La fille d’elle-même

A multidisciplinary artist born in Saint-Siméon, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay published her first poetry collection, Le Ventre des volcans, in 2015 and a second, Les secrets de l’origami, in 2018. In 2021, she released her first autofiction novel, La fille d’elle-même, which she finally ‘gave birth to’ after beginning it at age 15. It is a coming-of-age account of a child’s experience of trans identity in a Québec that is both cruel and full of life. Set amid Charlevoix’s bucolic landscapes and the majestic Saint-Laurent, the novel changed her life and offered Québec a more intimate view of a reality that is still often little known.
La fille d’elle-même is to be adapted for television, and the following year the novel received the Prix des libraires du Québec. It is the first French-language autofiction novel written by a trans woman in Québec. In 2025, Boulianne-Tremblay published La fille de la foudre, a sequel exploring life after transition through the experience of a woman with borderline personality disorder.
After earlier appearances in several documentaries and short films, she made her feature-film debut in 2016 in Mathieu Denis’s Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau. Her performance as Klas Batalo earned a best supporting actress nomination at the Prix Écrans canadiens, making her the first trans woman nominated as an actress by those awards.
A trans-rights activist, she served in 2023 as spokesperson for the first Fierté Charlevoix.
In 2026, she wrote François.e, a comedy in which François, a declining cisgender male screenwriter, poses as a trans woman to obtain financing for a television series. The film was very well received by critics.