In a new one starseries, we ask people from all walks of life what it means to them to be a woman or a man, to live as a trans person or to not feel like they belong to any gender. We set out to find what shapes our sense of gender.
Recorded by Lisa Frieda Cossham
Anastasia Biefang, 49, was born male and secretly dressed in her mother’s clothes during puberty. But it would take another 20 years before she was able to make public what she had long felt: she is a woman. As a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, she heads the cyber and information space command in Bonn, is deputy chairwoman of the QueerBW association and an LGBTIQ+ activist. Here she tells her story.
For me, being a woman means being myself. And I wasn’t like that for a long time. Until I couldn’t anymore. My inner and outer life were in competition with each other. On the outside, I was a man and a soldier in the Bundeswehr, married to a woman who wanted a guy at her side. And inside I was a woman who had no space. Who desired men and women and made no distinction between the sexes. The cause of my exhaustion was obvious: I had been a secret trans person for 40 years. It wasn’t until I dared to say it in 2015 that my life got better. I wasn’t immediately happy, but my everyday life became worth living again.
I was 16 when I first thought about being read as a male. And that there is a difference in how I perceive my body and how others see it. Gender and sexuality didn’t play a role in my family, it was never discussed, and until then it was completely normal for me to grow up as a boy. One day when I was home alone, I tried on my mother’s clothes. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt like I was able to express something that had always lived within me. It was a wow moment. At the same time I thought: What am I doing here?