The problem with sticking up for yourself in the media ‘is that you get called an activist, and you feel all the joy draining out of your body’, says the writer Paris Lees, with a dry laugh. ‘Most of my friends know me as funny, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from my public image if you’ve only seen me arguing with an old man about trans rights on Newsnight.’
Which is one of the reasons why Paris has written a book that is going to surprise a lot of people. What It Feels Like For A Girl is the true story of her life but presented as a novel, because she wanted to make sure it was fast and funny and furious, which it very much is. Written in her local Midlands dialect, it has already been compared to Trainspotting and is not the trans polemic that some might expect. Really, it’s about being working class and chaotic in a small town, coming of age to ’90s and noughties pop music and trying to get away from macho expectations on a council estate.
It’s set near Nottingham, so local heroine Vicky McClure was the first person in their town to get a copy ‘because I posted it to her myself’, explains Paris. Vicky loved it, and the band Sleaford Mods are also fans.
The hero of Paris’s book is Byron, who later becomes Paris, growing up with a violent dad who can’t believe his son is such a wuss and wants to toughen him up with fists. Byron’s mum doesn’t know what to do with her unusual child either, so follows her new boyfriend to Turkey for a few months instead, while Byron, who doesn’t feel like a boy at all, finds escape when teenage adventure beckons. Lured away by the pied piper of nightclubs, illicit sex and a gang of wild mates called The Fallen Divas, Byron is reborn.
The Divas become party monsters, growing ever braver in the face of lads who jeer at them for dressing in women’s clothes. Their lives turn into one big hilarious walk of shame, full of drunk and druggy nights out that seem to last for days, ending with them being dragged through a hedge backwards, almost literally. But of course it isn’t all funny, and real drama ensues.
‘I felt completely disconnected from my body and like I wasn’t worth anything,’ Paris tells me now, sounding quite emotional to think back to that time in her life. ‘I felt I had nothing to lose. So I thought I’ll do whatever I want and damn the consequences. I’m still coming to terms with it now.’
In particular, the book tells her experiences of being a ‘rent boy’, as she puts it. What’s interesting is that we hear the whole story through young Byron’s eyes, so when a much older man is willing to pay for sex, or to take Byron in his car to meet a group of other paedophiles, we can see that this is deeply predatory behaviour. But Byron, starved of affection and in need of feeling special, can’t.
I put it to Paris that she was brave to write it like that, to explain the thrill as much as the danger. ‘Well, at the time, the truth is that I thought what I was doing was wonderful and nobody could tell me otherwise. I thought I was grown up. Now I look back and think, “Babe, you were abused. What else could you call it? I look back at those men… it’s like waking up, this moment of realisation: “Oh, my, god, you were 14 years old.”’
One crime leads to another, and Byron ends up in prison. Yet the writing is so alive and warm that you don’t feel remotely miserable while reading it, even while your heart is pounding for her. ‘Robbing somebody – it was exciting. I’m not proud of that,’ Paris says. ‘But there is a certain glee to acting however we want, and I wanted to capture that. I’m really interested in getting to the truth of things. It’s not really that politically correct a book! Everything is so boring now – I spend so much time just thinking about how to say things online in the right way. Social media has been great for my career as a journalist, I have to say, but writing books is the way forward – there’s so much more nuance.’
As for the question posed by some journalists about whether opening up women-only spaces to trans women could put other women at risk of more violence, the book shows you how Paris spent her childhood running from that same violence. She clearly knows more about it than I do, and is glad when I point this out. ‘It’s hugely frustrating seeing all this stuff suggesting I’m the problem,’ she says. ‘It’s sick.’
For Paris, prison felt like the end of the world, particularly as she was highly sensitive, feminine, ‘a boy to the outside world’. ‘You know, imagine the sort of boy from school I’d have crossed the road to avoid, and I was shoved in there with ALL of them. I literally thought I was going to die. But honestly, I didn’t. I was treated with more kindness in prison than I have been in sections of the British media.’
I remember watching Paris on Question Time in 2013 and being impressed by this glamorous, eloquent woman talking about her experience of being inside. The Labour MPs Harriet Harman and John Prescott tweeted about what a powerful speaker she was too. It seemed a breakthrough moment in trans history. But when I ask her about that now, she says she had to drag her mattress into her living room and sit there eating Rice Krispies for three days afterwards to cope with the exposure.
She’d also had a nervous time backstage with a make-up department that couldn’t really do her poker straight hair, and the old Fallen Diva in her rose up again.
The producers said her hair didn’t matter, it would be fine. ‘I said, “You don’t understand. I am not going on BBC One if my fringe isn’t straight! So you’re going to have to send somebody to get my straighteners. So they had to send Chris Bryant!”’ The Labour MP had to ‘go to my hotel, get into my room, and wade through my knickers and bras strewn across the floor to find them. Turns out he’s a really handy guy to have around if you need an extra pair of hands while you’re getting your glam on.’
‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ is out now
Photographer: Ollie Adegboye
Photographer Assistant: Yomi Adewusi
Stylist: Steph Wilson
Stylist Assistant: Rosalind Donoghue
Hair: Patrick Wilson at The Wall Group using Kerastase
Makeup: Rachel Shram