One day nearly 15 years ago, Tony Belcher set about project-managing one of the most complex manoeuvres of his career.
First, he fabricated a story about a job going pear-shaped. Then, under the pretence of needing advice on now to handle the situation, he asked for separate meetings with each of his five fellow equity partners at building surveying firm Mellersh & Harding.
On every occasion, which he spread out over the course of two weeks, he would rush off home early to change before heading back into central London to meet his peers one by one. As a woman.
“They were all pretty gobsmacked,” says Antonia, now post transition. “I imagine each of them left the wine bar we met in and went straight on to another one to get over the shock. But just before the end of each of those meetings I told them all the same thing. I said, ‘If you need a year, take it. Think about it. But after that I am planning to come in to work in a frock. If you know you can’t live with it, tell me the soonest. Because I will just go. But I would like to stay.”
It turned out the partners didn’t need a year. A decision was made within a month that when the company moved offices the following year, Antonia would officially start work. And she stayed for five years until she made the decision to go independent eight years ago. Belcher worked with the same clients she had when she was “Tony with a ‘y’ ”, as she refers to her former self. And most people who knew her before her transition have been entirely accepting of her since.
Even her family. “I am still married to my wife of 33 years,” she says. “We still live together with my three children. We are looking into renewing our vows since the same-sex marriage laws have changed, to be two girls together. But my kids still call me dad. I am their dad and always will be.”
In the end, the story of Antonia’s life post transition is an undeniably positive one. “I got to keep everyone. I carried them all over from my old life into my new one and I am very lucky.” But it would be naive to assume that the process leading up to that point was smooth. It was anything but. Forty years of burying the feeling that something was not quite right were swiftly followed by another five living an exhausting double life that led eventually to Tony’s realisation that he was not a transvestite. He was transgender. And that everything was going to have to change.
Here, two decades on and in her first interview, Antonia talks frankly about everything from facing up to her new life after years in denial to her experiences of gender equality at work having been both a man, and now a woman, in the property sector.
Change is inevitable
It was 1995 when Tony first decided something had to change. Ultimately this was the decision that resulted in nothing being the same again. And it had been a long time coming.
“I knew as soon as I could logically think, maybe from when I was about five, that I wasn’t a conventional boy,” says Antonia, sitting in the St Paul’s HQ of her building surveying firm MHBC. “I had thoughts I knew a boy shouldn’t think.” Such as? “It is hard to explain. You just know they are not a boy’s thoughts. But I came from a very working-class family, the eldest of four. My father was a builder and the last thing I could have done was tell mum and dad. My father never knew in the end. He died before I told anyone. So I decided, ‘I am a boy. I have to be a boy.’ And I locked those thoughts away. For a very long time.”
The coping mechanism for the next 30-odd years was to work. At a career, at a marriage, at a life. “I worked hard to keep those thoughts locked away. To stay busy. I knew I had to get on with it. It helped that I never abhorred my male body. I was a good-looking bloke. But then I got older. I was in my mid 40s and had achieved so much of what I had wanted that I had more time to think. And I started to think about what it would be like to be a woman. I knew nothing about LGBT issues. Nothing about the trans community. But I wanted to see what Antonia would be like.”
This signalled the start of an exhilarating but agonising five years. Tony with a ‘y’ lied to everyone, including his wife, in order to set up an environment in which Antonia could thrive: “I could have been the world’s best spy,” she says. “I maintained my family life and work but I created a second life and I created Antonia. I convinced my wife that work was so busy in town that coming home at the end of the day was too tiring. So I bought a flat in Docklands and I would stay in town during the week and come back home at weekends.”
“I was allowing Antonia to exist. I was discovering who I would be as a woman.”
That flat became Antonia’s home. The first time she got dressed and put her make up on felt entirely natural – though she concedes that buying cosmetics and women’s clothes in such quantities was tricky and attracted a fair amount of attention – and while a quick walk around the block was enough for her first outing, she quickly built confidence. “She didn’t have as much time back then as Tony but she started to enjoy herself,” recalls Antonia. “I was never a very hirsute man, thank goodness, so I passed well right from the beginning, which gave me confidence. During the week I would go home after work, become Antonia, go out and would spend my evenings – from 10pm onwards by the time I had got ready – visiting the clubs and bars where people like me would go.”
Belcher survived on minimum sleep for those five years, often staying out until 4am and heading back out to work three hours later. But it was worth it. “I was allowing Antonia to exist. I was discovering who I would be as a woman. I made a tremendous group of friends from the LGBT community during that time and I built up a fabulous wardrobe – though I always had to hide it when the kids came to the flat, which was a nightmare. I usually chucked it in the back of the car.”
Transgender research
It was during these five years that Belcher began to learn about the trans community and research what it was to be transgender. “I was so novice and green back then. I didn’t know there was a difference between a transsexual and a transvestite. I questioned myself about which I was and all my friends from that part of my life were pretty clear. They said, ‘Antonia. You are transsexual. Get over it.’”
And it was this realisation that forced Belcher to face up to the fact that continuing with the double life was not sustainable. “I knew I wanted to be Antonia more than I wanted to be Tony. And the lies, the cheat and the deceit were beginning to eat me up. I hated it. And I was running out of steam.”
The time had come to tell the world about Antonia with an “i”. Starting with Tony’s wife. “We went away to the Seychelles on holiday and at the end of the trip I told her. I told her over dinner. And that’s when her world collapsed. I said, ‘There is something you don’t know about me that I need to tell you and it is going to change everything. I love you but I perfectly understand that nothing will ever be the same.’ I said I would like to think that I can make this work for us. But the bottom line is that if you want to divorce me, you should. Take me for what you can and find another man.”
It took two years but his wife decided to stay and is now Antonia with an ‘i’s partner. “She grieved my death,” says Antonia. “Trans is an interesting field. You are a gay man, you are a lesbian woman, you are bisexual and in all those cases you are the same person. With a trans person you are changing. My wife is very open but she had to see Tony with a ‘y’ die in her own mind. She is my soulmate. We are two girls together now and we are still a couple. I asked her why she didn’t kick me out and she said, ‘I just saw this person who wasn’t the same but who I still loved. And I wanted to stay with that person.’ And my three children have all been brilliant. They are three of my biggest supporters.”
Life as Antonia
The meetings with the equity partners followed swiftly and soon Belcher was living and working as Antonia, having managed to keep things relatively unchanged in terms of her professional and personal lives. In 2007 she decided to set up on her own and found that half the business, including two partners, chose to follow her. Proof, if it was required, that no one was concerned a boutique building surveyor run by a trans woman would have any problems attracting good business and key clients.
And Antonia says that this should all be hugely reassuring to anyone in a similar situation. “I discovered that it was my commerciality and my business brain the clients were interested in. Not how I look. I was successful at what I was doing before and after I transitioned and so the clients weren’t worried one bit that I was trans. Even the seriously traditional ones. People in organisations in the property sector who are not out need to be stronger about their position. It is not a negative.”
“People in the property sector who are not out need to be stronger about their position. It is not a negative”
But is this not easier to say now from a position of relatively minimal fall out? An outcome which she has arguably reached, against the odds?
“I was very lucky,” she concedes. “I had money and a home when I transitioned, and the support of my family. I haven’t lost anyone. But that just proves that there are positive stories to tell. And I still think that, looking to the future, more trans people should put their head above the parapet. There are lots of us. Way more than people think. And we need to pull together.”
The gender equality issue
Then there is the subject she says everyone wants to ask her about – particularly women: gender equality in the property and construction industries.
“Women are incredibly interested in what I have done at work as a woman in business that I wasn’t doing as a man. They want to know what impediments I see. I think that ultimately it is down to the differences between the way the sexes work. I see a team working on a project, men and women together. We talk about it and the guys will be shooting ideas in meetings and often one of the girls will come up at the end and say, ‘I thought he was wrong. We should be doing it this way.’ And I will always say, ‘Why didn’t you say that in the meeting, then?’
“It might be that the woman doesn’t want to upset someone or that they weren’t sure of themselves. Well. The guys don’t worry about that, do they? They don’t care if they are right. They just go for it. So sometimes women need to be more assertive.”
So does Antonia think she is more assertive now that she is a woman in property? “No,” she says. “Probably not. But then I had been a very adversarial man. I fought my corner arduously and I was told regularly that I could be aggressive to get my way. I am probably softer now. But I think that’s more to do with the fact I am living my life exactly the way I want to live it. People know who I am now. I know who I am now. I am a trans woman.”
She pauses for a minute to allow a brief moment of reflection, a hint of that softer side. “And I am happy.”
For more on Estates Gazette’s LGBT Special Edition, click here.
emily.wright@estatesgazette.com
Antonia is willing to be contacted by anyone seeking advice or quiet counsel on LGBT issues. Get in touch at abelcher@thisismhbc.com
