‘I don’t expect everyone to accept me as a woman’
Actress Talisa Garcia is at the centre of a big plot twist in the new BBC crime drama series ‘Baptiste’ — and it’s also the story of her own life, writes Ciara McGoogan
‘My story is huge… but it’s not sad,” says Garcia, the Chilean-born English actress who plays Kim Vogel in Baptiste, the BBC’s new six-part crime drama spin-off of The Missing. Following a twist at the end of the first episode in which French detective Julien Baptiste, played by Tcheky Karyo, discovers that Vogel was born male, Garcia has chosen to reveal for the first time that she, too, has had gender reassignment surgery, when she was 18.
“For me, it has always been a secret. I was a bit embarrassed, I suppose, of not being a ‘normal’ woman,” she admits, making air quotes with her hands.
Garcia is slender in a black and white jumpsuit, with pointed stiletto boots and freshly blowdried, long, brown hair. As she flicks her wrist, a silver Pandora charm bracelet jangles.
“I look different to a lot of transgender people and have been extremely lucky,” she says. “I was just a woman and no one ever questioned it. So I kept it hidden.”
Until now. Speaking openly about her transition, the 45-yearold knows the news will come as a shock to some who know her, not least the former boyfriends, colleagues with whom she worked on serial dramas such as Silent Witness and Doctors, and friends to whom she never confided her full story. But, hot on the heels of her first major television role, she is excited to no longer have “a little secret that’s always there in the back of my mind”.
“I don’t expect everyone to accept me, and there’s nothing wrong with it if people don’t — as long as we’re all civil to each other,” she says.
Her temperate tone is perhaps surprising in an era when transgender activists have been accused of aggression and shutting down debate, but it belies her ethos that working with the mainstream is the best way to challenge stereotypes and foster acceptance.
Garcia’s story begins in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in 1973, shortly after the military coup in which dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power. Then around eight months old, Garcia was found on the streets, orphaned and starving, with a four-year-old boy, thought to be her brother. The two were separated and sent to the Ciudad del Nuno orphanage, where Garcia was adopted by her mother, a lecturer at the University of Chile, and father, a mechanical engineer, who already had three biological sons.
‘When will it stop? We need to drop the labels. There are so many labels, people don’t know what’s what any more’
Soon after her adoption, the family fled Pinochet’s murderous regime and sought refuge in Swansea, where Garcia — then called Jose — had a happy childhood of rounders in the park, trying on her mother’s clothes and playing with dolls at any opportunity. She always felt different to her brothers and remembers asking her mum “why girls wore little dresses and I had to wear shorts” when she was five. “[My parents] tried to ‘boy me up’ a little bit, but it wasn’t working,” says Garcia, looking at a picture of her seven-year-old self in which she has delicate features and smooth, long hair. “There were a few battles at home. Mum bought me Barbie dolls and Wendy houses, and Dad would say: ‘We mustn’t encourage it.’ ”
It was the 1980s, and transgenderism wasn’t as visible, but Garcia was largely accepted for who she was. Children at school called her a “boy-girl” and used “Josie” rather than Jose. “I always made everybody laugh, whether it was my brothers or bullies,” she says. “That was my weapon to never getting picked on.”
But the disconnect she felt within herself meant Garcia became severely depressed. Feeling like she didn’t want to be “part of this world” if she wasn’t a woman, when she reached teenagehood, she attempted suicide. It was “horrific for my parents and family”, she says, but it was an incident that would ultimately save her life as she was finally diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
“As soon as they gave it a name, everything became better,” says Garcia, who “saw a light at the end of the tunnel” when her psychiatrist told her about Caroline Cossey, an English model who became the first transgender woman to pose for Playboy and appeared in the James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only.
“I thought, ‘If she can do it, so can I’,” she says. “It changed everything for me. I wanted to live.”
Garcia procured transitional hormones illicitly when she was 15 and told her parents she wanted a sex change, to which her father responded: “You’re going to make a beautiful woman.”
She was lucky: friends of the same age were kicked out of their homes for being transgender or gay. “My Dad wanted lots of boys and was, in a way, quite old school,” she says. “But when it happens to your child — and you realise how much they suffer —
you change your mind.”
So, at 18, with her terrified parents holding her hands, Garcia underwent the seven-hour genital reconstruction surgery. Before the doctor administered the anaesthetic, she told them: “If I don’t wake up, it’s fine. If I can’t have the operation, I won’t be here anyway.”
Pivotal to everything were Garcia’s understanding parents. “It’s very important to listen to children about how they feel,” she says. “If I had a child who was five or six and I could tell they were unhappy in themselves, they were playing with the opposite sex’s toys, I would send them to a psychiatrist or give them someone to speak to.”
Though she admits to being happy in almost every way, the one area she still struggles to forget that she was born male is when it comes to matters romantic. “I can go on a date and sit through a candlelit dinner, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to have to tell this guy that I was born the same way as him’,” she says. “It’s really difficult for them to comprehend.” Only three partners have ever asked her outright if she is transgender.
These days, Garcia waits until she knows a man well before telling them – “if you tell him straight away without them knowing you as a person, their imagination runs wild” – but it doesn’t always work. In her 20s, she broke up with the “love of my life to this day” because he wouldn’t marry her and didn’t accept her for who she was.
In another painful break-up, Garcia fled the Spanish town where she was living after telling her boyfriend and his family. “They really didn’t accept me,” she says.
Having undergone the transition process, she feels well-placed to be critical of the experience. It should, for instance, be more tightly regulated, so that those who present for gender reassignment undergo “at least three years” of psychological assessment beforehand — “especially if they are older”: “I find it very difficult to understand how somebody at 60 suddenly has the urge to have the operation,” she says. “You have to be very careful with that.”
Garcia is also forthright in her belief that, in recent years, transgender rights activists may have done more harm to the cause than good. “This is where we get into the really hard bit,” she says. “Nowadays, we have to be very careful with what we say and what’s politically correct”. Although she won’t elaborate much further, she does say that transgender toilets are “the worst thing that could ever happen”.
“When will it stop?” she says. “We need to drop the labels. There are so many labels, people don’t know what’s what any more.”
While she thinks her appearance in Baptiste will help move the needle of public opinion on the issue of transgender, she hopes her next big role will be motherhood: she would love to start a family “if the right person comes along”. She knows she can’t have children of her own, but, having been adopted herself, doesn’t mind.
Until then, Garcia is keen to play a parent on screen. “When you cast a transgender woman who happens to be a mother, people will start looking at it for what it is: normal.” ‘Baptiste’ is on BBC One, Sundays, at 9pm