Andie Davidson is a British writer, poet, musician, blogger and publisher from the south coast of England whose transition in her fifties became the catalyst for an unusually rich period of creative work. She began writing seriously after discovering she was transgender, using poetry to explore self-discovery, identity, relationships and the often complicated reactions of those around her. Her first collection, Realisations, was published by her own Bramley Press in 2012 and was subsequently longlisted for the 2013 Polari First Book Prize. Andie also became known through her blog Andie's Place, where she documented her transition week by week, and through her work in the poetry community. She was one of the editors of the Brighton Stanza Poets Anthology 2013, which Bramley Press published, and she performed her poetry at venues including Polari and Brighton Pride. A keen amateur musician, she played trumpet in local wind bands, while her writing and public speaking increasingly became ways of sharing her experience and challenging narrow ideas about transgender lives.
Her own transition began after she discovered, at 55, that being transgender was distinct from sexual orientation and that there was a name for the feelings she had carried since childhood. She found support through a Brighton transgender support group and from several close friends, while also facing the painful loss of her marriage and relationship with her daughter. By Easter 2012, she had publicly told the musicians with whom she regularly performed that she would no longer be living as a man. Andie has combined transition with creativity. In Realisations, she transformed the experience of discovering her identity into intensely personal poetry, while her blog offered an honest account of the practical and emotional journey of becoming herself. Her work also earned recognition beyond the transgender community through its inclusion on the 2013 Polari First Book Prize longlist.
Monika: Andie, welcome! It's a pleasure to have you here today.
Andie: Hi Monika, it's great to join you here, and in such company.
Monika: To begin, how would you introduce yourself in a few words?
Andie: No! I talk far too much! But I can try. I live on the south coast of the UK and work as a technical writer in an engineering company. I was married for over 30 years and have two grown-up children. I'm recently divorced, but happy to have found my true self after 55 years of ignorance and another couple of years sorting it out.
Monika: Your poetry collection, Realisations, appeared in 2012. What drew you to poetry in the first place?
Andie: Hmm. That's interesting. Maybe, like "becoming a woman," one doesn't. I just am, but I only took writing seriously when the transgender light dawned. Being made redundant three years ago in 2011 was a catalyst for everything, and gave me time to think. I just desperately needed to write my way through the emotions of self-discovery and the impact of it, in a way that might subvert the ordinary conversation that simply hits opinions head-on before inner dialogue can take place.
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| Her first poetry collection: Realisations (Amazon), 2012 |
Monika: Is there such a thing as transgender art? What does it mean to be a transgendered artist?
Andie: Art is observation, and we all see the world differently. But transgendered people have a perspective that others don't. We notice things such as ambiguities and false certainties through gender, and as artists realize we can extend that to the wider world. That can make our art really interesting rather than purely descriptive, and be used to provoke a response that brings new realizations in others. My experience in writing openly as transgendered was that I was suddenly much more daring in speaking my truth and throwing it into an unsuspecting world. I then suspected that it might be difficult to understand without a background, so I added section introductions as scene-setters into my poetry collection.
Monika: Readers without that background may not always follow the message. Does that ever worry you?
Andie: Ever since, I have questioned whether my writing is clear enough for those with a narrower perspective, or whether I am too subtle. I think that so long as you don't get too self-obsessed about your message, you can speak a much broader language and become much richer and more nuanced from being transgendered. I find I write poems now that are dense with meaning for me that simply pass over the heads of non-trans people. So if anything, being a transgendered artist or writer is to work from a privileged position of seeing everything differently. Non-trans people can never do that, however good their imagination. When you have stood amongst men when no women are present, and amongst women when no men are present, you have witnessed unguarded self uniquely equally.
Monika: Your transition must have colored your writing. In what ways did it change the way you approach poetry?
Andie: I did write some before, through emotional times, but it was sporadic and far from crafted. Poetry can also be pretentious, imitating other poets. Mine was! My transition was as raw and authentic as it gets, and I wanted my writing to be that as well. Discovering what it means to be born transsexual was overwhelming because it was unavoidable and was not up for discussion. You can't negotiate your authenticity, and poetry was a way of being brutally direct whilst being a bit more gentle about it. That meant I had to learn to write in a way that leads rather than pushes, so that the truth of what I was saying became self-evident rather than being an argument with proof.
The best poetry is full of "show, not tell," which was what I was trying to do at first about my gender, so it felt very appropriate to learn the real craft of poetry. I worked with a poet-mentor for a year. In hindsight, I can see how much of my writing was about trying to capture other people's perspectives of transgendered people erupting into their lives, so it was about me, but it taught me to observe self (hence the subtitle of my blog).
Monika: Take me back to the beginning of your story. When did you first sense that you were different?
Andie: I felt I was different from the age of five, but I had no explanation for it. By the time I hit puberty, with the help of religious cultural background and a taboo-sensitive family, I knew it was something unspeakable and bad. So by adolescence, I was into evangelical Christianity and pretty screwed up inside! I had girlfriends because they were attractive but also, I can see now, so that I could be much more intimate with feeling female. But no one else knew my secret.
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| Starting out in 2011, her first style. |
Monika: What happened as adulthood and marriage followed?
Andie: I married at 25, revealing very little of my secret, but felt safe enough hoping it might all go away, whatever 'it' was. I just didn't know that people could be born transgendered and that this could be diagnosed, and that it felt like this. I left doctrinal religion behind at about the same age, but still knew I had this wicked side to me that no one must find out about because I would be rejected as disgusting or perverted.
Monika: When did things finally click for you, and how did your wife respond once she knew?
Andie: It was only in desperate searching of the Internet in 2010, at the age of 55, that I discovered that being transgendered wasn't anything to do with sexual preferences. I knew it wasn't a sexual thing for me, but that had been the only image I'd been presented with all my life. It clicked and suddenly I knew I could be alright. It was a shock to my wife, but we read all the right books together to understand it, and ended up going to therapy together for a while. To a degree, I had her support, and we did go around together as two women for about a year.
Monika: Did that closeness last, and how did your children take the news?
Andie: I think she understood reasonably well what gender dysphoria meant, but it didn't mean she was at all comfortable living intimately with a woman. I was racing ahead and she was confused. In the end, she just didn't want to be married to a woman, and I had to leave for my own emotional security. It was making me suicidal to live with the emotional rejection. Did she support me? In some ways, yes, and I am just glad she wasn't antagonistic. But welcoming? Definitely not. My daughter stopped talking to me three years ago, has never even been in the same room as me since the transition, left home to join her boyfriend soon after, and I haven't seen or heard from her since. In contrast, my son had a transgendered friend so it was never an issue for him.
Monika: Beyond your family, who helped you through that critical time?
Andie: I was fortunate to find a support group in Brighton (UK) that I could attend while out of employment for that critical year. It normalized my experience and gave me the courage to do what had to be done, and I was able to find out what to do in practical terms. Without them, I'd have been quite lost and fearful, and transition would have taken longer and been a lot harder.
Monika: You spent a lot of time around other musicians. How did you tell them?
Andie: Yes, I lost all the family friends, mainly other couples, but as a musician, I was involved every week with maybe 150 other musicians. There was no way I could creep in one day dressed in women's clothes, though it might have finally explained the nail varnish and earrings! Instead, I announced in front of each band in turn through one week at Easter 2012 that I would no longer be seen as a man. I think my explanation, and certainly my courage, was enough to settle all gossip and ridicule, and I had a lot of support, especially from other women.
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| The end of prosthetics, a new natural self, 2013. |
Monika: Was there anyone in particular who held you up through it all?
Andie: It was three other women friends who were the key to my survival, giving me all the encouragement, time, support, and advice I needed to leave the old gender behind completely. None had the experience of transgender people before, but what they gave was very much more than just acceptance. My sister has been amazing. We don't live near each other, but after a lifetime of phone calls maybe four times a year, we now spend an hour a week. Being sisters is a wonderful thing, and her support and mediation have meant my mother accepting me fully too.
Monika: During your transition, did any transgender role models guide you?
Andie: No. I'm not one for role models, heroines, or leaders to follow. It's great to see the famous and prominent being out and trans, because it makes me feel less vulnerable and part of something more unassailable. People with established public respect like musicians, actors, film directors, TV personalities, or writers bring that respectability into being transgendered. But I don't feel they wholly represent me or agree with everything they say.
My first awareness was Caroline Cossey, modeling as Tula, but everywhere she was billed with 'sex change,' like it was a choice she made. I was wowed but felt no connection. I wish I'd seen interviews with her at the time. I have to do my own thing or it doesn't feel right. However, seeing other trans friends going through the whole business of gender identity clinics, psychiatrists, and negotiating the hormones through to surgery and out the other side, has been hugely important. I had plenty of examples of complete success to give me confidence in getting all the way through. This is why I blog.
Monika: Coming out is rarely easy. What was the hardest part for you?
Andie: That's the easy question! Losing my wife, home, and daughter. The consequences of transition quickly reveal how conditional even the best love you know can be. It was absolute and complete agony. We were together for 32 years and I never stopped loving her.
But when she started treating me like an intruder or potential predator in my own bedroom, even before my body looked any different at all, it very nearly kicked me completely over the edge. Everything else has been very straightforward apart from that. I have always been so completely confident about who I am and how I should live, that even the most "courageous" things like public announcements in person have just seemed obvious.
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| In her own place at last. |
Monika: How would you describe the current situation for transgender women in your country?
Andie: Here in the UK the situation is on the whole pretty good, but patchy. I know people who can't find housing or jobs whose main explanation is discrimination. I certainly think being transgendered on top of anything else compounds your problems.
In terms of legal protections there isn't a lot more to ask, but implementing non-binary attitudes is still very hard, whether it's gendered bathrooms or official forms and registrations. The male-female declaration is pervasively required and yet there is so little reason to do so.
Monika: You identify as a woman within the binary. How do non-binary people fare, and what could change that?
Andie: I was clear after a few months of part-time transition that I am a woman, not ambiguously gendered, so I was flipping within the binary more than declaring neither. For non-binary people, life is very awkward indeed in many ways.
If society could be persuaded to drop binary identification everywhere that it doesn't actually make a difference, this would go a long way, and probably further than protesting for trans rights with reference to a persisting binarist culture.
Monika: Has prejudice touched your own life along the way?
Andie: I have had very little antagonism or prejudice throughout my transition and wherever I've traveled and lived, partly because I'm not out clubbing on Saturday nights, partly because I'm older and well-established as a person with proven skills and abilities, and partly because I refused to compromise my identity and went at it with total confidence and sheer bloody-mindedness. Those who find themselves in different cultural areas, or in places where local bigotry is rife, I know have a very different experience. Even when there are legal protections, you may find your local police force unskilled, untrained and unsympathetic, or that your HR managers in work situations don't implement proper practice and stamp on bullying. I also think that trans women experience a mix of prejudice through being women and also being trans. I would say I've had as much to deal with simply for being a woman as I have for being trans.
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| Performing at Brighton Pride, 2013. |
Monika: Some say transgender rights are the new frontier for human rights. Would you agree?
Andie: My first reaction to that is to say that there is no "transgenderism." It isn't an ideology and we aren't a movement. People are born with gender identities that don't conform to the nonsensical binary. Compare feminists with females. We don't have femaleists. I worry about movements that form to make a normal variety highly visible.
END OF PART 1
All the photos: courtesy of Andie Davidson.
© 2014 - Monika Kowalska
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