Our gender swap wedding
When Jamie and Louis, both transsexual, decided to marry, they also chose to allow TV cameras to record the often rocky run-up to the big day. They tell Kate Hilpern why they did it
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Your support makes all the difference.To the casual onlooker, the wedding of Jamie Eagle and Louis Davies was much like any other. There was a beautiful bride, heartfelt vows, speeches, cake and dancing. But this was no ordinary ceremony. The 21-year-old bride, Jamie, was born a boy and the 26-year-old groom, Louis, was born a girl. And given the pits of despair they have both endured (and still do) along their transgender journey, it was a day they often wondered would ever happen.
As if the lead-up to the wedding this summer wasnât hard enough â with Louis having agonising breast removal surgery; Jamie facing hate crime for being transgender; and some wedding venues turning them away â the couple decided to have it all filmed. This week, the footage, including the culmination of the wedding day itself, will be aired in a documentary.
With the title Our Gender Swap Wedding, it would be easy to assume that the couple are yet another example of TV companies exploiting vulnerable people to make shock-tactics telly. But, they insist, nothing could be further from the truth and itâs true that the result â which is the first in Sky Livingâs Forbidden Love series â is an educational, insightful and often moving window into the lives of two people who, for as long as they can remember, have felt they were living with the wrong body parts.
âWe thought long and hard before agreeing to it, because life is difficult enough for us, without TV cameras encroaching into our daily lives and struggles,â admits Louis. âBut in the end, that was our motive for going ahead. We want people to have a sense of what our lives are really like, so that when they talk about transgender issues, they are more informed.â
There are no holds barred in the show, with the couple discussing everything from their difficult childhoods (in her darkest moment as a teenager, Jamie tried to cut off her genitals, while Louisâ disgust at puberty made him resort to drugs and eventually an attempted suicide) to the dramatic physical changes that the hormone treatment has brought about (Jamieâs breast growth and softer skin, for instance, and Louisâ sprouting hair and increased libido). But with Louis doing the voice-over and a level of editorial control that included them deciding whether to keep in the scene of Louis baring his breasts to his consultant before their removal (they did), thereâs a very strong sense of the couple telling their own story.
âI had to double-bind my breasts every day to hide them because they were big. It was horribly painful and yet equally horrible for me to have them not bound when I was at home with Jamie. I kept the scene in because I wanted people to grasp what that was like,â explains Louis.
Not that the surgery turned out to be the answer to everything, he admits. âOn the one hand, it was momentous. Iâve had to jump through huge hoops to get a diagnosis, surgery and then funding for surgery. And itâs wonderful for my chest to look like how it should have been all along. But things didnât go entirely as planned, which meant it was agony for a long time afterwards and we almost split up a couple of times due to the stress. In fact, we held off filming altogether for a couple of months while we focused on saving our relationship. Then, when were finally back on track, we got the bad news that we were missing a document to add to our birth certificates in order for me to marry as a man and Jamie as a woman.â The alternative (Jamie marrying as a man and Louis as a woman) was unthinkable for them and they almost called the wedding off altogether. âBut then we decided a mere piece of paper shouldnât stop us, so we went ahead with a humanist commitment ceremony and weâll hand over the official documents to finalise it at a later date,â he says.
Itâs not as if Louis and Jamie are new to media exposure. In fact, I first met the couple in the green room of ITVâs This Morning a couple of years back and it was only after a good hour of chatting to them that they told me their story â a story that I wrote for The Independent, while the couple also decided to do interviews with several tabloids.
Sadly, they paid a high price, with Jamie suffering so much verbal abuse from strangers in her community in Bridgend, Wales, that she needed anti-depressants. âBut we still donât regret it because so many others have told us how weâve inspired them and I still get contacted for advice, including from parents of young children,â says Jamie, whose work in educating others on LGBT issues was how she first met Louis. âFor me, the documentary felt like the next logical step,â says Jamie.
One of the most profound aspects of the programme is the insight into the coupleâs familiesâ perspectives. While some of their siblings â including Louisâ sister, who says she always felt there was a masculine energy about him â are casual about the whole thing, their parents have clearly struggled. Indeed, while Jamieâs mother says she noticed Jamie was âtotally differentâ from as young as six years old, her enduring use of the pronoun âheâ hints at an ongoing internal battle. When she finally describes her daughter as âsheâ on her wedding day, you want to cheer.
Jamie was even more moved when, also on her wedding day, her dad said she looked beautiful. âIt wasnât filmed, but it was the first time heâd said it and it felt like heâd accepted me as a woman. It really moved me,â says Jamie.
Louisâ mother, who couldnât be more supportive, is the most frank about the parental angst that she has suffered. âItâs difficult looking at photos because I gave birth to a daughter and gained a son,â she admits. âI grieved for a few years because I wanted Samantha back, but I have to realise what makes him happy.â
Neither Jamie nor Louis are at the end their respective journeys. Jamieâs gender reassignment surgery isnât until next summer, after which it will be Louisâ turn. Once thatâs over, theyâd like to move somewhere new and start again â âsomewhere we can be accepted like any other coupleâ.
But what the documentary reveals, and what strikes me when talking to them again, is that the wedding has given them something far more than any ordinary couple would get. You feel it the moment that Jamie steps into her wedding dress in the bridal shop. You feel it throughout their carefully and tenderly worded vows. And perhaps most of all, you feel it when their friends talk about how the wedding carried a very strong sense of all that Jamie and Louis have gone through to get there â individually, as a couple, in their families and in the outside world.
âForbidden Love: Our Gender Swap Weddingâ screens tomorrow at 10pm on Sky Living
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