Alexandra Heminsley on inhabiting a female body
The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May:
Alexandra Heminsley on inhabiting a female body
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This week Katherine chats to journalist and writer Alexandra Heminsley, author of Some Body to Love.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hi, everyone. I'm Katherine May and this is The Wintering Sessions. How you all doing? Yeah. I can hear you replying, don't worry. It's been, well, I don't know. I don't think any one of us knows where to put our heads right now. I'm standing in my kitchen. Spring is breaking out. I have, and I'm counting here, four crocuses, one daffodil, two wood pigeons trying to mate. I think I can hear a robin, but I can't see him. Earlier, a big flock of starlings all landed in the ash tree that overhangs my garden at once and they made the most incredible noise.
Katherine May:
I feel like we're all clinging to these things at the moment, and well we should. There's absolute tragedies unfolding all across the world and we're all, all of us, doing our best to bear witness to those. Every one of us is doing what we can. But you know what? You need permission to turn off, as well. I know that the people who are being directly affected can't turn off, but this is a long haul. Nobody is helping by getting themselves stressed, distressed, unable to function.
Katherine May:
It's so important to take great care of the people around you, as well. This isn't some kind of a situation where you have to demonstrate that you care. No decent person is looking for your proof. It's okay to stop scrolling. Maybe think about watching the news at a set time, once a day, just like you would have done 15 years ago. That felt like a time when we could get the measure of the news, when we weren't living it. We've all been through a lot. I just wanted to say that. Go outside and breathe the air whenever you can. All my heart and soul is with the people who are suffering.
Katherine May:
Anyway. I've got a really good conversation to introduce you to today. Really, one of the first people that I thought about when I started this podcast was Alex Heminsley because she writes so interestingly about how we, I don't know, live through and overcome the problems that come up from being a woman, physical problems, ordinary problems. She doesn't talk about anything exceptional, normally, but she talks about the everyday challenges of how it feels to live in a female body.
Katherine May:
But then Somebody To Love came out, which is the book we're talking about in this interview. I think it's made her reach even deeper in a way that I found incredibly compelling. We'll outline the story in the interview, so I won't go into it now. But what I do want to say is, I think in this time when there's so little redemption, I think it's really brilliant to see a writer thinking hard about how their mind has been changed and how it's possible to understand the world in a completely different way, and still be compassionate towards the person who has made your life change so abruptly.
Katherine May:
I don't think we talk about that enough, the possibility of flexibility and pragmatism, and love that doesn't flow in quite the way we wanted it to, but that is nevertheless still love. We certainly don't talk enough about respect for people who have different identities, and different bodies, and different minds to us.
Katherine May:
Anyway, I was really excited to talk to her. She's always great fun. She's always really thoughtful. I think you'll all really enjoy listening to this interview and how it brings a different perspective on the trans issue, which shouldn't be an issue to me at all, but which apparently is.
Katherine May:
But I love to hear somebody who has been personally affected by somebody realising they're trans and who still comes out fighting for that person rather than wanting to punish them. Take a listen anyway. I'll be back a bit later.
Katherine May:
Alex, welcome to The Wintering Sessions. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me. I have been wanting to talk to you about this particular book, I think for a long time, because it's such an interesting turn of events for you, I suppose.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Katherine May:
Yeah. No, total pleasure. But also I think because it does this rare thing, which shows a writer in motion changing and learning a different perspective on the world in the middle of it. I think that's a really thrilling thing to read, personally.
Alex Heminsley:
Well, thank you. No one has put it like that, but that is exactly what it felt like while I was writing it. I felt like my brain at the time was as if it were a laptop with too many tabs open, that faint fan noise, heat coming from somewhere within. I couldn't just think my way through the situation I was in. I had to write my way through it, and then in the editing understand myself better.
Alex Heminsley:
I was really lucky to be able to do that. I was very well guided because I specifically chose the editor that I felt would be the wisest person to perform that with, rather than the "razzly dazzliest, we'll make you a best sellerist" deals that were being offered at the height of the gender debate type thing a few years ago.
Katherine May:
Oh, that's so interesting. Let's outline what this situation is for anyone who doesn't know it. I'll let you tell it in your words.
Alex Heminsley:
I'd already written Running Like A Girl, which was about being a terrible runner but embracing it anyway. Then I wrote Leap In, which was going to in some ways replicate Running Like A Girl. Instead of doing lots of marathons, I was going to do lots of long swims, and swim to Alcatraz in the current. Then it ended up being a book about appreciating your limitations, because I ended up doing IVF. It was about embracing flaws, and seeing strength from a new perspective and things like that, because I ended up doing a lot of cold water swimming.
Alex Heminsley:
Then I thought I had it made. My son was born and everything was looking great. Whatever will I find to write about next, I found myself pondering. It turned out that actually three things happened to me in quite close succession, which I don't think I could have survived. Even in having three quite intense things happening so quickly was awful, the perspective that each lent the other ultimately turned out to be the thing that helped me survive.
Alex Heminsley:
When I was very early in pregnancy, I went to have a test, which actually I heard The Daily, no, The New York Times podcast had a whole podcast on last week. A DNA blood test which most people have to find out about the sex of their baby because it's much more reliable than just looking on a scan. It also tests for all the chromosome abnormalities that can happen. That's why I wanted to have it because at that point, my swimming book was around the corner and people were saying, "Can you do this daring swim? Can you have this photo of you in the freezing cold sea?"
Alex Heminsley:
I was too scared to tell my publishers I was pregnant because I was only six or seven weeks. But I didn't want to say no and be being shady. So I went to have all of these tests. It's a blood test. The midwife who'd done the test, it was a private thing, called me and said, "Oh, weird. The tests have come back from the lab. Did you use a donor egg?" I said, "No, definitely not." Anyone who's had IVF knows that the worst thing about IVF is getting the eggs out.
Katherine May:
In the first place, yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
She said, "You don't share any DNA with the baby," which obviously provided almost exponential possibilities in ever varying levels of sci-fi novel horror from another couple altogether's child in me. This was our last embryo, so there'd been a year of me trying all the other embryos we made, during which time I was thinking our embryo could have been born to somebody. It could be living in someone else's house now if there's just been a label swap. It could be an embryo that was made with my ex's sperm. There were so many different levels of awfulness because it's a relatively new test and new science. Until three or four years earlier, you wouldn't find out, it would be a telenovela plot that the baby would be born and it wouldn't be the same colour as the father, or whatever. Whereas this was, the terrifying sentence, no legal precedent was used from time to time.
Alex Heminsley:
As it all turned out, it was just a lab mistake. My son is entirely both of his allotted parents', but there was a good few weeks during which I was outside of legal precedent. I was into new science. I was into things that people would call perhaps unnatural. If you just have sex with your partner, you know that it's at least your baby, even if you've got multiple partners and it could be different father. Most women or female body people having babies who have just had sex rather than IVF know that they're the mother.
Alex Heminsley:
Whereas, there was no novel that had dealt with this. There was no film. There was no frame of reference, emotionally. Then about three or four weeks before my son was born, I was sexually assaulted on a train. Someone groped me. He repeatedly said, it went to court and he was found innocent because of weird things to do with the angle of the CCTV. He repeatedly said he hadn't done it, it hadn't happened. The male magistrate also said that he was finding the guy innocent because it would be very traumatic for him to be falsely accused and could have an impact on his life, a massive impact on his life.
Katherine May:
Yeah. He also pointed out that you were pregnant and not rational, necessarily, which I just thought was the most breathtakingly misogynistic thing I've heard in quite a long time.
Alex Heminsley:
That absolutely floored me because this guy was hammered. What he admitted to in court was 10 gin and tonics, 10 pints, and two bottles of white wine. He'd been to a football match. That was what he was prepared to go on the record and say, while also lying about having groped me.
Alex Heminsley:
I had just thought for the entire nine months preceding the court case that the one thing I could rely on would be that the eight and a half months pregnant person, that I could be reliably understood to be sober, and therefore, a reliable witness of what had happened. There was another witness that came forward and said she'd seen it all happen. She'd been sitting behind me, so I hadn't known that she was there. It wasn't like it was my friend going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." It was a complete stranger.
Alex Heminsley:
My state of pregnancy was deemed to be more of a cognitive impairment than all of the booze that this guy was prepared to talk about.
Katherine May:
Unbelievable.
Alex Heminsley:
Then, around this time, once my son was born but before the court case, my co-parent realised that she had to transition. She was going to go through transition. Came out, effectively. That's usually the point, when I have conversations like this, that people gasp because it's the thing that your 11 year old self would want to avoid at all costs. When actually, it turned into the making of me, and that's what this book's about was because I'd been turned inside out so comprehensively by the preceding two things and their implications about what we think about a natural, or a real, or a proper woman's body and about gender politics.
Alex Heminsley:
It just sort of razed everything to the ground. I felt like a building that had been in a terrible fire and only the few remaining stones and steel girders, which was a handful of friends that I could talk this through, or people I trusted to read, or to listen to, or whatever.
Alex Heminsley:
That was all I had. That popular culture was giving me Chris Kardashian, Jenna. Disclosure, that amazing Netflix documentary hadn't been even released then. There was no template. I absolutely understood why my ex needed to transition. It was a huge relief to find out that was it, that was the problem. There wasn't something else that I couldn't understand as to why this person that I really loved was clearly in such extreme levels of torment at what we were understanding to be the happiest time in our lives.
Alex Heminsley:
So yeah, having confidently begun this memoir journey almost 10 years before saying, "I'm just a normal woman and any woman with a woman's body can do that." Now I realise that those broad brushstroke terms from the smiley, slightly curvy, possibly size 14 blond white lady was taking and making assumptions on a dizzying scale that I was then forced to reexamine, which was obviously incredibly painful. I was grieving for my marriage, and I was freaking out about how to be a single parent, and I was mourning lots of things that I thought I knew about myself.
Alex Heminsley:
But actually, when something so radical like that happens, I was so far outside of normal by that point, that it was in for a penny. It absolutely proved to be the thing that's helped me to see the world entirely different, helped me to approach things completely differently. Obviously, there are negatives, but on the whole, it has definitely been the pivot point at which I went from the first half to the second half of my life, and realised that the second half could be this amazing re-embracing of all sorts of things. Rather than, when I had my son I was thinking, "I'm 40. It's all downhill from here," all that kind of thing.
Alex Heminsley:
Whereas, the whole of life seemed completely different than I'd understood it to be for half my life. I hope half my life.
Katherine May:
Yes, let's say [crosstalk 00:16:13].
Alex Heminsley:
Making some more of my wild assumptions.
Katherine May:
You've got vary wary of those over the last few years.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
But it was an extremely traumatic period to live through, but also proved to be, ultimately, a really positive one and uber wintering.
Katherine May:
Uber wintering; a multi-headed hydra wintering.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
They always are, I think. I think it's your mother in the book who says you've been radicalised by this. It seems to me like you're visited by what it really means to own a female body, and a woman's body, and the gap in between, as well. It's like the whole thing was enacted in your life in one big cluster.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. It sounds funny because it's such a dogged term now, but I did feel really privileged to have had some of those experiences and understandings on a really visceral, personal level. It's that expression. I saw it on a T-shirt the other day. I don't know where it came from, "I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you."
Alex Heminsley:
I got to understand it within the cells of my body. To turn up in Harley Street where we'd been sent by the IVF clinic to this most high powered gynecologist and foetal expert in the world. To see the look of bafflement on the receptionist's face when she was saying, "So you're here for the paternity test," and we go, "And maternity test." The feeling of the cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline sloshes through you in those moments where you realise you are not being seen as a normal case. You are outside of what anyone's assumption, just standing at reception.
Alex Heminsley:
I know that now. That day is imprinted in the DNA of my existence and will be until the day I die. So, it taught me a lot about a trans person, but specifically a trans woman's experience of, "You're saying this, but I've never heard of that," or, "That doesn't figure. It's perfectly simple. That's not the way things are," all those terms that you see online, or in standup, or whatever. "Uh, no," as the punchline.
Alex Heminsley:
I know what it feels like to stand at the reception and go, "Yes, it is a maternity test."
Katherine May:
Yes, actually. Yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
Things happen that you haven't heard of and might not make you comfortable. This poor receptionist was lovely. It's just an example.
Katherine May:
Well, it's the experience of having to explain yourself. I think what you were really saying earlier was that you'd been able to assume that you were normal and understandable up until this point in your life.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah, and that I knew what normal was, and that it was a static boundary rather than a permeable membrane that we all float through.
Alex Heminsley:
Similarly, the assault case taught me that you can feel enormous rage, and aggrievement, and fear, and terror. I didn't get on a train by myself until my son was a toddler. I could only get on trains with the buggy as a physical barrier between me and people. To have those anxieties and to feel rigid with furry, a magistrate in that position who could make those assumptions and feel confident and calm saying those things in front of me.
Alex Heminsley:
Also, not see trans women as a silent aggressor in that case. It was men. It was just cis, straight men who were making these impacts on my life. They are, to me, not problematically confusable with trans women. We share a perpetrator in that, rather than the cis men and the trans women sharing that position.
Alex Heminsley:
Again, I felt very lucky, especially in 2020 when all the Black Lives Matter stuff happened. I was watching friends go through that process of, "But I don't say racist things, so don't call me a racist." I'd gone through that with transphobia two years earlier of, "I'm not really transphobic," but just blithe assumptions can still have transphobic impacts, the same as blithe assumptions can have racist impacts.
Alex Heminsley:
I did feel quite lucky that I'd been able to undergo this experience of understanding how fallible a privileged person's assumptions can be. Privately, I'd done it in my home talking to my friends on a micro scale and I'd had really visceral emotional pinpoints and pivot points. Whereas everyone else last summer, whatever it was, more than 18 months now, seemed to be thinking, "But I'm a good person." Me, I was thinking, "Oh, yeah. I remember those days when I thought just saying normal was a simple term."
Katherine May:
That's so funny because I had exactly the same impression. I'd learned I was autistic and I'd had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about autism. I held all those same assumptions that loads of people hold about autism now, that I now find deeply undermining and offensive. I had exactly that same thought process of, "Oh, yeah. I've been through this before." As soon as that stuff really hit the mainstream I just thought, "Yeah, I recognize this completely."
Katherine May:
I can almost unquestioningly accept it because actually, I know exactly what it is to find myself in conversations with people that ends in a pause when they realize that they're about to say something that's offensive to you and they would normally say it.
Alex Heminsley:
Yes, they can see the end of the street and they realize they don't want to go down it.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Or when people say, "I don't mean autistic people like you, but of course."
Alex Heminsley:
The real ones.
Katherine May:
Yes, yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
I also feel, I know it sounds quite self-aggrandizing, and now I'm Britain's most woke woman.
Alex Heminsley:
What I have got is a confidence to know how little I know and that I learned that privately rather than because of some horrendous social media faux pas, which I think you see public figures going through. I'm just very lucky that, I will happily now if corrected or see a shadow across someone's face, I feel confident enough now to say, "What was it? Educate me quick."
Katherine May:
Interesting, yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
Whereas before, I would have tried to talk a bit faster and hope no one had noticed I'd said something awful, and then not sleep for three weeks.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
Now I feel confident enough in my curiosity and my willingness to understand different viewpoints that, that terror of, "What are they going to get me on?" Because realistically, it could be anything. You could find anything. I could probably hang up this podcast now and go and find five old articles which make me cringe, but I can at least say I did try to see the world differently and it did make my life better, as well.
Katherine May:
Isn't that wonderful? It's lovely to have the reverse of the conversation that I've had with so many people, which is, we are under threat. We can't say anything. People are out there waiting to get us, and when they do, they're going to cancel us. We're all in trouble. It's so dangerous to be a white person in this world, or whatever.
Katherine May:
I've heard people say it. It's so easy to have the opposite conversation, which is to say, "There are some things I don't know and there are some experiences I don't understand." Actually, what my experience has taught me is that I probably am screwing up a whole load of things and I'm willing to hear it if I am and just go, "I'm so sorry." I know that, that's all people want from me, is to just be able to hear them.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. It's so true. Also, I'm now finding, I've been separated from my ex for four years now. We're coming up for two years since the summer of all the Black Lives Matter protests. I can see personally quite a clear mark now where the authors or creators, even if they're stand ups or whatever, who I'm really interested in their material, are increasingly proving to be the people who are staying curious about wider social issues. Especially with people a generation older than me who were the kind of writers who were interested in how the 20 somethings of today see the world.
Alex Heminsley:
You don't have to go, "I totally adhere to every single thing I've ever seen on Tik Tok. The 20-somethings have absolutely got it nailed." To be someone who goes in the other direction and says, "The youth of today." That's [crosstalk 00:25:18].
Katherine May:
Who thought we'd be saying that?
Alex Heminsley:
It seems so obvious that a consistent and compassionate interest in multiple perspectives will make better art. Why would you entrench yourself and not try and see that as part of making better art rather than being just under attack?
Katherine May:
I love that. I love that so much.
Alex Heminsley:
But it's really true. You look at something like, I became obsessed over Christmas, obviously like so many other people, by watching Get Back, the millionaire [crosstalk 00:25:58].
Katherine May:
Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Heminsley:
By 2022, I believed I was a really quite crucial part of The Beatles.
Alex Heminsley:
I found it really compelling as a writer, watching a collaborative, creative process. The amount of times that they, they were all driving each other mad, and they were all obviously about to break up, but it was really interesting seeing the amount of times you have to stop and listen. They all debunked to George's house because he's in a half. Then there's trying to get John. Then there's an amazing scene where two of them, Paul McCartney and I think, is it Ringo, go off and they sit. No, it's Paul and John in the canteen at the film studios, discussing George. You can really see them trying to understand his point of view, to work out why they've had this big falling out. It just seems so obvious that a group that could articulate themselves emotionally and a decades long friendship since childhood would make interesting things.
Alex Heminsley:
It was fascinating to me, that idea of actively watching people trying to understand each other's perspectives and why they were in a grump at lunch, and see how obviously, then, that would imprint itself on a series of songs.
Katherine May:
That's really interesting.
Alex Heminsley:
Would it be better if I had turned up obviously [crosstalk 00:27:24]
Katherine May:
You could have solved it. It would have been fine. Everything would have been okay and they'd have carried on making really terrible records into the '80s. It would be like Genesis or something. You'd be like, "Oh, God. I wish The Beatles had split up in the '70s." We can all be grateful that they hated each other for a little while.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
I worry about, one of the things that I try and follow is, I try not to externalize the things I dislike in the world and look for the bit of me that, that reflects when I'm reacting against it. One of the things I think about a lot in myself is my unwillingness to find a middle way with people who I consider to be beyond the pale.
Katherine May:
I was talking to somebody yesterday in my Pilates class. She was saying about an upstairs neighbor of her, who sounds like a holy nightmare. She's had to talk her down from smashing a police car with a hammer and all these kind of things. She sounds like a lot. But I was so interested to hear the person in my class say, "So I've had to work really hard to get on with her. We've come to terms."
Katherine May:
I thought, "Wow. I don't know if I'm capable of that." She's older than me and I did wonder if that's my intolerance writ large. I know that's a really extreme example, but would I see it as my responsibility to find a way to get on with this woman or would I be trying to get her-
Alex Heminsley:
Bring her down.
Katherine May:
... get her evicted.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
It did make me wonder about myself.
Alex Heminsley:
Yes. It is, it's really interesting. I think that's an interesting question at a point in society where we've been literally isolated from each other. You could probably put your head out of your front door any given day and see someone shouting at someone at traffic lights or any of those things that wouldn't have happened to the same degree if we hadn't all spent half of the last couple of years literally avoiding each other.
Alex Heminsley:
Also, this hyper connectivity of being online all the time. I find it really difficult and I've, I say wasted. Maybe it was really super valuable and I'll be really insightful for decades to come. I feel at the moment like I've wasted a phenomenal amount of my own life on trying to work out at what point #speakingout is worth it on social media, or whether you're just stamping the grass down in the pathways more and making the algorithm learn that more money is to be made here and more clicks are to be made here. When speaking out is of value and when it's adding to the heat, and light, and ghastliness of social media and when actually taking the loftiest [inaudible 00:30:13] type route of saying, "I'm only responsible for my life and I will try to do that as well and as ethically as possible," and to do it offline.
Alex Heminsley:
I heard her, at the end of the summer of 2020, on the Adam Buxton podcast. I thought it was a really interesting interview because she's such an offline person and where she sees, where does social responsibility lie if you don't have social media accounts to repost stuff on.
Katherine May:
God, isn't it terrible that I find it hard to imagine? I can't imagine not being there.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. You feel like, what is there to do if not to retweet. That sentence was a big part of me leaving Twitter was, if that's what I think doing good things is, I need to not have that crutch.
Katherine May:
That's so interesting.
Alex Heminsley:
I'm not saying, I haven't rebuilt a church hall.
Katherine May:
With your bare hands.
Alex Heminsley:
[crosstalk 00:31:20] nine months was lead footed, but it has made me more conscious of how, obviously because I'm not scrolling online a lot of the time. But I find it fascinating trying to work out that boundary of at what point, I tend to say to myself if I think there are, because I only have Instagram left. I think if there's something where I have a specific insight, then I'll share it, if it's in any way unique to me, but the rest of the time I'll just leave it and try to do something concrete like send a text.
Alex Heminsley:
If I see something's blowing up online, some sort of, as happens every few months, there's some sort of publishing hoo-ha about something.
Katherine May:
There is, yup.
Alex Heminsley:
I really went, when I left Twitter, I really went out of my way to find, everyone's got an e-mail address, even if you have to go through their agent or whatever. I went through a period of specifically finding people's e-mails or numbers and messaging them and saying, instead of just retweeting something going, "I don't know you, but I want you to know that you're supported. I've read what you've said about this thing and you're not alone in thinking it. If there are concrete steps I can take, tell me," and things like that.
Katherine May:
That's amazing. I quite often feel exhausted by the little advocacy I do online.
Alex Heminsley:
Yes because you-
Katherine May:
Yeah, because it's everything, isn't it.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. Is it worth it? Is it worth not doing it? Are you doing it for the right reason? We can't ever answer any of those questions completely or truthfully anyway, so the whole thing's doubly exhausting because there's no Wizard of Oz who's going to whip back the curtain and go, "Well done. You advocated for these people well." Because they're all individuals, too.
Katherine May:
I'm just interrupting you for a moment to ask if you'd consider subscribing to my Patreon. Friends of The Wintering Sessions get an extended edition of the podcast a day early, the chance to put questions to my guests, a monthly bonus episode, and exclusive discounts on my courses and events. Most of all, you help to keep the podcast running. To find out more, go to patreon.com/katherinemay. Do take a look. Now back to the show.
Katherine May:
I do think sometimes we just contribute to noise being made.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah, and profits for people that will never share any of it with me.
Katherine May:
Yes. That is also true. There was a statistic that was going around recently and I've not fact checked this so I'm wary of it. But it said that something like 95% of the all the anti-vax propaganda online was generated by 12, or originated in 12 Facebook accounts.
Alex Heminsley:
Wow.
Katherine May:
All of those people have become millionaires from that storm that they've cooked up. That connection between the numbers, the concentration of it, and the economics is what I find breathtaking, really. There's a very clear motivation here.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. That's part of it in Somebody To Love, when I wrote about, the book, it's got memoir of what happened to me and then it does a back loop of my previous two books and how much I was forced to re-confront them. A big part of Running Like A Girl and the promo around that was photographs of me where there was this constant push/pull. I was writing a book that was saying, "We're all feeling so exhausted," and in Leap In, to a degree because of swimwear. We feel all so exhausted by having to look right to do exercise because marketing images will only ever use perfect colored, perfect bodied, able bodied, smiling, calm women in all that market.
Alex Heminsley:
This has changed a lot. I was writing Running Like A Girl 10 years ago now. The reality is, is that we're sweating, and red faced, and feel hilarious, and feel like we shouldn't be allowed in the club because we don't look right, or we've got a big, weird lolloping gait when we run, or blobby bits that you can't even see when you're in the water when you're swimming, and all of those things.
Alex Heminsley:
While at the same time, trying to promote the book was a series of being put into often designer running kit and having photographers who were used to taking [crosstalk 00:35:58].
Katherine May:
Oh, please tell this story. I related. I had a very similar experience to the story you relate in Somebody To Love, about the photo shoot with the designer clothes and the all male styling team.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah, all male. It was a different time. Nobody involved was trying to be cruel. Everybody thought this was a lovely, glamorous, and exciting opportunity for me. But the way that these things are commissioned out was that the person who'd maybe commissioned the piece had probably read the book or read some of the book, enough to know that they wanted to use me.
Alex Heminsley:
But the people who commissioned the photo, and the person who took the photo, and the person who did the makeup and the hair, none of them knew that it was a running book. It's a woman's running book in this fancy Sunday supplement. So they all thought they were doing me an absolute solid to send down a suitcase worth of designer running gear and put loads of makeup on me.
Alex Heminsley:
Then they were all just so visibly disappointed. Again, I am not in any way someone who's in any position to be bigging up about plus size culture. At that point, I probably was size 12. They were so visibly disappointed, not just in my body, but in the fact that bits of it moved up and down when I was in motion.
Katherine May:
It's a shock to them.
Alex Heminsley:
You realize how synthetic those covers, or the cover of those old school running magazines. They always, a woman's suspended on a desert track, smiling and not sweating. They never had boobs. When you run, your boobs go up in the air. If that's the point at which the photographer takes the photo, you do look weird.
Katherine May:
When they're in flight.
Alex Heminsley:
But also, it's not weird. It only looks weird because no one else in the history of space and time ever depicted anyone over size eight running. It was mortifying because they really wanted me to have these super glamorous, but also relatable shots. I felt utterly demoralized by it and guilty for being demoralized by it because that was the opposite of what my book was saying. I felt like I couldn't tell anybody because I'd be dobbing myself in.
Alex Heminsley:
So, I did nothing for a whole decade.
Katherine May:
There's the seeds of a whole Instagram culture there.
Katherine May:
I had a really similar experience about the same time. I had a book out and I was invited for a photo shoot at a big women's magazine, but one of the more relatable ones, not one of the glossies. It was in between, in between, more for middle aged women. Anyway, I probably positioned it exactly in the market enough for everyone to know which magazine it was now.
Katherine May:
But I had the same as you, asking me what my dress size was before I turned up, and my shoe size, which I provided. I was, at the time, a size 16. I'm now not a 16. I'm more than that. And also my shoe size, which was a size eight. I pointed out that I'm very tall and therefore, most clothes do not fit me even if they're in the right size. Therefore, I will bring my own clothes because I know that you won't hit lucky because I rarely hit lucky.
Katherine May:
Turned up and they had a rail of clothes ready for me. The jeans, we got you a size 12 jeans because I wondered if you could squeeze into them. I was like, "If I could squeeze into size 12 jeans, I would have said I was a size 12." Do you know what I mean?
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
If I fit into a size 12, I'm going to tell you I'm a size 12. I've told you I'm a size 16, which, given the economics that most women work on probably means a little bit larger than that sometimes, too.
Katherine May:
Size five shoes that had a four inch heel. Well, I'm six foot already. I was like, "I can't wear these clothes. I cannot put these clothes on my body. These clothes don't fit on my body." This look of intense disappointment, and eye rolling, and [inaudible 00:39:56]. Because I felt so ashamed of myself, I went on and tried to squeeze myself into the two sizes too small jeans. And hey, guess what? They didn't fit.
Katherine May:
So I then had to say, "I've got a bag of clothes. Can I wear these?" "Well, they're not, these are just not very fashionable," they said. I was like, "Well, I'm not very fashionable. You're representing a writer here. I'm not a fashion icon in any way and I'm not pretending to be." So in the end, the compromise was reached that I could wear my own dress, but I had to pretend to wear the size five shoes.
Alex Heminsley:
Oh, God, like the ugly sisters.
Katherine May:
Like the freaking ugly sisters. I cried. I was in physical pain but I felt so humiliated. The stylist looked at me and she said, "We had a load of women with cancer before you. They didn't make a fuss."
Alex Heminsley:
Oh, my word! This is a positive of social media is that it created space for a plurality of voices because the stranglehold that women's magazines run by skinny white women had for decades over what being a woman would be, and could be, and should be.
Alex Heminsley:
I was books editor for one of the glossies for nearly a decade earlier on in my career. I remember endlessly bringing authors to them to review or interview and then the answer coming back no once their photo had been seen, like it couldn't have besmirched the magazine. Some of the shoots, not all of the shoots, and there are always exceptions, et cetera, et cetera.
Alex Heminsley:
But I found the publicity campaign for Running Like A Girl in particular really demoralizing. Then I paid a photographer, and it cost me quite a lot, and I was lucky to know a photographer that I trusted, to take shots of me for Leap In. I was like, "I wish more people could understand that, that's empowering." Saving up the money to represent yourself as you see yourself as your best. It's not empowering to be ennobled by a glossy magazine who saying, "Girl Boss, blah, blah, blah," at the bottom of the caption while making you cry because your feet are too big.
Katherine May:
And you're literally squeezed into painful shoes.
Alex Heminsley:
I can be really down on social media, but it definitely let chinks of light in which are ever being widened, which industries like women's magazines were extremely reluctant to give up on. It's no coincidence to me that a lot of the generation of people that are now the most vocal anti-trans ones were 20, 30 years ago gatekeepers of that kind of journalism, and that they are not dealing well with questions being asked.
Katherine May:
No. Because they thought they were the ones who could claim victimhood and they were actually all along victimizing a lot of other people, but it was just very, very silent.
Alex Heminsley:
Don't get me wrong. I think being a journalist in the '90s, if your choice was being treated like Queen Bea at a women's magazine or having your bum pinched on a desk at one of the dailies, where all the men were out getting pissed at four hour lunches and you did all the work and didn't get the bylines. I'm not pretending that, that was necessarily an easy time to be a woman, either. But the point is, you stay curious and you don't say, "Well, it was hard for me back then so it can't be hard for you now because these small number of things have changed."
Katherine May:
It's so interesting. Actually, what's lovely about this conversation is, I think it's been a lot about the invisible ways that society has changed already and is changing. We have not reached the perfect state of existence by any means. But wow, the difference in power I have over my own representation now and 10 years ago is huge. That's partly because the tools are there for me to do it, but it's also because the conversations exist that allow me to find a community that will back me up if I say, "I don't want to wear clothes that were two sizes too small and shoes that didn't fit me to squeeze into an image that isn't me in the first place."
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. Definitely. I found, going through all those previously mentioned three things that are the core of Somebody To Love really, really difficult. But I ultimately found the experience hugely cathartic by the time I'd finished writing the book because it allowed me to revisit things like those photo shoots for Running Like A Girl. Which at the time, I definitely didn't feel able to articulate were painful or difficult, because I was being told, "Your book's a success. Everything must be going brilliantly for you."
Alex Heminsley:
But there's still this feeling of the queasy feeling sloshing of adrenaline in the pit of your stomach. It made me realize how far I've come and we'd come. Even though during the summer of 2020, when the conversations around trans lives were becoming super toxic and I was pre-publication of Somebody To Love, I was extremely aware of what the blow back could be for me personally or for our family.
Alex Heminsley:
There was a real struggle for me with being honest about my experiences and acknowledging the rage and the pain that I'd felt, while not making an eternal testament to the most negative feelings I've had about my family.
Alex Heminsley:
Then now, I actually feel quite hopeful a lot of the time about things like trans lives and the conversation around them. Because I see, I think before I was looking at it from a very UK specific perspective. Now I see globally, things are changing for the positive at quite a pace.
Alex Heminsley:
When I was still with my ex she, for her work, had to go to some sort of conference in Geneva. They had a conversation around self-ID and trans lives in Switzerland. The Swiss were like, "We are really far from that. That's not going to happen." It was announced a couple of weeks ago.
Alex Heminsley:
So, the idea that the Swiss who were four, it was just before I fell pregnant, so five years ago, the Swiss were saying, "Yeah, we're a really long way from that. Don't hedge your bets." At which point, the Theresa May government was looking like it was going to make positive changes. Although it's depressing for us in the UK, it's exciting to see that other countries, things can change really quickly. Public moods do shift. They do and they will, and that is exciting. I think that, that the ever flowing river of public opinion is not going to stop flowing.
Katherine May:
I think it's often an issue of what people have come into contact with. Minds change very quickly when they are presented with real life examples rather than these abstracted rants in The Daily Mail.
Alex Heminsley:
Whether things are presented in the context of shame, I think that's really important. I think that, that's something that's really shifted with mental health in the last 10 years. It used to be, depression was seen purely as a flaw. People like [inaudible 00:47:23] Gordon have done amazing things in that kind of area, and that it was something to be ashamed of.
Alex Heminsley:
I really wanted with Somebody To Love, to be really open and honest about the pain that I felt. Because to pretend that it hadn't happened would only make other people feel terrible about feeling all parts of the process. But also to acknowledge that I have a really fantastic relationship with my ex. We are amazing co-parents. We are definitely a family, even if we're not a marriage.
Alex Heminsley:
To acknowledge that without shame, and that I made what many would see, loads of people I've seen online have said, "How could she have not known," and things like that. Well, you know.
Katherine May:
Some things aren't plainly obvious.
Alex Heminsley:
I refuse to be ashamed for the choices I made because they ended up with a situation that I'm really proud of now. I'm so proud that I got us to where, it was my dogged nagging, and asking, and, "Are you okay? What's the problem? What's the problem," that got us to where we are now. I could have just shut up and pretended I hadn't seen anything and gone, "Being normal is what counts. As long as I can stay married and my son can have two parents, a mom and a dad."
Alex Heminsley:
But I didn't value those things over what I could tell wasn't the truth. I think getting rid of shame is a really important part of, I often find when you see MPs being appalled by things, I always find it quite reveling when they do a Tweet and you just think, "Wow, you really-"
Katherine May:
You're wrestling the shame there, aren't you?
Alex Heminsley:
[inaudible 00:49:12] you're saying what you think you're saying in that one, mate.
Katherine May:
You're telling us a lot.
Katherine May:
I just think it's such a redemptive book, honestly. Culturally redemptive as well as individually redemptive. I'm so glad that you had the courage to write it because I know it must have taken it.
Alex Heminsley:
Thank you.
Katherine May:
Along those lines, I note that you've written a novel now, which is possibly a move away from memoir because you can't face it again, but also very much to our gain. Can you tell me a bit about your novel that's coming up next year? This year, sorry. We have moved into 2022 now.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. I was supposed to write the novel before Somebody To Love. I went on a research trip. I went to Norway because most of the novel's set in north Norway. Actually what happened was, I had such an amazing time on that trip and gave up drinking for several months. It was the first moment of clarity that I had mentally. My son, I think, was two at that point. I was supposed to come back and sit down and write the novel. Actually, Somebody To Love fell out of my head first. I felt like I couldn't write around it.
Alex Heminsley:
So, writing the novel later was a real treat. It's about two sisters who don't know each other exist. Their shared father dies. Then the younger of the sisters, who's grown up in the suburbs without much sense of direction and not quite knowing what she wants to do, has to go and find the other sister and let her know that their dad's died. She's chosen to go off, quite understandably, and live in north Norway, up in the archipelago of islands that's up in the Arctic Circle and has completely cut herself off. It's a mutual thawing.
Katherine May:
Ooh, love it. You know I love a wintry metaphor. I move for this.
Alex Heminsley:
I wanted to write an adventure story for girls. I wanted to do tin [inaudible 00:51:14] scenes, where someone was hanging off the edge of a cliff for dear life and things like that, but to do it with an emotional resonance that you perhaps don't get in Jack London novels.
Katherine May:
Well, you have to dig quite hard, that's all.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. It's weird. You would think that writing memoir would be as exposing as it can get. But then, as with the MP Tweets thing, there's some lingering terror before the publication of a novel where you think, "Oh, my God. Are people going to read things that I didn't know I was writing? What have I said that I don't know yet that I've said?"
Katherine May:
It sounds wonderful and I can't wait to read it. I wish you all the publishing luck with it.
Alex Heminsley:
Oh, thank you.
Katherine May:
It's been fantastic to talk to you. Thank you so much. I will obviously make sure that everybody can find links to you in your various locations, in the show notes.
Alex Heminsley:
Okay.
Katherine May:
Even if you are gradually cutting down on those for very sensible reasons.
Alex Heminsley:
Yeah. Under this rock is where Alex is on Thursdays.
Katherine May:
Oh, thank you.
Katherine May:
It's at this time of year that I always think I should become a gardener. Not an actual professional gardener, but just somebody who does their garden occasionally. It's not my skill in life. It should be, by rights, but everything I plant dies.
Katherine May:
In fact, I'm just looking into my garden at the moment. I had somebody in to plant my garden out and to clear it in the autumn, because I knew I was never going to get around to it and I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. He dug everything up, planted new plants. Now we've had some builders in and they've put a load of wood on top of my garden, which I know didn't look like much.
Katherine May:
There's sawdust all over it. Full disclosure, the dog has dug up a couple of the plants repeatedly and I've given up replanting them again. I have a friend who said to me recently, "I just don't know what you do to gardens." I don't, either. I can't work out why I can't just have a garden like a normal person. It always get full of rubble somehow. I don't know. I think I'm just not very domestic. I think I was born without that gene. I was. Come as a shock.
Katherine May:
Well, anyway. Spring is springing and perhaps things will grow soon. Perhaps I will replant some new things to replace the ones that have been a bit squashed by the people who had to take my bathroom floor out because it was rotting.
Katherine May:
My big crisis this week is that my staircase has been found to have woodworm, and also that it has never been attached to the wall, or at least not for a long time. So luckily, we haven't ever fallen through it, but that has caused a building emergency this week. Adult life is fun. What can I tell you? I'm very grateful to be able to afford to have someone in to mend it. Certainly hasn't always been the case in my life.
Katherine May:
I hope you'll all pick up Alex Heminsley's book after listening to her. Somebody To Love comes out in paperback on the 24th of March in the UK. She's also got a novel coming out soon, too, as she talked about, Under The Same Stars, which I've not had the privilege of reading yet, but I'm sure it'll be great. She's one of our really endurable reading voices in the UK, I think. I don't know how much she's reached into the U.S. Maybe you guys are discovering her for the first time. But anyway, I really enjoyed that conversation.
Katherine May:
As you know, I think I run this podcast just to have a good chat with people sometimes. It's been in a bit short supply over the last few years. I'm not losing my enthusiasm, either.
Katherine May:
So, I want to say thank you to the producer, Buddy Peace; and to Meghan Hutchins, who looks after all the details; and to my Patreon community, who are just reeling from, I don't think they're reeling, the first ever live bonus episode that we did for The Wintering Sessions, which they were already getting once a month, but now I've started to do them live and on video so that just they can watch, and then they get it as a recording afterwords.
Katherine May:
I've had great fun and done a lot of thinking, answering all the members' questions. I really enjoy that and trying to provide my cultural highlights, such as they are. If you can, do join the Patreon community. I've got some really good stuff coming out, too, some changes to be made, some additional things. It's really worth being there, I think. I'm really proud of it. It helps keep this podcast running, and not just having to do short seasons, as I've done before, but to keep it running on and on, just makes it possible. It helps to do things like make sure it's accessible by getting it transcribed, every episode, which to me is really important. I hope it's something that you guys appreciate, too. There's lots of different people who find transcription to be helpful. It's not always the obvious people.
Katherine May:
Anyway, you understand that. I don't need to tell you that. I will be back very soon with another episode and another brilliant conversational partner. But until then, take enormous care. Do what you can. Make sure you give yourself a rest, too. All right, guys. See you soon.
Show Notes
This week Katherine chats to journalist and writer Alexandra Heminsley, author of Some Body to Love. After infertility treatment, a challenging pregnancy and a sexual assault, Alex found her relationship drifting apart for reasons she couldn’t fully understand. But when her partner finally disclosed that they wanted to transition to being a woman, Alex had to come to terms with something she never expected: being part of a LBTQIA+ family. In this conversation, she explores her compassionate response to her former partner’s needs, how it has changed her viewpoint on life, and how life can be remade in the face of the unexpected.
We talk about:
Discovering that your partner is trans
Becoming part of an LBTQIA+ family
Fertility treatment and its complications
Body image and women’s magazines
Alex’s advocacy for trans rights and inclusion
Links from this episode:
Alexandra’s website
Alexandra’s book Some Body To Love
Alexandra’s book Running Like A Girl
Alexandra’s journalism work
The Daily episode
The Beatles Get Back series
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
To keep up to date with The Wintering Sessions, follow Katherine on Twitter, Instagram and Substack
For information on Katherine’s online writing courses, including her programme Wintering for Writers, visit True Stories Writing School
Wintering is out now in the UK, and the US.
