An excellent, if thoroughly depressing, article in today's Times:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-alex-bertie-the-transgender-poster-boy-z88hgh8b8
Meet Alex Bertie, the transgender poster boy
More girls are changing their gender from female to male than ever before. And it’s YouTube star Alex Bertie’s example that they’re following. What’s behind the surge in numbers? Janice Turner investigates
The little girl who was once Alex Bertie liked action figures, toy cars and Lego. Above all she loved video games: her favourite times were sitting beside her father, Paul, a postman, while he played Nintendo and Dreamcast. Consequently at primary school her friends were all boys. “The guys were like, ‘I can’t believe I’ve found a girl who likes video games.’ And to them that’s like gold, isn’t it?”
Little Alex “generally steered clear of anything pink, frilly or sparkly”, but her parents didn’t care that their daughter preferred jeans and shirts. Nor did her many friends, who all lived close by in a modern estate in rural Alderholt, Dorset. And for the happy first 11 years of life, Alex never thought about gender.
At 13, there was the hated school prom: Alex didn’t want to wear a dress, but for once her mother, Michelle, insisted, and so Alex bought the dullest black gown imaginable but wiped the make-up off her face: it felt wrong.
That term, just before summer break, Alex realised she was attracted to her female best friend: “And I ended up, stupidly, telling people at school that we were in a relationship. I didn’t think I was a lesbian or anything like that. I just thought, ‘This is somebody that I’m really into. Why can’t we be together if we have a connection in a similar way that I would if I found a boy that I liked?’ ”
In September, starting at a huge new secondary school, Alex and her girlfriend found themselves surrounded by a jeering gang. News had spread. Alex felt panicked, anxious. She hadn’t even told her parents. “I was known as the ‘weird lesbian girl’ and nobody would speak to me, and suddenly it was just really hard, because I’d never found it difficult to make friends really.” She’d go over to her old mates, the video-game boys, but they’d walk away. “My sexuality tainted their perception of me entirely.” Among the post-pubescent “masculine” boys and “feminine” girls she was an oddity: a masculine girl. “I was the misshapen cookie, the one made at the end with the leftover dough that gets burnt and no one wants to eat.”
Lonely, dumped by her girlfriend, Alex was catcalled and harassed relentlessly by a gang of boys: “I was a bully’s dream: weedy, geeky and gay.” For three years, she endured shouts of “lezzer” or “you’re a boy” without reporting it, growing ever more troubled. She self-harmed by cutting her legs where her mother wouldn’t notice. She hated her now developing body, although cropping her long hair into a cool boyish cut felt great.
At this time, Alex assuaged loneliness by setting up a YouTube channel, making little videos in her bedroom about her sexuality in which she vented her misery but also created a perky online persona who quickly won followers. Then, around 15, Alex told a teacher about the bullying, self-harm and gender dysphoria – a discomfort with your body’s sex. A school counsellor made an appointment with an LGBT group, Over the Rainbow, which gave Alex a folder about transgender issues, including pictures of trans celebrities and how to begin the NHS pathway to transition. It was a lightbulb moment.
“At 15, I fully understood I’m supposed to be male,” Alex says. On YouTube he discovered many other female-to-male video bloggers, changed his girl birth name to Alex and started to strap down his breasts with too-tight swimsuits, before ordering a special breast binder online. “Suddenly,” he says, “my teachers looked out for me in class.”
At 16, he moved to sixth-form college where no one knew him, assuming his new male identity. As a man, his confidence soared. He learnt to act like a boy, to manspread and banter: “At first I was like the bro-iest bro.” On his YouTube channel he declared his intent to medically transition, and what he calls his “quest to a beard” began.
Now I sit with Alex, 21, in that same lime-green bedroom seen by his now 300,000 YouTube followers. In a tank is his snake, Tim. After 18 months on testosterone, injected into his buttock every three months, Alex’s voice is low; he has a passable beard and has filled out a little, but is still a birdlike 5ft 4in and his hair is receding. His periods have stopped and he is now probably infertile. “I’ll adopt,” he says cheerfully.
“I had so much dysphoria and distaste towards my body. And I knew in my heart and soul that I was not supposed to be a woman. It’s difficult for a cisgender person [someone who identifies as the sex they were born with] to understand. Now I have down days, but that’s not for gender reasons any more.”
Alex is a delightful person: by turns kids’-TV-presenter enthusiastic, then suddenly profoundly vulnerable. He recently had a very painful NHS operation to remove both breasts; it took weeks to recover. His book, Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard, details his journey, as did his frequent videos, through GPs appointments and gender services. He works as a graphic designer for a local private school and is dating another young trans-man called Jake, whom he met in a support group: they transitioned together.
And now Alex Bertie is a trans poster boy. His book is a how-to manual for confused girls with an appendix on how to make your own breast binder. Why does he think so many girls now transition? “It’s a lot more public than it used to be. People can see it as an option. Like, ‘Oh, I can actually alleviate this pain I feel towards my body.’ ”
These girls write to him with questions and he replies honestly online; thinks it’s important not to hide the gravity of transition. “How do you cope with gender dysphoria in the bath?” one asks. “Bubbles,” he replies, “lots of bubbles.” Alex’s body hatred endures to some degree, but in his book he says he won’t yet have what is known as “bottom surgery”, using his female genital tissue to create a penis and testicles, one of which acts as a pump to simulate an erection. Both of the two current methods risk infection and loss of orgasm.
He’ll wait until genital surgery has advanced. But, I say, they’ll never create a functioning penis that can ejaculate. “Never say never!” says Alex brightly. Meanwhile he “packs” his boxers with a prosthetic device that allows him – once he’d got the hang of it – to pee standing up. He feels he is now “my authentic self”.
Downstairs I speak with Michelle, who is the deputy manager of a care home. She weeps as she speaks of Alex’s double mastectomy. “Seeing him go through that … But he had such a pure hatred of his body. He said, ‘It’s your fault for giving birth to a girl.’ ” She never really tried to challenge his transition. By the time she even knew, he was being cheered on by thousands of online fans.
As a small girl, Jessie hated dresses and skirts, wearing jeans and T-shirts, and was often mistaken for a boy. Her quirky, nonconformist parents, in south London, encouraged her to play with trucks as well as dolls.
Around 13, Jessie realised she was attracted to girls and came out to friends as bisexual and then gay. Her favourite bands were All Time Low and Twenty One Pilots, all-male groups whose members were young, cute and fun. She didn’t fancy them; she wanted to be them. These boys had exciting lives, girlfriends, cool haircuts and wore clothes she liked to wear.
Online, Jessie could find no one like her. YouTubers Rose & Rosie were gay but too “girlie”. And she discovered that her favourite bands had a huge Instagram following of girls just like her: young, “butch”, high-achieving and gay. Her fellow fans became online and then real-life friends.
They’d hold meet-ups in Hyde Park. “No one uses the word ‘lesbian’ any more,” she says. “It’s so uncool. It has really negative connotations.” Rather, these short-haired androgynous girls, many of whom had previously self-harmed, started to identify as boys. Some went by male names only online, others just among close friends. A few were “socially transitioned”: out as male to family and school. “It’s weird,” says Jessie. “It’s as if a switch is flicked and suddenly you feel different. I felt I will no longer be that weird girl who dresses like a boy. I will be a boy.”
Jessie had felt uneasy about puberty, but now “it felt 100 times worse. ‘I’m not a girl: why do I have to go through this?’ ” To her 5,000 Instagram followers she became “Jake”. “And if you are on your phone as much as me, that means I was Jake most of the time.” She planned to become Jake permanently when she started sixth-form college, taking testosterone at 16, growing a beard … She followed Alex Bertie’s transition avidly online and was excited to meet him at a YouTube event.
Then she told her parents. They’d been warm and accepting (and unsurprised) when she came out as gay. But they were appalled when Jessie said she was “in the wrong body”. Her mother, Lily, refused to let her attend a gender clinic. Instead, she challenged her thinking: why did having short hair, loving other girls and preferring the menswear department make her a boy? Why must she change her body to match her personality? The rows were epic. “I was forever texting that my parents were awful, that they wouldn’t let me be my authentic self.”
Jessie’s friends had started to bind their breasts: some strapped so tight, they threw up. She tried, but it made her out of breath. Then her mum found her binder and threw it away.
Over a turbulent 18 months, the feeling she was a boy gradually faded. Why? She got a girlfriend and saw her transitioning friends were still deeply troubled. “But the biggest factor was that I moved from music stuff to TV fandom.” She watched Supergirl, which has two lesbian characters, Maggie and Alex, a secret agent and a cop; and Wynonna Earp, with action lesbians Waverly and Nicole who fight demons. “It sounds mad, but they changed my life: finally I saw girls I wanted to be.”
Now Jessie is 17, starting A levels, a happy, sociable, “out” lesbian. “I don’t see why there should be a male box and a female box. Just people who happen to have a penis or a vagina.”
What would have happened if her mother had taken her to a gender clinic? “I would have been Jake now. No question. But I wouldn’t have been happier at all.”