An American couple stopped me the other day, and said, "What's the outfit?" And I explained it to them and they were really cool with it. I've had women come up to me and say, "I love your look." The thing of walking down the street and somebody looking twice and going, "Is that a man or a woman?", is people can see I'm presenting as female and can see the beard, so seemingly I'm doing something with gender. I walk with confidence because I've accepted myself and I can radiate that out.ĪD: Most people treat me entirely normally: It just works. If you feel grounded and comfortable in your own skin you don't bring that anxiety across. I think that's to do with inner confidence and positivity – if you feel anxious about your appearance in the sense of "someone might spot I'm a natal male" then that anxiety comes out. I get very little hassle, if any, and I get a lot of positive reactions. For all the stories of trans women having a miserable time and being picked on, there are plenty of us having perfectly good lives. And if a child sees me and thinks, "Bloody hell, so it's not as simple as pink or blue or football or ballet – there must be 101 possibilities in between," then maybe I can serve the greater good.ĪD: It's actually very positive. If all you ever see is trans women who completely pass and are completely convincing as natal females, then those of us who just don't have that kind of luck won't have the confidence to come out.įor the people who don't pass I can say "don't be afraid" because what I've discovered is you don't need to pass, what you need is to act authentically. What I want to do is to widen the bandwidth of gender, to make it more possible for more people to come out as a transgender, to live authentic lives. I knew that simply shaving my beard and putting breasts on wasn't going to make me pass, and I used to work for an architect and he used to say, "When you're designing something you either make it very deliberately level or very deliberately off." So that was the philosophy.
I did it in a very radical way I was testing new ground. Many trans women seek to feminise their appearance, but you've chosen a beard – why?Īlex Drummond: I was aware that I was unlikely ever to pass as natal female, so what I wanted to do is to see if it was possible to create another space.
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