Press "Enter" to skip to content

Transitional by Munroe Bergdorf review – trauma and resilience

The model and trans activist writes movingly on prejudice, navigating controversy and personal growth

In August 2017, Munroe Bergdorf was riding high. Aged 29, she had been hired as L’Oréal’s first transgender model. A few days before, violent white supremacists had marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she posted, to a smallish audience on Facebook, her furious condemnation of white racism. After the L’Oréal campaign was announced, someone she went to university with sent a screenshot to the Daily Mail and what happened next made her notorious. “The conservative press was having a field day, labelling me a racist for daring to point out that racism exists and it benefits white people,” she writes. L’Oréal sacked her (though they rehired her in 2020), other brands dropped her and she received horrific abuse on social media. Her reaction was not to shrink away, but to accept the mountain of requests to speak on news and panel shows. “I took every single opportunity to tell my side of the story.”

In writing a memoir, Bergdorf is taking that opportunity again, and in much greater depth. On the page, she becomes a human being, rather than a headline. She writes about growing up middle class in a satellite commuter town, near to London but very much in the countryside. She was Black, of mixed heritage, in a town where the only other Black people she saw were two girls who had been adopted by white parents; she was an effeminate boy, repeatedly ostracised and bullied for being different, not only by her peers, but by her peers’ parents, too. The ghoulish section 28 still loomed over her education; teachers would not step in when she received homophobic abuse. Her depiction of the isolation she felt is precise. She could not tell her parents why she was being bullied because she felt unable to come out to them. When she did, it was painful, and she writes frankly about how long it took that relationship to heal.

Continue reading…

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply