✍ = 中文翻譯
Pejic on the catwalk in 2011 for French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who supported her in the beginning.
Pejić knew she was “different” as a child.
She was born in 1991 in Tuzla, which was then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the second son of Jadranka, a Bosnian Serb, and Vlado, a Bosnian Croat.
They divorced soon after and Jadranka, a lawyer, became a single parent.
She and her own mother took the boys and fled to Serbia during the Bosnian War, where they lived in a refugee camp near Belgrade.
When the NATO bombing of Serbia began in 1999, Jadranka applied for refugee status in Australia.
They arrived in Melbourne in 2000. Pejic ́was eight.
“I didn’t speak English at all,” says Pejic. ́
“Australia was a very different world and culture from the one I left in Europe.
“Life was much more spread out, people drove everywhere, they built higher fences, neighbours didn’t interact so much.”
Isolating, then, but tricky in other ways, too.
“Going to school being different, it was kind of rough. You know how kids are – they can be quite cruel, especially when someone doesn’t speak.”
It was not, to put it mildly, the best of times for Pejic. ́
“We were away from home, and I was away from who I really was. I was having to act,” Pejic says.
“I was going through gender issues at the time and it was no longer acceptable for me to play with dolls, dress up and only have friends who were girls.”
“I achieved my personal dream and completed my transition to be able to live life as a woman. I came out to the world and the press, then started rebranding and planning my comeback.”
Pejic’́ s brother, Igor, is very masculine and was into sports.
He protected her from bullies, but, “It was time for me to grow up and be a boy and do boyish things,” says Pejic. ́
She believed she had two options: to be a gay boy or a straight boy – until she read about transgender people on the internet. She was 13.
She realised this was her story and she wanted to live as a woman, although until she had the surgery, she was ambivalent about defining her gender in public.
Now, Pejic calls becoming a woman “my truth” and to hear her speak so passionately about it is very moving.
When I ask if she was scared going into surgery – the hospital, the anaesthetic, pain, the possibility of complications – she says, “That was the least of it. The physical aspects of the operation did not worry me. I was more nervous about coming out to the press and how it would affect my career.
“I found out that transition was a possibility at the age of 13; every day since then was a waiting period.
“It took me 10 years to get here and there was never a moment when I didn’t want this. No amount of physical pain would have made a difference to that.”
SRS, also called gender reassignment surgery (GRS), male-to female involves the surgical removal of the penis and the opening up of a neovaginal cavity.
Modern operations have been happening successfully since the 1950s, but today’s procedures are extremely sophisticated, involving all sorts of cleverness, the details of which I shall not go into over your Sunday breakfast.
Suffice to say, it’s possible to end up with authentic – and working – female genitalia.
Pejic ́was 14 when she told her mum she was transgender.
“It wasn’t easy because I knew she’d already been through so much. I didn’t want to cause trouble and worsen her situation.”
She refers to Jadranka as “my biggest inspiration, my everything, the love of my life”.
Was coming out one of those oh-darling-I-already-know moments?
“It was a shock, it took her a while to get her head around it. She didn’t really know anything about it; a lot of parents don’t.
“But she is someone who loves her kids so much, there was nothing that could take away from that.”
“It took me 10 years to get here and there was never a moment when I didn’t want this. No amount of physical pain would have made a difference to that.”
Pejic ́wishes all parents could be so understanding.
“We’ve seen, with Leelah Alcorn in America, what can go wrong when a parent doesn’t accept a child for who they are.”
Alcorn was a 17-year-old transgender kid from Ohio who was forced into conversion therapy, a brutal ‘solution’ to gender dysphoria that uses counselling, and sometimes hormone therapy, to try to ‘repair’ the patient – i.e. persuade them into accepting the gender they were assigned at birth.
The reasons behind it are often religious.
Alcorn’s conservative Christian parents felt unable to accept their ‘son’ Josh as Leelah, the name she chose for herself.
She committed suicide in December.
Writing about the case in Time magazine recently, American transgender athlete and activist Fallon Fox made this powerful plea: “If you know anything about the very real state of having gender dysphoria, you know that telling him or her it is wrong is one of the worst things in the world a transgender person can hear.
“It deepens the depression transgender people already seek help for because we suffer from having a body that does not match our mind.”
It is stories like these that spurred Pejić into making a film about her life.
To make Andrej(a): The Documentary, Pejić and director Eric Miclette raised $US63,325 on Kickstarter, helped by Jared Leto, who filmed a message of support for the project.
They also dug deep into their own pockets, and hope to release the film next year.
It’s sure to be compelling – I mean, you couldn’t script it, with a cast that includes the archetypal strong mother, a beautiful lonely boy who wants to be a girl and some of the most flamboyant figures in Paris fashion.
It begins with war, displacement and refugee status, and explores vital modern issues around beauty, gender and belonging.
“I’ve been thrust into this extroverted role, but I am a pretty private person, really,” says Pejic. ́ “It wasn’t easy to decide to do this documentary, but I am in a position of power as a public figure.
“I have the opportunity to tell this very interesting story that should expose a lot of truth about society, about being a transgender individual and also about fashion, and about living life as a woman.
“I feel there are so many kids all around the world who will relate.”
Pejic ́hopes to make them feel less alone. It’s good timing.
Behind the unbearable sadness of Alcorn’s story lies a society ready for change; transgender issues are becoming visible and discrimination is being addressed.
In the US, there is mounting pressure to enact Leelah’s Law, which would make conversion therapy illegal, and the associated Think Act Change online petition has more than 345,000 signatures.
In 2013, the NSW Parliament passed a motion, introduced by independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich, acknowledging the harm caused by ‘reparative’ therapy.
Still, Pejic ́says even the fashion industry – “often one step ahead of the rest of society in terms of expression” – is beset by tokenism.
“There are transgender models who don’t tell the world they are trans [for fear of not getting booked]. We have a long way to go.
“But this generation, the way they are seeing gender is so different even from when I was growing up.
“It’s much more open. There are more categories now; the old-school traditional views are breaking down.”
I point out that categories – be they girl, boy, transgender, transvestite, gay, straight, whatever – are still about labelling, and labelling means putting people in boxes.
By definition, that means building walls and pointing out difference.
“Oh, I would say more categories beats two or three,” laughs Pejic, ́ and suddenly there’s a lightness to this heavy conversation, and I’m reminded of the time I saw her being interviewed, a few years ago, on Australian television.
The journo, watching Pejic ́get her make-up done for a photo shoot, asked, “Does all this fuss and carrying on get to you after a while?”
Pejic ́ smiled coquettishly and fired back, “A little bit, but it’s better than bricklaying.”
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