Pippa York: "I want the world to leave trans people alone"

0:02Pippa York:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:05Mark Pougatch:Pippa York, then known as Robert Miller, was crowned Tour de France King of the Mountains, winning three stages in the 1980s.

0:13Pippa York:But ever since she was five, she wanted to be a girl. Years after quitting cycling, age 41, she started a 10 year transition process to become Pippa York, who joins us today.

0:23Mark Pougatch:What was it like racing the Tour de France with gender dysmorphia? And what does she make of the debate around trans inclusion in sport that is going on right now?

0:33Pippa York:Welcome to The Sports Agents.

0:42Pippa York:The Sports Agents with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman. Pippa, thank you very much for joining us on The Sports Agents. First of all, the process of the book with David Walsh. How did you find that whole experience of revisiting everything and all of your memories and putting them down with him?

1:04Gabby Logan:Some of it's very intrusive. So it brings back a lot of emotions that I didn't deal with at the time. and something that Chris Hoy said the other day when I watched his podcast was that every time you kind of have to talk about your past or what's happening to you and it's kind of intimate and invasive it leaves a certain amount of emotional baggage to deal with and I found that each time that I had to write something so David asked me to write basically kind of 10-12 chapters of my life which I thought were important and some of them were really difficult to visit because I didn't deal with the issues at the time.

1:46Some of the questions I think they were quite difficult for him to ask

1:50Gabby Logan:because he wasn't sure if I was just having to answer them. So eventually I said to him, look, David, just say it the way you're going to say it and forget about if you're going to offend me or think I'm going to be awkward with it.

2:03Mark Pougatch:You said just there that David, you felt at times was worried about he might offend you or say something the wrong way. And I have to say, I'm going to ask a question now that I hope I deliver in the right way to you. That in the book, there is a particular episode you talk about as a child and you're saving up because you enjoy putting on a dress and that's something that you're doing behind the scenes of everybody who knows you, obviously. This is a massive secret you're keeping. And when you start cycling and really getting into cycling, it feels like that's a brilliant way to try and put all that other stuff to one side because the cycling is almost a separate thing in your life.

2:44Mark Pougatch:And it's a brilliant chapter because it helped me to understand a bit more about what that must feel like as a child going through that because you felt from a very young age.

2:55Gabby Logan:Yeah, so I felt different from about the age of five that I didn't want to live in that kind of male world and deal with all the kind of rough and tumble. but I didn't know what it was because I didn't have the information so I kind of stumble along like you do as a child you're basically an infant who's kind of learning each thing every day so by the time I kind of got to the start of adolescence and I discovered cycling and then I decided I was going to be a bike rider even though it seemed totally crazy to everyone around about me that allowed a separation from the kind of gender stuff But it was always there because I hadn't learned the kind of mental techniques to deal with it, to bury it.

3:40Mark Pougatch:Was the focus on cycling so great that the conversations you were having in your head were able to almost you were deliberately letting them go?

3:48Gabby Logan:Only when I kind of reached, when I was just before turning professional, did I kind of invest my kind of mental self into it fully. Into cycling? Yeah. So on the tour, you don't have any mental capacity or mental space. It's all about recovery and then dealing with the race tactics and how you feel and stuff like that. So there's not a lot of time to kind of deal with the outside world. You're in this little bubble and everything that happens to you during that day, you kind of have to mull over at nighttime and process it. And if you've had a good day, it's fine. You can kind of let go of it quite quickly.

4:28Gabby Logan:but if you haven't had a good day then you're you're kind of stuck in this place of self-loathing and asking yourself if you're going to be good enough and professional cycling

4:40Pippa York:presumably it may still be like this i don't know but back then was an incredibly male world

4:47Gabby Logan:i'm guessing yeah like most sports were you know so the the the male world kind of dominates the female world and then so you can't allow yourself any weakness to show any weaknesses so I didn't. Did you have masking kind of practices and behaviors that you would adopt? I didn't let people in you know so I'd have my friends who I talked to and anybody else who came along and I didn't like them or you know they didn't like me then it made that would make no difference to me that I kind of learned the techniques to to deal with what I'm dealing with a lot of sports people talk about you kind of control the things that you can control and the other things you have to let go I learned that quite quickly you also talk a lot about I

5:34Mark Pougatch:mean you hear this from a lot of sports people obviously that the grieving that you have at the end of a career however brilliant that career is in fact just this came up the other day and I was quite surprised it was Alan Shearer who was talking about you think of somebody like him pretty much doing everything they want in a career. And still, we were talking about the end and how it's never easy to finish a sports career at the highest level. And at the same time, you're now thinking about grieving for the end of somebody you have been as well, that you're about to make this transition. I mean, it must have been an unbelievably challenging mental state to be in.

6:10Gabby Logan:The thing about my kind of sporting career, I realised it was going to come to an end. I'd had enough. Physically, I was okay. Mentally, I'd had enough. I'd been doing it, you know, I was in my 16th year. It started to kind of tell and I don't want to keep, you know, traveling and staying in hotels and riding bike races and not being competitive enough for my ego and ambition. And that starts to kind of annoy you and kind of prey on, you know, what am I doing here? Do I actually earn a place here? Am I better just to stop? So I saw that coming and then I knew that then I'd have to deal with the kind of gender issues that were going to come up because I decided probably 10 years earlier that I'd do my cycling career at 100 % as well as I could and then I would deal with the gender stuff afterwards but during that 10 years there'd be moments when you know it came up again and um yeah how do i deal with it that then when i'm a professional sports person i'm on television and i can't deal with it so then i have to bury it again

7:20Mark Pougatch:and that's when you start your process of transition at the end of the career in terms of not just the physical part but the mental part you able to move on to a certain extent and say

7:32Gabby Logan:right this is the start not immediately it took about five years that was the beginning of the So I have to kind of descend into this whole of, right, you have to do something about this because you're not functioning as a human. So that took basically five years because I got to such a low point with who I was and what I was doing that.

7:52Mark Pougatch:Even though you said, I mean, you talk about in the book, you knew that was coming.

7:55Gabby Logan:You knew it was coming, but you don't realise how low you're going to have to go before actually you're going to have to deal with it. And then you seek professional help. and you did reach some real lows there was yeah there's lots of lows you know you have to go to that point of right what am I going to do here so at that point I was never suicidal but certain people who transition are and that kind of you know there's a decision to be made then how am I going to deal with my gender issues and I sought to kind of reach out the biggest fear is probably rejection of the people around about you how are they going to deal with it the people in your life you know what their character is and what they like and dislike and the strong characters and kind of slightly weaker ones and you don't know how each of those kind of characters are going to deal with it so sometimes you think this is a really strong kind of macho person they're going to hate me but they're actually okay with it and then the people you think will be okay with it don't because it when somebody close to you transitions from one side to the other it brings up a lot of questions for the person for that person so they start to ask themselves am i okay with this you know what would happen if that was me or what was happening if that was my partner or my wife or my husband so it provokes a lot of questions for everybody around about you I've been dealing with those kind of answers and the questions that kind of go before it for probably 15, 20, 25 years.

9:35Gabby Logan:But now I've introduced that world to everybody else. So was part of that five years that you talked about to get yourself into a position where you could carry those closest to you and all of their questions and feelings as well on your

9:54Pippa York:shoulders?

9:55Gabby Logan:No, I've reached a point with myself where I've stopped functioning. And I'm in the process of kind of rebuilding where I'm going, but I don't know where it's going to end. And for the people around about me, my closest people, they're also asking that same question. Where is this going? Quite often the question of why are we not enough? as a part of your life? Why is that not enough that they're there and you need to seek this other kind of place? So there's a lot of questions for them. If you think about it in terms of sexuality, you're in a straight relationship and then suddenly you're not.

10:39Gabby Logan:Not everybody can deal with that. And you can understand that. And I understand that because I'm asking, how are they going to deal with this? So I understand it.

10:50Mark Pougatch:Did you find anybody that you could speak to who had similar experiences? And how hard is it to do that? No, this is pre-internet.

11:00Gabby Logan:There's no... No chat rooms. There's no forum or, you know, there just isn't, you know. So you're dealing with it, you know, basically with the, you know, the kind of professional help that you're getting. And then they kind of point you, if you need a kind of therapy group or whatever, But it's not everybody's transition is different. So for some people, it's about, you know, they have body dysphoria. I never had that. I needed to be seen in the kind of social context of being seen as female and living in that world. The body part, I just thought, right, basically for me, my body was the tools that I used for my career.

11:44Gabby Logan:so I didn't have the kind of same outlook on things about that. I think I heard Chris always saying, you're used to your body being that tool and it functions and it's healthy and all the rest of it. And that's how I looked at my body. I wasn't in any way appalled by certain parts of it. For me, it was more a kind of, I need to integrate into a female world because that's where I feel more comfortable.

12:13Mark Pougatch:The world we are in right now, it feels the conversation about trans generally incites a lot of inflamed kind of opinions and people get very angry on both sides of the city. I don't know. It just feels like something that you have to tread so carefully around because it's not an easy conversation by any stretch of imagination. It's not an easy conversation when it comes to sport. And as a result, it feels like a conversation that gets buried quite a lot because people are so conscious of that, of being offensive or taking the wrong tact.

12:49Gabby Logan:I think you have to ask yourself if you go back 10, 15 years, was this a topic? No. So why has it become a topic now? Because, you know, whatever sport you're going to choose, there isn't a trans person in it. So I've started to say to people, remind me what the trans world record is in the 100 metres, because there's this perception that suddenly there's all these trans women in the kind of female side of the sport. And there isn't one. There isn't one in swimming, tennis. I think the best example is Scottish FA banned trans women from playing, but they don't have any. So how can you make an assessment of the impact of that person's on that sport if there aren't any people?

13:39Pippa York:So what has happened then, Pippa? What has happened in the last, as you say, from 10, 15 years? How has it ended up in this situation now?

13:50Gabby Logan:Well, then it becomes a political thing. You look at the previous government, how poorly they functioned. So they need distractions. for everything so if it's immigrants or you know unions or trans people or and it's just it's just uh somewhere to kind of deflect from how poor a job that they're doing so that you don't think about when you're standing there trying to fill your car up and it's now 150 a litre and it used to be a pound or whatever so you're not meant to think about that you're meant to be you know concentrating on there's so many immigrants in this hotel and um trans people have invaded women's sport, but it's just a smoke screen for the way that the political class functions.

14:38Pippa York:So for you now, is trans inclusion in sport a valid debate at the moment, or is it a distraction?

14:48Gabby Logan:It's a distraction. You know, it's a distraction. I remember going into British Cycling at the start of their kind of, oh, we're going to be trans inclusive. And I think there were six trans trans women that they had in the whole kind of membership of over 100 ,000 people. And they were all ordinary riders. You know, you'd never heard of any of them. You never will. And then they came up with this ban, but it's and saying that, oh, you have to, you're going to have to prove that you're not competitive. Well, if I'm banned from competing, how am I going to prove that? So then you're looking at history and have there been any trans world records?

15:30Gabby Logan:Has there been anybody who's competitive at an elite level or a world championships from Olympics? And no, there isn't. So then you realise that this has got nothing to do with inclusion and everything to do with the distraction of not dealing with the problems of women's sport not being regarded at the same level as the men's side. Because women's sport is always seen as inspirational for somebody else, you know, for somebody younger to come through and be inspired by that person. Whereas men's sports, you've seen a sport and nobody deals with that.

16:08Mark Pougatch:How do you find doing sport and exercise now in terms of your...

16:13Gabby Logan:It hurts instantly. So I don't recover. And I noticed that straight away in the first six months out of breath instantly because my red blood cells are lower and any kind of effort as a male you would recover the next day transitioning you it might take two days to recover so then you're no longer an idiot athlete because you can't have the training load Is exercise still very important to you mentally and physically? Do you still get Only to stay healthy?

16:44Pippa York:Do you cycle for fun?