While getting ready for her final lip sync of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15, Sasha Colby said she was overwhelmed with emotion in the moment because she was living her dream on that stage. With the trans and drag community under attack, she felt she was in a place on that RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 finale stage to completely discredit all the things the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and misconceptions that are being spewed by so many conservatives.

“I am walking living proof that all of what they’re saying is not true… I’m not hurting anybody,” Sasha tells GLAAD’s Anthony Allen Ramos. “We’re happy trans people. We are not going anywhere.”

Sasha may have been crowned the winner of the 15^th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but she has already been a legend, specifically for winning Miss Continental in 2012. That said, she admitted that she wanted to have more life experiences to handle the competition. She said, “But really, I was supposed to be this for this time because of what’s going on in the world. I’m supposed to be here to combat everything that they’re trying to do and just my sheer existence and my success is enough to negate everything that they’re saying.”

Throughout the season, Sasha remained a contender, scoring four maxi-challenge wins and never falling in the bottom two —  a rare accomplishment in the franchise. For Sasha, one of the things she fondly looks back on are the acting challenges and she also learned another thing.

“I am so surprised that I’m not a bitch,” admits Sasha jokingly. “I love parts where I was so goofy – like the acting challenges, the [neck] crack and the silly things I would say in confessional. I really like that the world got to see a softer side of Sasha instead of just the fierce, hair flipping girl.”

Sasha’s drag daughter Kerri Colby competed last season and was on hand to support her mother at the finale. During the season, Mistress jokingly called her Dumbledore, but it’s more of a compliment if anything. She’s wiser, experienced, patient and a natural leader. That said, if she was an inspiration to people before, her reach has now expanded more now than ever.

“It feels great because it was me being strong enough to be vulnerable on a world stage and that vulnerability always connects people,” said Sasha of the supportive response from the audience. She adds, “They see themselves in you.”

Sasha is moved by all the response and videos from people all over the world crying as if they won. “How do you explain how someone is so invested because they could see themselves in me?” she asks. “That is just so beautiful that me just being myself is all you really need in life.”

Now that she has won the crown, Sasha wants to do everything the little kid in her has ever dreamed of doing. “We’re gonna act, we’re gonna sing, we’re gonna – I mean, not sing – make music,” she corrects. “I just can’t wait to have the Sasha Colby era just be extended over so many different forms of art and pop culture.

She points out that in the eternal words of Madonna on American Bandstand, she wants to “rule the world”.