in Carletonville
Andr was in matric in a small Afrikaans mining town when he began taking the hormone tablets that would ultimately transform him into Tula – but only more than 20 years later. Charl Blignaut traces one woman’s story of emancipation
‘Every day of my life I threaten to leave Carletonville,” sighs Tula from the back seat of the car. ”I swear, every day, but I just dunno … it’s not so simple …”
Dusk is starting to settle all around us, slowly darkening the flat, empty streets of the small gold mining town an hour west of Johannesburg; rows of lawns and square brick houses occasionally giving way to uninspired shopping centres. ”Jiss, Sunday night there’s nothing open in Carletonville. Nothing, not even The Porterhouse. I suppose we can try the Wimpy, but I don’t know if they’re open either …”
We’re still at least half an hour too early for the Yellowstone Spur, an oblong structure craftily disguised from view inside the Sanlam Sentrum. The restaurant was to have been the site of my first meeting with Tula, but I’d arrived late and we had missed one another.
Sitting waiting for her on the half-built wall outside Dawie’s Men’s Hairdressers next to the Spur, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was looking out for. Four years ago, after seeing a piece on transgender that I had produced for TV, Tula had written me a letter and, on and off over the years, we had kept in touch by letter or by phone.
I had thought I would recognise her, but now I wasn’t so sure, perched on my wall gazing pointedly at the female occupants of each car that pulled into the parking lot. She’s definitely not the stout one with the perm. Nah. Or is she? Nope, kids in the back. Or has she got married in the meanwhile? I know she had been seeing a married man …
Ah, here comes someone, a sporty girl in a tracksuit with ruddy cheeks. Our eyes meet and she veers to the left, ducking into the restaurant. No way, much too butch. Another car and a babe with long blonde hair …
Sidling up to the shut restaurant door, I glance hopefully inside. No Tula, just an increasingly aggro manager with a clear dislike for my facial piercings. I return to my wall … I swear, I think to myself, half the women who have walked past this wall look like they could’ve once been men …
”Charl!” shrieks Tula, flapping her arms in the air as she rounds the corner, simultaneously winking at the manager and reaching forward to kiss me hello … She’s a tall, composed woman, her outfit carefully chosen, her make-up meticulously applied. I’d’ve known it was her, I swear …
”Can you believe it,” comes Tula’s voice from the back of the car, ”It’s open. Well I never.”
We park outside the Wimpy. I open her door and Tula climbs out of the car past me, running a hand through her long auburn hair, smoothing down her dress with the other. ”This place. I swear, any day now I’m just going to leave and settle in Pretoria.”
I think about it for a moment. Tula is 40 years old and in her prime, having lived in the area for 36 of those years; her father a mine captain all his life, her mother a housewife. Three years ago, a year after her father died, Tula finally underwent her full sex change surgery, in so doing characteristically rediscovering her sex drive.
So surely then, you would think, the first thing that she would do in a small town where everyone knows everyone would be to pack up her things and slip into the conglomerate anonymity of a sprawling city like Pretoria, one where no one remembers Andr from school.
Of course, nothing in life is that simple, least of all in a small town. ”Why do you stay?” I ask.
”Ag, there’s my family, you know. And there’s the people here; I’m used to them. The new ones don’t know about my past and almost all of the others have come to accept me. In fact, let me tell you something, the people in Carletonville treat me with a lot more respect now than they did when they thought I was a gay outjie. The gay ous have a much harder time of it than I do …”
From the moment we walk through the front doors of the Wimpy, Tula starts to greet the people. She stops off at a black family seated around a table and has a little chat. As I weave through the restaurant behind her to a table in the back corner, I realise that there is another very important reason why Tula stays on in Carletonville. Basically, she’s something of a local celeb, at worst a curiosity. (Fred: ”Millie! Millie! Check, there goes that sex change I told you about!” Millie: ”Her? No way! But she looks just like a real woman!” Fred blushes, then whispers into Millie’s ear: ”How does she, you know, do it, do you think?”)
And it will come as no great surprise to any alternative looking whitey that it is black South Africans who are most likely to tell you that they think you look lovely. ”It’s always been like that,” Tula will later reveal, ”Black people are by far the most supportive. For some reason they seem to like me.”
‘Let me tell you something,” says Tula a little later, taking a sip of her coffee and pausing for dramatic effect, ”I’m the second sex change in Carletonville. The first was Paula Barry, back in the Sixties. She’s in her 50s now. I met her one night at Champions in Jo’burg. She came up to me and asked, ‘Are you Tula?’ She said, ‘How on earth do you survive in Carletonville?’
”But you know, I really think people have learnt to accept me, especially because of when I owned the hair salon. They could see that I knew how to do business. My clients loved me and accepted me for what I was. Also I was nominated on to the local business council and people learned to deal with me as a businesswoman and not just a transsexual.”
”Do they gossip a lot?” I ask.
”Ag yes, of course,” twinkles Tula, ”I love it.”
At 40, Tula may finally have begun to live the life she always wanted to, but you’d better believe it has been a bumpy path.
Yes, little Andr – Tula flinches each time her former name is mentioned – always believed that he was supposed to be a little girl; yes he detested the sight of his penis growing; yes he became a boy trapped in a girl’s body; a man trapped in a woman’s body; no he never believed he was actually gay, even though he was attracted to men. He was a woman, goddamit, that he knew for certain.
Tula’s childhood psychiatric make-up correlates almost precisely with the views expressed by every transsexual I have ever interviewed and with 95% of those documented by medical professionals. Yes, from the age of five already little Andr would spend hours on his knees praying to God that he would wake up the next morning as a girl …
What makes Tula’s story particularly poignant, though, is being transsexual within the confines of a small town like Carletonville. As Andr grew up he would pore over magazines, books and medical journals for any articles on transsexualism and the rapidly developing field of male- to-female sex change procedure. These articles he would keep on him wherever he went. Back then the procedure was incredibly complicated, sex change operations being executed in three drawn- out stages. You can well imagine the tolerance levels of apartheid era state psychologists …
Soon enough Andr’s teenage life fell into a pattern of its own. He would return from school and get changed into his older sister’s clothes, adding some titbits from his mother’s wardrobe.
The female members of the family eventually grew to cope with Andr’s ”stage”, persuading him at least to change back when pa came home from the mines at about 4pm.
Andr was an excellent pupil at school and went on to become a prefect. Few people questioned why his eyebrows had grown so tapered and his eyelashes so thick. Inside his school shoes his nails were painted. When he was 14 he had an affair with a male teacher. He knew he was attracted to men, but did not feel the same emotions as other gay boys.
It was at this stage that Andr began ”dragging” outside the house with a friend a couple of evenings a month. They stuck to the shadows, shying from public view. ”I was so scared of being caught,” says Tula, ordering a second coffee. ”I thought that if they caught me with panties on that was it, so I would wear underpants.”
When he was in about standard nine, Andr discovered Johannesburg and the pleasures of the notorious gay and lesbian club The Dungeon. It was there that he began dragging seriously, entering all the competitions; testing his look by going out in Johannesburg and ”passing” as a woman in front of straight men.
Except, Tula says, drag was just a drag. She wanted 24-hour drag, not just a night out. Being at school in Carletonville didn’t help matters much either.
”I was about 17 and a half when I met a midway-through sex change called Carol- Anne. She taught me all the tips and told me who to speak to. Most importantly, she told me where I could buy illegal hormones.”
By the end of his standard nine year, Andr decided that the time had come to take his pocket money and go and visit a particular chemist at the Langlaagte Station, who sold the hormone tablet Premarin under the counter.
Extraordinarily, Tula was still at school in Carletonville when she began to use Premarin regularly.
Every now and then glancing in the mirror next to our table to check her make-up, Tula travels back to the Seventies. ”The first time I took the hormones I expected them to work immediately. I thought I would just sprout breasts overnight,” she confesses across the Wimpy bar table, a twinkle in her eyes.
But Andr, now in matric, had no such luck, well, not until two or three months had passed, and he suddenly began to feel a difference. The first sign was that his nipples had become extremely sensitive.
As matric continued, so did Andr’s treatment. His breasts began to enlarge and he would soon enough find it necessary to wear two tight T-shirts beneath his school shirts. And his facial hair needed a lot less attention all the time; easier to disguise than the fact that his voice, too, was changing.
Back in Johannesburg on the weekends Carol- Anne was helping Andr get to grips with the state psychiatry procedure so that, by the time he had matriculated, he could begin his counselling.
The state pays for sex changes, but it must also approve them first and that is a lengthy process.
Even then, back in the Seventies only three or four operations were being performed a year.
Another change was coming over Andr in his matric year: his penis and his testicles were slowly shrinking. A year or two later he would lose the ability to achieve an erection and eventually it would become painful to urinate. For Tula these would be wondrous signs and a great encouragement. The Premarin was working!
At 19, Tula could no longer hide her changing body and fluctuating emotions from her family and she left Carletonville, moving to Johannesburg and cutting off her family.
At The Dungeon she met a lover and they moved into a flat on the 23rd floor of Ponte, learning to take Nobese and to drink heavily with her macho electrician gay lover -”well, you could say he was bisexual. I mean, my breasts were already quite developed and he made it clear he wanted me to keep my penis and balls.”
That year Tula – who was still using the name ”Andr” – made her first appointment with the state psychiatrist at Johannesburg General Hospital. When she walked in he was convinced she was a woman, pleasing her no end. She went for counselling for almost a year, staying in Johannesburg for four.
Eventually her relationship with her lover became a strain. When they fought he would threaten to call her parents and tell them that their son had sprouted boobs. They enjoyed anal sex, like two gay men, yet her breasts were now fully developed and her hips had become broader. She felt she was ready for the removal and construction operation; her lover didn’t agree. She had yet to adopt the name Tula, dragging as Glenda or Dalene. Once, when bust in a costume after a Miss Legs competition, her breasts led the police to discharge her.
”What terrified me the most at that stage was that I would develop an Adam’s apple, but, thank God, that never happened. I must say, though, that last year in Jo’burg is a bit of a blur. I was drinking quite heavily and we were fighting. I think his confusion was growing while mine was subsiding. When he started hitting me regularly I decided to move on.”
Her sessions with the state psychiatrist were progressing well and her Premarin prescription had reached levels of 120 a month. After evaluation at Weskoppies, she was nominated for surgery, but something was holding her back. She missed her mother; she had decided to go back to Carletonville.
It was pretty obvious that she would never be able to pull off a boy look, so Tula bound her breasts, dressed in denim and returned home to a hostile father. ”At that stage I looked like a classic lesbian,” she says, declining an umpteenth cup of weak Wimpy coffee.
Taking up hairdressing training, Tula entered a period of protracted hermaphroditism, repeatedly nominated for surgery, but postponing it, partly, it appears, for the sake of her family. It goes without saying that relationships were out until she made the decision to go ahead with surgery and defy her father. She went on plenty of dates, once or twice not being able to stop having her panties ripped off. ”When men saw, they freaked, but ag, they were so turned on at that stage, I dunno. It was difficult. Obviously I would never see them again.”
How Tula coped with her situation in Carletonville seems astounding. In cities like New York, there’s a whole kinky strip circuit for pre-op hermaphrodites. A thousand dollars a night. In Carletonville there was hardly even anyone to talk to.
”My father’s death resolved a lot of things for me,” says Tula, her eyes returning to sparkle mode as she describes the release of finally, at 11am on an October morning in 1994, being able to book herself into surgery.
Pain?
”Shit. You have no idea. I had already had my testicles removed by the local doctor, but that was nothing compared with six months of hell.”
Drilling a hole in the pelvic bone, removing the penis muscle and constructing a fully- functional vagina – complete with attached nerve endings for sensation – from the remaining skin is the first phase. Learning to use the toilet; weeks of keeping the vagina functional with a plastic penis mould intact at all times …
None of this was too much to suffer for Tula finally to become normal according to her own definitions.
Yes, Tula has a clitoris. Yes, Tula can achieve orgasms. Such is modern science. Oh, and yes, the state paid for it all.
After her op, Tula could finally stop taking the hormones and rediscover her sex drive. Perhaps the first test she had to ”pass” was having sex with her new body. ”He didn’t have a clue that I wasn’t born that way.”
Unlike many former men who have undergone sex changes, she is able to speak about her sex life without trying to sanitise it. You’re damn right she finds it kinky that men who used to mock her gayness are now trying to pick her up.
She decided to sell the salon to her business partner after her op and she has been living off that money. She says ”I know I will have to work again soon.”
But, hell, at 40 she’s got some catching up to do.
In a sense she can become the ultimate lover. She knows what sensations please both the male and the female body.
And who says that times haven’t changed in smalltown South Africa. Last year Tula attended her school reunion as a woman – and there was absolutely no aggression towards her. Nor is there any in the streets and bars of Carletonville.
Driving Tula back to her little brick home, the conversation again drifts on to the subject of ”getting out of this town”. In a sense, it’s a vicious circle: what’s really keeping her there are her family and friends, but what will ultimately drive her away is that there are still, to this day, friends and members of that family who see Tula but remember Andr and who still refer to her as ”he” and ”him”. And it is that, after 40 years, that ”drives me bloody mad. But I understand it’s a big mental leap for them to make.”