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.
By the time she left home and moved to Brighton for university, there were other transitions to navigate. Each chapter covers a broad theme: adolescence, sex, gender, love, race and purpose. Many memories are traumatic, and her resilience is astonishing. Not everyone survives those experiences, as the book’s affecting dedication makes plain. As she contemplates her purpose, in the final chapter, she suggests that she is moving – or in the language and spirit of this book, “transitioning” – towards a more tranquil place. “I think I’m tired of chaos, and would like some peace now,” she writes.
There was one element of Transitional that I particularly liked, though it’s in the margins, rather than centre stage. Bergdorf writes about the lack of role models she had growing up. She finds self-expression in pop culture: bedroom walls covered in Buffy and Britney posters, an obsession with Madonna, “a woman who didn’t give a fuck about the opinions others had of her”, watching Queer As Folk on TV. “Role models show us that we are good enough as we are,” she writes, and her testament to what other role models – including lecturers, mentors and elders – did for her is joyful and moving. There is no denying the power of representation and how much it matters to see yourself reflected positively in the world.
The slightly gauzy selling point of Transitional – that all of us transition, all the time, in different ways, and that should unite us – gives it a veneer of self-help, but it is much more effective as a memoir than a guide. The idea that we must navigate difficulties and heal from trauma is so vague that it feels almost as if Bergdorf is trying to make herself believe it. Still, when trans people are facing such a hostile climate in the UK, it is hard to begrudge her this open-arms gesture, one that aims to speak to all human experience, rather than simply her own.
• Transitional: In One Way Or Another, We All Transition is published by Bloomsbury Tonic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
