When artist Jess T. Dugan crossed paths with social worker Vanessa Fabbre some time in 2012, they realised almost immediately they had a lot of overlapping interests, even though they worked in very different fields. Dugan grew up in Arkansas but moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts as a teenager – a more "progressive environment" that was important for her process of coming out as queer and gender nonconforming. "It also facilitated my discovery of photography and art," she says, "and a lot of my work explored issues of identity, gender and sexuality, often focusing specifically on the LGBTQ community and even more specifically on the transgender community." Fabbre, meanwhile, spent her early years in St. Louis, Missouri attending a Catholic high school, and didn’t feel too tuned in to her own identity as a queer person until later in life. "I went to graduate school for social work in Chicago," Fabbre says. "That environment impacted my awareness of queer and trans issues as well as my involvement in social justice work. I also do qualitative research, often through interviews, but had never worked on an art project before." As each of them had been working within trans communities for many years, albeit in different capacities, collaboration on a new project felt natural. "I had never focused specifically on ageing or older adults, and Vanessa had never worked with photography," Dugan says. "We combined the ageing component from her work with the photographic component from mine." The resulting project, To Survive on This Shore , is an expansive coast-to-coast chronicle of the lived experiences of older transgender adults living in the US, shot between 2013 and 2018.