I loved the Army, but they didn’t want me as a woman...
In combat in Iraq and Afghanistan as an elite Para, Ian Hamilton was a model officer. Yet the hardest fight he’d face was for his true identity
CURLED up on the sofa of her comfortable living room, Abigail Austen is poring over wedding magazines in search of the perfect outfit for her big day. In just eight months she’ll walk down the aisle and get married for the second time.
Not that this will be any ordinary twice-round wedding; for one she’ll be a bride rather than a groom, though she laughs, saying she’ll still be ‘wearing the trousers’. She says: ‘I’m looking for something a bit Studio 54 from the 1970s, a white trouser suit... Debs is more flouncy, she’ll be doing the princessy thing.’
Abigail’s journey to wedded bliss has been anything but ordinary. Only eight years ago she was Captain Ian Hamilton, a strapping, muscle-bound Scottish paratrooper fighting on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today she is Abi, the first officer in the British Army to undergo gender transition surgery.
Her decision to become a woman saw her publicly ridiculed, thrown out of the Army and disowned by her family, who declared her ‘dead’ to them. She became a magnet for abuse and was verbally assaulted whenever she left her home.
But now, she says, her life is back on track – ironically thanks to the US Army – and since meeting her partner Deborah Williamson, she’s never been happier.
The pair met online through a gay dating agency when Abi was once again back in Afghanistan, this time working for Nato in the US Army base in Kandahar. Their first conversation was, she says, rudely interrupted by the sound of the alarm. ‘There were four Taliban through the wire and all hell was breaking loose and we’d just said hello over Skype,’ recalls Abi.
‘People were taking cover and grabbing firearms and I had to go and organise it. When I got back I was in a helmet saying “Now, where were we?” so there was that and of course I told her I was transgender. I think it made her intrigued.’
They finally met when she returned from 1,000 days in Afghanistan last year and it was love at first sight.
‘We found a lovely house in Liverpool, it’s 150 years old and there’s lots wrong with it. We’re a bit like the Addams family and I’m Morticia,’ she laughs. ‘We’re two middle-aged lesbians floating about in a big draughty house complete with bats. It’s crazy, really.’
Crazy is perhaps an apt word for Abi’s path through life so far, paved as it has been with cracks and fissures so deep she is still coming to terms with most of them.
Born 50 years ago as Ian Hamilton, the eldest of three sons brought up by very traditional parents in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, from a young age she found being a boy difficult.
Drawn to dressing up, Ian was given a stern rebuke by his gran at the age of eight for wearing girls’ clothes; playing with a tea set saw him sent to a boy’s boarding school; and there was, he has said in the past, a period when a male teacher abused him.
Desperate to please, he signed up to the Army at the age of 17, training at Sandhurst before being posted to Berlin. Once back in the UK he quit the military life for television, working for STV and becoming a Bafta award-nominated documentary maker. As Ian, he married in 1995 and appeared to the world like he was an ordinary heterosexual man.
But at home he dressed in his wife’s clothes, before he began buying his own for a dressing-up box he kept well hidden.
A combination of frustration, guilt, fear and aiming to be ‘as macho as possible to find a cure for what I was feeling’ saw him re-enlist, this time training to become a Para – the toughest of the tough. During his time as Para, Ian became a qualified military physical instructor, took the Royal Marine Commando training course and passed the SAS Combat Survival and Resistance to Interrogation course. A model officer over six years, he served in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Looking back, Abi says she took every dangerous mission going – a suicidal streak coming to the fore as she battled with her true nature. ‘Then I got too close to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and was medivaced back to the UK,’ she says.
‘That’s when I realised I just couldn’t do this any more. That’s when the dam broke. I had a series of psychiatric evaluations with the Army as part of getting better and I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I was offered therapy and I took a beauty course. You’d think that might have alerted them!’
Finally, he walked out on his marriage of ten years. After counselling and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – that he was a woman born in the body of a man – he finally decided that he could no longer deny his true self.
He changed his name by deed poll to Jan and began taking oestrogen. The Army, though, was having none of it. They wanted Ian back on duty – he’d landed a £45,000-a-year job running its media operations in Gibraltar – and demanded he attend a medical as a male.
Jan refused and the story hit the headlines in 2008, when she launched a claim of sexual discrimination and unfair dismissal against the Ministry of Defence.
It was a major turning point in her life – though she dropped the case when the MoD settled out of court, with a reputed £250,000 payout. ‘I loved the Army, I was good at what I did. I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it as a woman.
‘It would have been humiliating and demeaning for me to turn up for my medical examination dressed in a man’s uniform. I sent them my psychiatric evaluations and copies of the law.
‘The feelings of emptiness the Army’s rejection provoked are indescribable. I had believed in the Army and had served my country when asked. I didn’t want to leave.’
Then her physically painful journey from 16-stone Para with 14-inch biceps to a size 12 woman was documented in a Channel 4 programme which followed her to Thailand for her radical surgery.
‘Thailand was so hard. I was on my own, going through all those changes – at one point I tried to kill myself taking an overdose. I was
‘I was aiming to be as macho as possible to cure what I felt’ ‘It was so hard. At one point I tried to kill myself’
lucky to survive that,’ admits Abi. ‘So after all that, I wanted to try to be as normal as possible. I changed my name, joined the police, training at Tulliallan, and became a community officer in Partick. It was a lot harder than I thought.
‘It wasn’t as accepting an environment as I thought it might be. Glasgow cops were very blunt. And I was getting more aggravated assaults against me than the rest of the division put together. People would just come up and lamp me, call me a “tranny b******” which is unacceptable – it got a bit much.’
So when in 2011 Nato was looking for people to work in Afghanistan she applied, and ended up becoming head of strategic communications with the US Army in Kandahar.
‘A British soldier would be there for four to six months at the most. I stayed for 1,000 days,’ she says.
‘It was a combat role. I was going out on foot patrols with the Afghan army and then there were times I’d be sitting round tables with senior members of the US government taking geopolitical decisions.’
She adds: ‘It was a wonderful experience going back to Afghanistan. To be at the tip of the spear of the biggest ground force campaign the West has maintained, to be at the eye of the hurricane, it was fantastic. I felt like I was getting my life back.
‘The British Army said it didn’t want me so this was a chance to go back to what I was good at. It was unfinished business, a chance to prove myself which is probably why I stayed longer than anyone else.’
Abi is full of praise for the US Army for giving her a second chance: ‘They knew all about me – I never hid anything. One general said, “I don’t care if you’re man, woman, martian or dachshund if you can do the job”.’
Now she has written a book about her time there. Lord Robert’s Valet is Abi’s take on the war strategy, why it failed and her life as a transgender woman in an incredibly macho environment.
‘The book is about what we didn’t do in Afghanistan. I wanted to talk about the people and the extraordinary pressures they were under.
‘I think it will be an eye-opener for a lot of people. The camp where I lived had 40,000 people – 1,500 were women. There were a lot of issues around sexual assault and there was an overbearing culture of macho aggression.
‘Soldiers develop tour-goggles and suddenly you’re Marilyn Monroe. It was the oddest thing. Some became more overtly chivalrous – holding open doors for you, but I had to go with it and get used to it.’
She adds: ‘I also discovered that you can be standing in a room full of men and make the most erudite comment and be completely ignored. That was a revelation for me, and whenever you become forceful you’re suddenly the ice-cold lesbian. I couldn’t order anyone around, it was all “could I possibly?” and “can I suggest?”.’
Abi admits that she found the role difficult physically – ‘I can’t run, I’m literally not made for it and I had to take cushions in the tank as my back couldn’t take it’ – but using her combat and communications experiences finally made her feel like herself again. Happy in work, it was short step to thinking about relationships. ‘“Who do you want to be with?” is a question I really wrestled with when I was out there.
‘Having been a man and now a woman, I’ve had sex with men and women. I’ve tried every combination there is. For me what works best is to be with a woman. That’s what makes me happy.’
She adds: ‘Debs is in her fifties as well and you can’t reach that age without a couple of suitcases of baggage. Debs works in the NHS and has three kids from her marriage who are 23, 16 and 13.
‘She was in a heterosexual relationship for 30 years before coming out. She left home and her husband and then a few months later had to tell her kids that she was living with a transgender former paratrooper,’ Abi laughs.
‘So now I’m a stepmum and a stepgran to a three-year-old. It’s really nice. It’s taken some getting used to and made me relax about some things, like not being able to keep the house immaculate when the kids come round and trash it.’
Wedding plans are taking shape. There’ll be a hen night in Virginia, where she has some distant family who still talk to her, and her US Army friends will come. Her parents and brothers won’t be involved – they wrote to her saying she was dead to them after her operation and they have never been reconciled, which she admits to finding distressing.
‘Unbeknown to me Debs called my mother recently but she just hung up,’ she shrugs.
But the ceremony will be in Liverpool next July and though she doesn’t want to reveal details, she says the honeymoon will be in Thailand as her surgeon offered them his holiday home as a gift.
In the meantime she is working as a security communications consultant – she has already been to Ukraine on behalf of the European Union – and is working on another book, which will tell her life story.
Abi says she is most proud of how her legal challenge in 2008 allowed transgender people to serve in the British Army. She now feels recent publicity around Caitlyn Jenner and Kellie Maloney is helping to reshape people’s views of sexual identity.
She says: ‘When I did it people wrote me off, said my life was finished but I have made a success of things. I’ve gone back to what I did before and I’ve succeeded. I’m happier than ever.’
‘People wrote me off, said my life was over’