#You know my name not my story full#

‘No moment I can pinpoint reveals an innate knowing of my transness’ Or, at least, that is the kind of energy I brought to my debut performance, my small feet shuffling in my mother’s heels, as I marched unknowingly into each gender-nonconforming child’s cliched memory. That is how the 1999 record‑breaking hit All You Need Is a Shoe was born, smashing all previous chart records, and the royalties clearing every Alabanza out of generational cycles of poverty for ever more. “Singing his new song, All You Need Is a Shoe, introducing … Travis Alabanza!”Īnd the rest is history. “Hangwolf, you have to introduce me with the name of the song I’m singing you can’t just say my name!” I said offstage (which at this point in my life meant the living room). “Introducing … Travis Alabanza!” Hangwolf said one day. Our German lodger, Hangwolf, primarily there to pay our food bills, developed into a brief but important and loving figure in the house: a tall, statuesque man who fitted into the structure of our unit, almost as if there was a gap left by a father, still warm for Hangwolf to walk into. We’re OK with pantomime dames, RuPaul’s Drag Race, or Harry Styles in a dress – as long as it stays in the realms of performance

#You know my name not my story full#

We were warm, loud and most definitely excessive: three very strong-minded people who made a home full of belly laughs, lots of singing, shouting and plenty of talking. I was raised in a red-brick council house in a neglected suburb of Bristol, the kind of council estate that looks like every other photo of a council estate you have seen.Īlthough the house was cold, bare in its furniture and had cracks in its ceilings from subsidence, our family was the opposite of this.

I think about the house I grew up in and one of my earliest memories there. I think of an article I read by another trans person speaking of the indescribable pain of knowing innately they were not in the body they were supposed to be, how their childhood was plagued with the consistent reminder of being told they were a gender they were not. ‘S o Travis, when did you know?” I think of other people I have heard speak about their moment of knowing, how they say their parents recall them crying whenever they were in the wrong clothing. “I opened my mouth, aged three, and said: ‘Doctor, I am actually a cross-dressing, gender-nonconforming deviant.’ And that is how we all knew something was different about me.” “And then, just as the doctor had given up on finding why I could not speak, as he was packing up his bag, I turned around and I opened my mouth and said my very first words. I can tell she is waiting for the meat of this story to be served. She is nodding ferociously at this point. He realised I was not deaf, so then he started to look inside my throat, to check if it was anything to do with my vocal cords … ” The doctor inspected me, and did hearing tests and more, to check if there was a problem with any of my senses. Seeing that this story is working, I continue.

She nods, as if to say, go on, don’t stop, tell me, how exactly you know. I was her second child and my older brother couldn’t shut up, making full sentences by the age of three … ” “Well, when I was around three years old my mother took me to the doctor because I had not spoken my first word yet. I take a sharp breath to prepare my answer. The “uh” is followed by a grand gesture of her hand, pointing up and down to my outfit and makeup. “So, when did you know, uh … ?” asks a donor to a very popular LGBTQ+ charity in the UK, at a private dinner celebrating volunteers. Travis Alabanza: ‘What is terrifying is that for a long time I felt I owed every question an answer.’ All portraits: Harry Borden/The Guardian. Perhaps what is even more terrifying is that for a long time I felt I owed every question an answer. People want to know, often within the first handshake or moment you sit down, whether you were always like this, what your parents think, the defining moment you knew, and when you first tried on the red lipstick and dress from your mother’s closet (even if, in fact, you never did). “So, when did you know?” becomes their version of weather talk or asking what you do for a living. Yet, present that same dinner table with someone who is visibly gender nonconforming, wearing a dress, with a bit of a 5 o’clock shadow coming through, and all of those manners disappear. Asking any form of direct question at a British dinner table can cause waves of disapproving murmurs for months. Of course, humans are naturally curious, but I find British ways of communicating to be crowded with social pleasantries and forced “politeness” – an investment in never rocking the boat or being seen as out of line.