Paris Lees: ‘It drives me crazy when people introduce me as a trans activist’ | Life and style
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Paris Lees always knew she would write the story of her life. She knew it when she was a teenager in Hucknall, just north of Nottingham, getting beaten up in alleyways, imagining that her bullies would get to read about her in the paper. She knew when she told her auntie Rachael that when she was older, her life would be like Sex And The City, going to book launches and parties, meeting politicians, wearing nice clothes. She knew when an author visited her university during her graduation, and her mother told her it would be her one day. “It was a bit of a running joke,” she says. “I’ve always known. I just had to write this book.”
That book is What It Feels Like For A Girl, a memoir that reads like a novel, written in dialect, Trainspotting-style. Here, it is a Nottingham/east Midlands slang, where “right” is “rate” and “myself” is “mysen”, though Lees has only the bare bones of that accent today. She arrives for lunch almost an hour after we agreed to meet, outside a cafe in Canary Wharf in London, not far from where she lives. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, a fast-talking, 10-to-the-dozen whirlwind in a black hoodie and PVC trousers, hiding for a moment behind tinted Gucci specs in the freezing-cold shadows of metal-and-glass skyscrapers. She didn’t sleep last night, she says, out of nerves. She is anxious about discussing the book, and has been dithering at home, picking up things to give me or show me. She hands over a finished copy of the memoir, wrapped in black tissue, which peels off to reveal a bold, brash neon jacket, with a photograph of young Lees on the cover. In thick eyeliner, hair piled high, she looks like a club kid from two decades before her time. “You tell me how bright this is! Doesn’t it just grab your attention?” she says, beaming.
Lees herself has always been bright, always been attention-grabbing. She found growing up and living as a boy tough, and her adolescence was dramatic. There was bullying, a troubled home life, rebellion. She immersed herself in the party scene with a ragtag group of mates, or the Fallen Divas Project as she names them in the book, and became what she calls a rent boy at 14. She was eventually given a two-year prison sentence for her part in a robbery.
It was a fork in the road. She had dropped out of college before prison, but when she was released on curfew, she went back, took her A-levels, and successfully applied to university in Brighton to study English language and literature. It was around this time that she started her gender transition. After she graduated, she moved to London and did work experience at Gay Times, a magazine she had read in prison, and ended up carving out a career as a journalist, presenter, campaigner and model.
They say a writer gets to live life twice. Which is all well and good, but sometimes you don’t want to live things twice
That career is filled with high-profile firsts. She was the first openly trans woman to present a show on Radio 1, to present a show on Channel 4, and to appear on Question Time (she has done it twice) and in Vogue. She had a cameo on Hollyoaks, addressed the Oxford Union in 2014, and in 2016 gave evidence at the home affairs select committee on prostitution laws.
She has been a columnist for newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian and Vice, and now for Vogue. As a writer, she is witty, gossipy and intimate, but with a steely edge when necessary. And while she does write about being trans, it is not her dominant theme. “It drives me crazy when people introduce me as a trans activist, because that makes me feel like I should be chained up to the railings outside Downing Street with Peter Tatchell,” she says. Recently, someone left a comment on her Instagram saying they missed her writing on trans issues. “And I do get it. But it’s so interesting to me that people assume I’ve written a book about being trans. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t. This is only a trans book if every other memoir is a “woman book” or a “man book”. I can’t write a book in which I’m not trans, because I am, and obviously it is relevant. But, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve written a book about growing up poor and bullied and abused at a certain point in history. I don’t think it’s a trans memoir at all.”
She heard that one early reader of the book had wondered why Lees had not written more about her gender transition. “They said, ‘Oh, she doesn’t really talk about surgery or any of that side of things,’” she says. “You were expecting me to? Why? I understand that it’s interesting to people, but it’s really, really boring to me, at this point.”
Lees went to the publisher with the idea for What It Feels Like For A Girl in 2013. At first, the plan was to write a more straightforward autobiography, rather than the stylised literary memoir that it became. “We’re talking the thick end of a decade,” she says. “There’s this great quote about writing, which is that a writer gets to live life twice. Which is all very well and good, but sometimes you don’t want to live things twice. And, to tell you the truth, this has been really, really hard.”
While it is a memoir, she has chosen to use a different name for her protagonist, whom she calls “Byron”, a homage to Nottingham’s most famous literary son. Throughout our conversation, we talk about Lees’ teenage self as Byron, and she prefers to use “they/them” when discussing Byron now. There is so much drama in the book that there is an obvious question: how much of it is true? “This is my story,” she says, simply. “It all happened.”
When it begins, in 2001, Byron is in a desperate place. They are bullied and beaten up by their peers, intimidated by a macho father. They sell sex to older men, take far too many drugs, and end up serving eight months in a young offender institute. But for all of its bleakness, it is a bold story with a big, open, funny heart. Byron finds moments of light and joy, and ultimately escape, in friends, in nightlife, and in a refusal to fade into the background.
“I wanted it to be joyful,” Lees says, nodding. “Because I feel like being a trans person in the public eye has traditionally meant being a professional victim. So how do you talk about your trauma and the abuse you’ve been through, how do you not be a victim, when you sort of have been a victim?” This is a conflict that runs through our conversation. Lees is thick-skinned and tough, funny and quick, but she can also be sensitive and vulnerable. There’s no denying that life for teenage Byron was dark. “But there was also this joy. We just had so much fun. You only get to be young once, and puberty wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but it was what it was, for better or worse.”
Lees doesn’t want to talk about her age, but, judging by the book, she is in her early 30s. She was born to a young mother and father, the “local hardman”, who was a bouncer and former boxer. Her parents split up acrimoniously when she was a baby, and she grew up between various family members’ houses in Hucknall. “Do you know what, if you were not born the way that I was born, it’s actually quite a nice place to grow up,” she says. “I’m not saying it’s all hunky-dory. But I do think that my experience was uniquely awful, because I was a strange fruit.” Though she feels far more affectionate towards Hucknall now, she hated it as a teenager, in that passionate way that teenagers often do, and never felt as if she fitted in. “I grew up feeling like I was less than other people, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was a pervert, that there was something wrong with me,” she says.
My parents don’t come out of it too great, do they? I mean, neither do I. It’s warts and all for everybody
The book follows Byron from 13 to 18, a difficult period in Lees’ life. “I am traumatised by my past,” she says. “Obviously, it’s a very vivid and formative time in most people’s lives, but if you’re going through the wrong puberty, you’re going through trauma as well.” She says that reliving it has been upsetting; I can see that it is difficult for her to talk about it now. “But I didn’t want to look back on being 18 and think, oh well, that was that. It was so awful, I had to turn it into something positive. It couldn’t have been for nothing.”
Her relationship with her parents was fractious, to say the least, though they are on much better terms now. In the book, her father is violent and ill-tempered, doling out regular clips around the earhole. When Byron is attacked by bullies, he calls Byron “a grett big fuckin’ poof” and slaps them again, to provoke something: “What are ya gonna do if someone hits ya?” Byron’s mother is distant and detached, at one point leaving Byron to follow a boyfriend to Turkey. “I thought she’d left me for ever,” Lees writes.
“They don’t come out of it too great, do they?” she says. “I mean, neither do I. It’s warts and all for everybody, let’s be honest. I go to prison.” She wanted the book to be true, and the truth is not always rose-tinted. “Those things did happen to me, and I did do those things. So let’s talk about them.”
Lees making that decision for herself is one thing. Do her family feel the same way? “My mum and dad may see themselves differently from the version of themselves that appears in the book, I think that’s fair to say. They could have been really angry with me, and they could have opposed me, but they’ve decided to give me their blessing and embrace it.” Both of them? “Both of them, yeah. Even though they may not feel that it represents who they are, in 2021, they understand this is important to me. They just want me to have some peace, have some security, and help other people, hopefully, going through this. I feel like they’re putting my best interests at heart. And I’m so grateful to them. I love them. I’m not angry with them any more.”
On her 14th birthday, Lees went into a public toilet cubicle with an older man. It doesn’t feel appropriate to describe what happened next as sex work, given that Lees was underage, so I ask how she would describe it. “Listen, I was a rent boy,” she says. In the book, Byron seems not to judge the men who pay a young teenager for sex. “Because it’s written from my perspective at that time,” she says. “And, of course, you can never completely remove your perspective of now, and what you want to say today, but I really tried to make it authentic to that time, and I didn’t realise quite how bad it was. It’s taken me many years to realise that it was abuse. I wasn’t forced, but it was statutory rape. What would you call it? If somebody in their 30s or their 40s was having sex with a 14-year-old? It’s abuse. And I wanted you to be horrified.”
Lees reaches into her bag. “I want to show you something, actually.” She brings out photographs of her mother, and her auntie Rachael, and of Byron, at 14, on a family holiday. “So that’s Byron,” she says, softly. Her mother looks so young. “It’s like, she’s a kid. On a council estate in Nottingham. How was she supposed to know? What’s she going to do, with a kid like me?” says Lees. She shows me another photograph of Byron, in a Nottingham Forest football top and cargo trousers, sitting on a swing.
Prison wasn’t the worst time of my life. Being in those cells, I felt held and contained. I didn’t feel that as a kid
“But this one,” says Lees. She hands over a picture of Byron in pink swimming trunks, propped up sideways on a bed, next to a closed copy of Little Women, another book open. “I think it’s Geri Halliwell’s If Only,” she laughs. “My mum took this, and it broke my heart. Because I think you can see, look, this person is a lady. It was taken through family eyes. This is on holiday. It’s not sexualised. But I look at this body, and this is the body of a 14- or 15-year-old, and this is the body that older men were lusting after, wanting to grab hold of, wanting to have sex with. And it makes me really sad. And it makes me sick, actually. It’s weird thinking about myself in the third person, but I really want to go and just give that person a hug. And say, ‘You poor baby, please keep yourself safe. Please look after yourself.’”
These photographs are private, though, later, Lees will show me a picture on her phone of them pinned up on her wall at home. For the first time, she says, she has been able to have them on display. “I wanted to show you. I wanted you to understand, this is who we’re talking about.”
When she was 16, Lees was arrested for her part in a robbery. She was “sweet on” another rent boy, who suggested they rob a client; they stole his bank cards and withdrew a large amount of money from his accounts. She was released on curfew after serving eight months in the young offender institute. It sounds, oddly, like prison was a relief in some ways, a place where Lees made friends by telling funny stories. “The thing is, it wasn’t the worst time of my life, prison,” she says. “It was awful. It’s horrible. Who wants to be in prison?” But part of her feels nostalgic for it. “Being in those cells, locked away, with the radiators rattling at night-time, I remember feeling held and feeling contained. And I didn’t feel that as a kid. I was putting myself in dangerous, dangerous situations. I felt safe in prison in a way that I don’t necessarily feel now, in some ways, to this day. I don’t recommend it. I certainly didn’t want to go back. But I did make people laugh.”
There is a huge contrast between Lees’ early life and her life today. “I was living in a different city, I had a different accent, I had a different way of making money, shall we say, a different set of friends. I can’t connect that with my life today. And a lot of it is the class thing.” We talk about how it feels to shift from a working-class life to a more middle-class one. “For me, personally, the much more interesting journey of this book is the class transition,” she says. The media world is not exactly dominated by people who grew up on council estates, but most of her friends come from similar backgrounds. She mentions the performance artist and playwright Travis Alabanza. “The people I tend to connect with have been along class lines, rather than along LGBT lines,” she says. “We’re on the same wavelength.”
A couple of weeks ago, Lees met a friend for lunch. She was late (I raise an eyebrow. “Give me a break!” she protests) and the friend had to leave, but suggested Lees stay at the table, have some food, hang out on her own. She couldn’t do it. “And it’s not like there was a big gang of lads, or anything. No one was looking, there was nothing threatening. It was just a nice, sunny day, at a cafe not unlike this one.” But all she wanted to do was go home. “I never feel completely safe, ever. You grow up and you don’t feel safe at home, you don’t feel safe walking down the street. I mean, I’ve been mugged. I’ve been spat at, I have been beaten up, humiliated in public. I just can’t seem to get over it, no matter how much therapy I do.”
I feel like I want to cry, because all of this stuff has been the noise in my head for the past 10 years
Hearing about those experiences, seeing the pain, makes the toxic discourse around transgender women in this country seem particularly cruel. Maybe that’s an obvious point to make, I say. “Well, I hope you do make it,” says Lees. “I could make that point. But I think it’s more powerful if other people look at the situation and go, hang on a minute.”
She tells me that after she transitioned, she didn’t go swimming for 10 years. “I thought, well, you can’t go into a women’s changing room: you can’t go swimming. I’m not a proper person, I don’t deserve to be in this space.” She joined a fancy gym, and, about two years ago, returned to the water. “I’ve missed swimming so much in lockdown, because I love it.” Her face wobbles slightly. “Sorry. I feel like I want to cry at so many different points of this conversation, because all of this stuff has been the noise in my head for the past 10 years, and it’s just so weird to actually be talking about it in the open.” She is sad for all those years she missed out on swimming, just because she didn’t think it was OK. “And I just can’t believe what I read is said about us. I can’t even put it into words. It’s so upsetting and horrible.”
Does she think things are worse now than they were five years ago, when Time magazine put Laverne Cox on the cover and declared a “transgender tipping point”, citing greater public visibility of trans people? “Yeah, I do,” she says, sadly. Why does she think that is? “I think it’s backlash, for sure. I think it’s a reaction to genuine progress. We’ve seen this with every group that’s come forward to fight for their rights and for acceptance.” She says some of it is down to a generational divide. “This is the world that this book is set in. It was OK to ridicule and laugh at trans people. Even I thought so. If people would abuse us in the street or humiliate us, I would think, well, we have come out dressed as women, so we kind of deserve it, don’t we? What are you going to do?”
It is only in the last decade that the conversation has significantly changed. “If you’re 50 or 60, then 15 years ago just seems like yesterday,” she says. “But if you’re 25, that’s the only world you’ve ever known.”
In a column for Vogue, she once wrote, “There are times when I wonder what I am sacrificing by living my life so publicly. I appreciate having a voice to try and make life a little bit better for young trans people, but I sometimes fantasise about life under the radar now that I could, I daresay, ‘get away with it’.” I wonder how she feels about that now.
“To be completely honest, my activism was selfish, in the sense that I realised that my life was unbearable, that I can’t be a trans person in this society, so something’s got to change. And part of that was, well, I can change my appearance and throw everything that I’ve got into not ‘looking trans’, to escape that discrimination. But the end goal was that I just wanted to be OK with walking down the street.” If she goes on holiday to France, say (she spent much of lockdown becoming fluent in French, and can see herself moving to Europe one day) she never thinks about her gender. “I’m in a bakery, ‘Bonjour, madame’, I’m just somebody buying bread. It’s so bizarre to me, because you go online, and you’d think that I was the antichrist, or that we’re this huge menace to society.”
What It Feels Like For A Girl is a story of resilience as much as a story of pain. These days, her public achievements get written up in the Nottingham Post. I joke that she is the pride of the city. “I was the shame, at one point,” she chuckles. Lees has lived an extraordinary life, and it makes for extraordinary writing. “This book was just the start really,” she says, casually, which makes me laugh, given how much is packed into it. “There’s at least two more books!” I ask her to sign my copy, gleaming brightly on the table. “I didn’t want to be arrogant,” she says, “but I did bring a pen.” On the title page, she writes: “I turned my trauma into art! For your enjoyment! Lots of love, Paris.”
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What It Feels Like For A Girl by Paris Lees is published by Penguin Books at £20. To order a copy for £17.40, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.