“My upbringing was tough,” Danielle Laidley says. “Going back over it was therapeutic, but emotionally distressing at times.
“But I look back now and think, ‘Would I change anything?’ I don’t think so. It helped me become the person I am today.”
Laidley’s dad drank. If she played poorly, he called her a pussy. If she played well, she was a poser. At 12, she was booted out of home. “I can’t afford you,” he said. “You’re going to have to go.”
Her “other self”, she writes in her book Don’t Look Away, was “like a conjoined twin I couldn’t quite absorb”. At first, dressing in women’s clothes and applying makeup brought peace. But then came the self-loathing, the alienation, the fear. This was the 1980s. There was no internet. No one talked about gender dysphoria, and certainly not at football clubs.
Laidley, then known by her birth name Dean, learnt by watching other women. She kept her miniskirts and nail polish in the shed. In every interaction, there was the terrifying prospect of being discovered. “You live in fear, in shame and in embarrassment for so many years,” she tells Guardian Australia.
She was a parent and a state footballer at 19. She was running a fledgling sports store, selling aerobics gear, cricket bats and T-Ball stands. She was a sharp elbowed, pitiless, fearless footballer. She liked to hurt people.
“I lived by the mantra, ‘Kill or be killed’,” she says. “It was so far removed from the person I really was. In a way, playing like that was a way of keeping my two worlds from colliding.”
Cruelled by injury, she transferred to North Melbourne, a club always in danger of going under, a club drowning in booze, a team revolving around its solar superstar Wayne Carey, and coached by the hardest of bastards, Denis Pagan. She was best afield in one of the best games ever played, the 1994 preliminary final, although North lost by a goal to Geelong. Her nose was cut and she panicked – how could she apply makeup? That night, she partied with the trans community. She arrived home at noon, back to her other life.
I wish I didn’t have to hide
She eventually won a premiership, when North beat Sydney in 1996, but there was still a void. It solved nothing. She says she was “institutionalised” by football. She moved into coaching, where she was adept at reading patterns and identifying trends. She was a brilliant tactician, but moody and unknowable. Her players called her The Bible because she was so hard to read.
“I wish I could tell you,” she remembers thinking. “I wish I didn’t have to hide.” She was gaunt, not sleeping, not coping with the Melbourne fishbowl, and struggling with her gender dysphoria. “Sometimes, the industry, and the media in particular, forget that we are human,” she says.
As football receded, her two lives, her two selves, were on a collision course. There was the realisation that this was not a psychological affliction, but a medical condition. There was help. There was hope. But first, there was rock bottom. There was drug addiction, and incarceration. In 2020, she was arrested, caught with 0.43g of methamphetamine and charged with one count of stalking. She pleaded guilty and was placed on a good behaviour bond, with no conviction recorded in relation to the drugs.
The most harrowing passage of her book concerns her time in a psychiatric ward. At night, the patients howled.
“I join in the screaming,” she writes. “Just another crazed wolf howling at the moon. Join in the chorus, and sing it one and all.”
Through all the pain, the ignorance, and the betrayal, there is humour, and there is hope. There are moments of decency, of humanity, of acceptance. Some of the most touching, and surprising, come from former teammates. In the 1990s, there were alpha males on every line at North Melbourne. They now rally around their former teammate. They sometimes don’t know where to look, or what to say. But they are there. They shepherd her away from the cameras, conduct welfare checks, write references, and include her in their catchups. All say the same thing – they’ve never seen her so happy, or speak so much.
“The men that I played with, and the sons that I coached – their support has been unconditional. Their attitude is, ‘You just be you, we want you here, the world is a better place with you in it’,” she says.
Pagan, who is now selling houses and training thoroughbreds, tendered a court reference that mentioned Laidley “continually placing his body in front of a rampaging Tony Lockett”.
For so long, that was how we framed the idea of courage in football. That was how respect was earned, and how characters were judged. Real courage, Laidley says, was reclaiming her true self.
“If I share what it’s been like to walk in my shoes for 55 years,” she writes. “All the blood and guts and shit and puke, the mistakes and the shame, the hugs and tears and fists in the air – it might lead to acceptance of others like me. It might help someone else to just keep walking.”
Don’t Look Away: a Memoir of Identity and Acceptance is published by HarperCollins on 30 August
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
