The Japan Times - Andi King recounts late-life transition after decades behind an “alpha male” identity

Andi King has described beginning her gender transition in her mid-50s after decades spent presenting a deliberately masculine public identity that concealed how she understood herself.

Back in 2022 I looked like I’d walked off the set of a Viking drama.

I was six foot tall, 17 stone, with big muscles, a beard, braided hair and tattoos inked onto the shaved sides of my head.

People used to take a second look at me in the street – they’d sometimes even cross it to avoid me.

I looked intimidating, but I was lying to myself.

Because underneath all of that was a woman and she’d been there my whole life.

After 52 years of being this Viking, I finally started my transition

Looking back, I feel a mix of euphoria that I can finally be me and a tinge of sadness at the decades missed where I felt trapped.

I was three when I first asked my mum why I was in a boy’s skin and not a girl’s.

‘Because you are a boy, Andrew,’ she stated. Somehow I already knew that she was wrong.

At pre-school, I got in trouble for dressing up with the girls instead of playing football and doctors, parents, and teachers agreed I would grow out of it.

As a kid, I would wear my t-shirt’s as a skirt in bed, graduating then to my mum’s actual clothes once I was old enough to be left alone in the house.

By the time I was 18, when I got a wage and a car, I ordered women’s clothes from catalogues, hid them in the boot and drove to a quiet beach on the weekends to walk the sand as myself after dark.

Then on Monday I’d return to being the man I didn’t feel like.

When the internet arrived I found a word for what I was: transsexual, was what was used at the time. I read about hormones and surgery, but didn’t have the courage at the time to take the plunge.

I was scared of the effect it would have on my life – I wasn’t prepared for how everything would change – so I embraced the wrong body.

So I built Andy instead – bouncer, martial arts enthusiast, gym obsessive – an alpha male.

Working in the Philippines a few years later, I became known as ‘Andy the Viking’.

But he was my armour and sometimes my work meant I was caught up in violence – I’m ashamed to say I revelled in it.

By 54 I was drinking heavily and self-harming, all while holding down a high flying financial job. I was struggling with who I was – the Viking was starting to kill me.

I had been with my partner for 20 years by that point, and she watched all of it, powerless to stop. A week before my 55th birthday in 2022, something in me shifted. I knew I was deteriorating and I didn’t want to die in a man’s body.

So I made the decision in the kitchen, there and then – I was finally going to transition. No going back, no reverse gear.

My partner was shocked, confused and devastated. But promised we would work through it.

I was fortunate – my job’s private healthcare covered the hormone treatment and gender affirming surgery I needed.

Luckily, when I told my boss and colleagues, they were right behind me. So were my sons and my brother – telling me ‘as long as you’re happy, that’s what counts’.

My mum needed longer, so I ended up telling her in December 2023 – pragmatic and devastated in the same breath, she stated she couldn’t face seeing me ‘with boobs.’

So we stopped seeing each other, however we talked every week for three years, about nothing much, while I had nine facial operations and implants, all paid for myself.

Everything changed however, when two days before my birthday this June, my brother talked her into a pub lunch. It was the best present I’ve ever had.

We spoke, I cried, and mum held me – later, she told me it was incredibly hard, but she loved me no matter what.

My partner had the hardest job of all – the Andy she’d committed twenty years to had just blown her life apart. He died that night and she had to decide whether to walk away or stay.

Luckily, she did the latter. We live together now as best friends, in a relationship that isn’t intimate anymore but is still, somehow, everything. I couldn’t do any of this without her and she supports me wholeheartedly.

I can understand why I assumed that character – to build the most masculine man that I could. But I don’t look back with regret – I’ve had a good life, I have my family, I’ve travelled the world and after all the past is impossible to change.

Through the process, I found out that transitioning isn’t just about hormones and surgery.

I had to learn to walk, talk, dress, and exist as the real me, from scratch. Going to a shopping centre, passport control, or wearing a bikini on a beach was no easy feat.

Trust me, nobody wakes up deciding being trans sounds fun – it’s one of the hardest things you can be.

Being a woman was never just about the body I was born into – it’s about what’s inside, about how I feel.

I spent 55 years finding the courage to say so.

Andy the Viking was the armour, the fists, a shield of a false identity.

But, the only person he was ever really fighting was me.

K.Nakajima--JT