amateur boxer and OutThere cover model – credits his adopted home of London with helping him discover who he was destined to be. And it’s here he’s making a muscular contribution to the LGBTQ+ community.
“In London, it’s easy to find your people”, says Jill Leflour. “When I moved here from Normandy, I started skateboarding with the queer skate collective Sibling. I met many trans-masc people there, and then the cogs started turning really quickly for me. Within a few months, I figured out I was trans”.
For Jill, a machine learning engineer for Deutsche Bank and model with Brother Models, sports have always been a way to find community. Inspired as a 14-year-old to learn karate by Robert Muchamore’s teen-spy book series Cherub, he graduated after a couple of years to Muay Thai. That was followed by boxing at women’s clubs when he moved to London in 2018 to study for an MSc, and after his return the following year to his home in the small, conservative coastal town Gouville-sur-Mer.
“Being quite an intensive sport, boxing shapes my body in a way that makes me comfortable”, he says. “It’s also a very psychological sport, and I think it teaches you that you can do a lot more than you think you can. It’s helped me get past a lot of barriers that were in my head, and which I think I’d absorbed from the negative things people say about trans men in sport – that we can’t do it, we can’t be competitive”.
Jill transitioned in 2020, and, moving back to London that October, started looking for a new boxing club. “I’d had top surgery, and passed as male, but I was still very uncomfortable with the locker room situation in mainstream clubs. So I looked for LGBTQ+ clubs – at the time there were three – and joined Bender Defenders in east London” (billing itself a ‘community empowerment movement’, Bender Defenders teaches queer and trans people martial arts and self-defence in a joyful, supportive environment).
Today he trains at Knockout LGBTQ+ boxing club, and at trans masc weightlifting classes run by Pecs Education.
“I’ve made probably 90 per cent of the friends I have in London through sport. And beyond sport, London is a place where it’s comparatively easy to feel part of a community as a trans person. There are just so many of us here, your friendships with other trans people don’t have to just be based on the fact you’re both trans. I guess the same is true in some other cities like New York, but it feels like a pretty rare thing”.
And while Jill has much to say about the toxicity of the debate around trans identity and rights in the media, he says he has found the vast majority of people he has met in his professional, social and sporting circles – which today include mainstream boxing clubs as well as Knockout – “so supportive. Clueless, often, so many people have still never heard of trans men. But when they do, they’re supportive. So in London, I think it’s easier to be out, and to be out earlier, and to be out in all facets of your life”.
Inspired by the people who set up clubs like Knockout and Bender Defenders, Jill puts a lot of time into volunteer work. Now an England Boxing level one-qualified coach, he teaches a weekly class at Knockout and serves as a diversity support officer on its operating committee. He’s also a mentor for Mosaic LGBT+ Young Persons’ Trust, has completed volunteer training for Gendered Intelligence, and has spearheaded multiple projects for Deutsche Bank’s dbPride programme as its trans representative, work that won him a Stonewall Changemaker of the Year award in 2024.
“I’m in a position that’s quite comfortable. My family has been great the whole way through, as has my partner, who I’ve been with since I was 14, and a girl, in high school. And in public, I’m never read as anything other than a man, and when you pass as a trans man, people generally just don’t compute you whatsoever, so I have the privilege of safety in that regard. I get hatred a lot more because I’m gay and hold my partner’s hand on the street than for being trans. But of course, there is a lot of fear in my community. The people who set up my LGBTQ+ clubs created spaces to make people like me feel comfortable. I want to be part of making space for others too”.
Another project close to Jill’s heart is to challenge England Boxing’s rules which currently don’t allow licensed amateur fights between boxers of different birth genders. He’s working on it with support from Knockout, which 18 months ago became England’s first LGBTQ+ club to achieve affiliation in the governing body’s 144-year history.
As an advocate for trans people in sports, Jill has appeared on Channel 4, ITVX and in the documentary shorts Bender Defenders and Come Out Fighting. As a model, he has amassed impressive credits including editorial for Arena Homme+, a campaign for Asos and a runway show for Fred Perry. Of his cover shoot for OutThere’s latest print edition, he says he felt especially relaxed to be part of a team put together by our creative director and photographer Martin Perry that included the queer, trans, non-binary stylist Namal Lanka. “I think there was a kind of unspoken understanding between us that let the creative vision come together very naturally. Their ideas really made sense to me”.
“And I find shoots quite affirming in general – the client’s hiring me because I look good as a man, which is all I ever wanted. And, on the OutThere shoot, the evening wear and glamorous settings and stuff? I’m a massive Bond fan, so…”
Jill Leflour was photographed by Martin Perry for The Experientialist Awards Issue Volume II
