fronting the agency’s headline bands might be
a selling point.
She began wearing padded bras, underwent
laser hair removal and electrolysis. Her
mother did her best to support her, bought her
foundation, learnt the vocabulary. (“A gaff,
I discovered, is essentially an extremely tight
jock strap designed to compress and conceal
the genitals.”) Amelie’s first excursion into
surgery was the removal of her Adam’s apple
by a surgeon specialising in facial feminisation.
The splits and contradictions in Spencer’s
feelings are striking in her account. She felt
squeamish and yet for the first time hopeful.
Was it relief? “Yes, huge relief,” she says.
“Once I got over the initial shock, I actually
began to see hope for the future. And it was
a great relief for me finally to have some sort
of explanation for 20 years of very apparent
unhappiness and 20 years of feeling that no
matter what I did, I could never make it better.
And I really tried. It’s one of the reasons I felt
compelled to support my daughter on this
journey as well as wanting to understand it.”
Spencer flew to Australia to break the news
to the extended family. They did not take it
well. Her sister dismissed it as an attention-
seeking “fad”. Her father asked whether his
grandchild intended to have “his penis cut off”.
Lucas was angry. “So under that dress is
a male pretending to be a woman, and you
actually think that’s OK?”
Milly’s decision to transition also jarred
with Spencer’s values, if in a different way.
When Milly began to see a Harley Street
vocal coach who specialised in helping trans
women find their voice, Spencer felt ashamed
to acknowledge to herself that she “actively
disliked this new, breathier tone that Milly
was acquiring. Why, I thought, should being
a woman mean sounding feeble? I wanted
my daughter to take my example of what
I hoped was a resilient and fearless kind of
womanhood. This meant a lot to me.”
What Spencer dreaded most were the
complex medical procedures ahead. Besides
the fact she’d always been squeamish about
surgery, it was hard for her as a mother to
accept that her child hated her own body
to the point that she wanted it operated on.
“It all struck me as painful, desperate and
expensive, but Milly was immoveable.”
Spencer writes of Milly’s impatience with
the NHS and her decision to go down the
private route, where she received psychiatric
assessments and then hormone therapy
through an endocrinologist. In this middle
period, Milly was often subject to insults and
assault. When she was on tour in Berlin, women
from the team she was working with refused
to let her into the women’s bathroom and then
kicked down the door when she used the
disabled facilities. Her physical transformation
was accelerating. “Her skin glowed and herhair shone. Her breasts began to develop. Her
masculine musculature melted away, and in
general there was a softening of the body.
“Most striking to me, though, was the very
real change in the relationship between us.
We could now talk in a way that was palpably
different to that which I had experienced
as the mother of sons. I was both fascinated
and troubled by this change, not wishing to
subscribe to biologically deterministic arguments
about the nature of the ‘female brain’. That
position seemed to me to be worryingly anti-
feminist, and yet here I was experiencing my
child as a medically induced daughter and,
I have to say, it was fundamentally different.”
Spencer was struck also by how positively
Milly’s decision to transition affected her
career, and hoped that she’d go off the idea
of further surgery. She recalls Milly in tears.
“ ‘If I had a terminal disease that could be
fixed with surgery but the waiting list was so
long you knew I might die before I could have
it, wouldn’t you do anything to help?’ ” Her
mother objected that this was just something
she wanted; mental rather than physical. “ ‘It is a
physical disorder. And if the only way forward
for me is to get a bank loan to pay for the
surgery, then that is what I am going to do.’ ”
Thailand, we learn in Spencer’s book, is the
world centre for transgender surgery. Most of
the world’s leading surgeons in the field have
done their specialist training there, at the
Preecha Aesthetic Institute in Bangkok.
Transgender medical tourism is a niche
market in Bangkok, with around 90 per cent
of patients coming from Europe, Australia, the
United States, China and the Middle East.
In January 2018, Milly travelled with two
friends to Thailand for surgery. Spencer flew
out once it was complete. “I was aware of my
limitations. I couldn’t cope with the thought of
watching my daughter being wheeled away for
this frightening surgical metamorphosis.” Milly
was in hospital for five days after the surgery
“in severe pain, relieved only by constant
infusions of pethidine given through her drip”.
Once home, healing was supposed to take
six weeks but there were complications. It
emerged that residual erectile tissue had
become embedded in the reconstructed pelvic
area, but no UK doctor was willing to carry
out revision surgery. A year later, in a lot of
pain, Milly returned to Thailand to fix the
problem and to have breast augmentation.
Since then she has been pain-free. Happy.
The row last year at the Tavistock
Clinic about puberty blockers being given
to under-16s raises the question as to howSpencer might have felt had Milly been a
minor. Is she glad she didn’t have to negotiate
this when Milly was under the age of consent?
“I am, actually. I think that it is very problematic.
I can understand why people have a lot of
anxiety around these issues and I would
not have liked to be making those kinds
of life-changing decisions on my daughter’s
behalf.” A chapter of her book goes into
the medical science but comes to no definite
conclusions. “My feeling in the end is that it
doesn’t really matter whether or not we know
why this is the case. If someone feels this way,
who are we to judge?
“My position is that they shouldn’t have to
be justifying themselves. And for that reason
it doesn’t matter to me what the reason for
them taking it is. It’s about having compassion
and respect for however other people need to
present themselves in life.”
Why didn’t Milly tell her mother earlier?
“She didn’t think I would understand or
accept it. She was wrong, but when you’re
a child, a parent is a role rather than an
individual, and maybe she didn’t think that
role would encompass me understanding
such an important and intimate thing.” The
emotional risks of disclosing such a secret
were huge, as was made clear by the reaction
of Milly’s birth father, although last year
he became seriously ill and before he died
in December he apologised to Milly. “Yes,
I suppose it’s the greatest risk. If you have an
affectionate relationship with your parents, it’s
a very transgressive secret,” says Spencer.
It would be interesting to read an account
by Milly alongside the one written by her
mother. Have the other family members come
to terms with Milly’s transition? “It hasn’t
damaged my relationship with them, but
it has caused fractures,” says Spencer, sadly.
“And those fractures shift over time as well.
Initial reactions have softened; it’s like the
movement of tectonic plates. I would say now
that Lucas is respectful; he has his private
views, but he certainly wouldn’t misgender
my daughter any more. But the relationship
between the two children is fraught and
I find that very, very sad, so I try to maintain
a relationship with both of them. I guess we
don’t have the relationship where we can all
be together. At the moment that’s my way of
surviving this particular problem, but I always
hope that there will be change.” nThe Road to My Daughter by Elisabeth Spencer
is published by Biteback on February 23 (£16.99).
To read an extract, go to thetimes.co.uk‘Surgery struck me as painful, desperate and
expensive, but Milly was immoveable’
The Times Magazine 39HAIR: JOANNE ORR. MAKE-UP: LIZBETH