Royal ballet school’s transgender scholar
A FORMER racing driver has become one of the first transgender ballet students to pass a Royal Academy of Dance exam.
Sophie Rebecca, 35, raced for nearly a decade before leaving motorsport to chase her childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer.
She originally began learning ballet as James at 17 but was dropped from class after the teacher found out about her gender struggles.
The RAD abandoned rules that only people born as women should be allowed to take its female dance courses in 2013.
Sophie – who asked to be known by only her first name – trained for her ‘intermediate foundation’ qualification and passed with a merit.
She was filmed by the BBC in tears after discovering she has passed the dance equivalent of an AS exam, and said: ‘I’m not transgender because I dance and I don’t dance because I’m transgender. I dance because I’m a dancer.’
Sophie started dancing around two and a half years ago. She said that she first began to feel that her male identity was wrong at primary school, where she liked to play girls’ games and was ‘beaten up mercilessly despite being one of the biggest kids at school.’
She realised in her mid-20s that she would never be comfortable as a man and sought help from the NHS, but said she ‘didn’t have a good experience’ with the health service.
‘I was trying my level best to be a man, to be manly, but a lot of it was just a front. It was trying to run from who I was,’ she said.
Sophie said she risked losing her ‘friends, fam- ily and job’ by her decision. In an interview with The Stage last year she said she had always wanted to be a ballerina but faced a huge battle because of the strong ‘gender bias’ in ballet.
Sophie, who is 6ft 3in tall, is now more than a year into her transition, and is grateful to her teacher for accepting her as a female pupil.
‘Looking in the mirror when I dance, I see the girl that’s on the inside reflected and it brings me so much comfort,’ she told The Stage.
However, her teacher, Lynne ReucroftCroome, said it was not easy to envisage the day when transgender dancers would perform professionally. ‘Ballet dancers are a bit like racehorses. They have a specific size, shape, height of legs, flexibility. At the end of the day, [for transgender dancers] it’s about people being themselves,’ she said.