A transgender pioneer has settled down in Liverpool and is proud to call the city home.
Abi Austen, who now lives in Walton, was the first transgender officer in the British army, the first transgender police officer in Scotland and the world’s first transgender diplomatic ambassador - all of which she talks about in her new book.
The 58-year-old, who is from Belfast but grew up in Scotland, first made headlines in 2007 and soon became known as a champion for transgender equality. After living forty-plus years “as someone else”, Abi began transitioning when she was 44 and part of the armed forces.
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She told the ECHO: “The army was a way out for me and a way to change up my life. But, it was very male-dominated and I had to hide who I was just to get into the army. The army took me away from where I was growing up which is what I wanted but I didn’t have agency over my physical body and because of this, the world saw me as something that I am not. That was the root of my discomfort - I wasn’t born in the wrong body, I was born in my body, the right body, but what I had to do was get control over it.”
Abi explained how her life felt similar to the Barbra Streisand film, Yentl, which follows a Jewish girl who disguises herself as a boy to enter an orthodox school.
She said: “War was an opportunity for me to forget the conflict that was going on in my head. At the same time, there was external and internal conflict. When I was in the warzone, I could forget about all the other stuff because at that moment I was focusing on survival. I didn’t have much time to dwell on my own personal unhappiness but it was still hard to push to one side.”
To take back “control”, Abi underwent 36 operations to be where she is today. The author added: “Not only did the surgical interventions allow me to connect my body with my soul, but it also allowed the outside world to see me for who I am too.”
After leaving the British Army in 2009, Abi set her sights on becoming an officer with Strathclyde Police. However, she quickly returned to what she loved, just this time in a different role. Abi joined NATO serving alongside the United States Army in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, for three years - something which she said was “the making of me”. She added: “I was at a senior level and being respected. I was back doing all the things I was doing in the British Army but this time I was doing it as myself.”
Now, rather than being “involved in the business of war”, Abi is trying to stop wars through her role as a diplomatic ambassador. Abi said: “I’ve been more successful than I was in my life before. The reason I think I’ve now achieved this success is that I am now happy with myself. I always had the skills and the experience, but what I couldn't do was express myself properly because I was so wound up in my own unhappiness and every time I went into a job, I was self-destructive.”
Having travelled the world - Afghanistan, Ukraine, North Macedonia and Central Asia - through her career in diplomacy, Abi has now returned back to the city and detailed all of her experiences, including the "good, bad and the ugly", in her new book - Sugar and Spice. Abi was motivated to write the book following the death of her parents.
She told the ECHO: “It's a memoir of how I became me and the story of my life. It details growing up with an evangelical family who supported scriptures that went against who I was. It’s about the trials and tribulations that I had to overcome being a trans person when the word trans wasn’t even about.”
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