Lewis Hancox British Director Born 1989 in Northern England

Early life

Lewis Joy Hancox was born on 15 June 1989 and grew up in Haydock, a village near St Helens in Merseyside, in northern England. As a child Hancox preferred the initials LJ to a given name and dressed in boys' clothes. Hancox went to Byrchall High School in Ashton-in-Makerfield and later to St Helens College, starting there at 18. Hancox later studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree at London South Bank University.

Career

Hancox first appeared on screen in 2011, aged 22, as one of seven participants in the Channel 4 series My Transsexual Summer, which followed transgender people at different stages of transition as they spent five weekends together in a large house in Bedfordshire. At the time Hancox worked part-time in a gallery and lived with family in St Helens. Hancox has called the show one of the best things ever done and said it brought more confidence.

Online, Hancox makes comedy sketches for TikTok and YouTube, drawing on growing up as a trans man. Recurring characters include an emo teenager named Lois, a stereotypical British mum and a figure called Prinny Queen. The YouTube channel passed one million subscribers by December 2025.

Filmmaking

Hancox co-founded My Genderation with the artist Fox Fisher. The ongoing project makes short documentaries about transgender people of different ages in the United Kingdom. Fisher has said the aim is to show these experiences without sensationalism and without upsetting the people interviewed.

In 2013, during the second year of a degree, Hancox began work on New Genderation, a My Genderation documentary made for the BBC and the BBC Fresh scheme. It follows Tayler, a 14-year-old transgender boy from Wales. The film was screened at the London Cinema Museum in May and broadcast on BBC Three in September 2013. In 2015 Hancox made educational videos about gender and sexuality for the advocacy project All About Trans. In 2016 Hancox created Me and My Teen Self, a six-part Channel 4 comedy in which the presenter talks to a younger self through time travel.

Books and illustration

Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure, a graphic memoir, was published by Scholastic on 2 June 2022, with launch events in St Helens and Southsea. The comedy is set in St Helens in the 2000s, and the title shortens the town's name. In it Hancox travels back in time to speak with a teenage self who is confused and struggling. Hancox has said the idea came during the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, and that the aim was to write for a general audience with empathy rather than shouting. Hancox draws on an iPad with an Apple Pencil and names the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and the films of Edgar Wright as influences.

A sequel, Escape from St Hell: My Trans Life Levels Up, followed from Scholastic in 2024. The 2024 horror collection Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror also appears in Hancox's bibliography.

In 2024 Hancox, Fisher and the Trans Publishing Network worked with Waterstones to launch the Trans Pride Book Fest at the chain's Piccadilly flagship in London on 27 June. Guests included Charlie Craggs, Laura Kate-Dale, Sophie Labelle and Jamie Raines. A second festival took place in London on 6 December 2025. Between April and May 2025, artwork by Hancox and Fisher filled the windows of all 101 Lush shops in the country as part of the company's campaign on trans rights.

Recognition

In 2013 Hancox and Fisher placed 79th on The Independent's Rainbow List of influential LGBTQ people in the United Kingdom, and Hancox returned to the list in 48th place in 2015. In 2014 Hancox ranked 13th in The Guardian's 30 Under 30 in Digital Media.

Welcome to St. Hell was shortlisted for the 2023 Waterstones Children's Book Prize in the Older Readers category, the first graphic memoir to be nominated. It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir and appeared on the American Library Association's Great Graphic Novels for Teens list for 2023. Hancox was shortlisted for the Positive LGBT Role Model category of the 2022 National Diversity Awards. Pages from the book were shown at The Cartoon Museum in London in 2025 for London Trans+ Pride.

Personal life

As of 2020 Hancox lived in Southsea, Portsmouth. Hancox is a celebrity patron of the LGBTQ+ helpline Switchboard and of the National Diversity Awards.