Yaz Tremlett on life as a pre-transition, trans woman

Yaz Tremlett discusses the negative impact of a boy-ish childhood as a trans woman. She talks fashion, transitioning, representation, and Pose.

It’s one of the hottest days in London since the start of a tremulous 2020. As rays of sunlight blaze through the glass of my arched windows, a sweltering Tuesday afternoon marks what feels like the official start of summer. From lockdown, in my hackney home, I sit at my Victorian era round table, and wait as the familiar ringing of FaceTime comes through my phone. Yaz Tremlett answers my call. With her hair parted down the middle and dyed half pink, she casually greets me from her respective quarantine spot. In an abstract layout, the walls surrounding her are covered in photographs of friends and tattoo designs - even through a screen, she emanates a creative energy. Facing a poor connection Yaz relocates within her Peckham bedroom, and after sitting on the edge of her bed clad in pastel pink, finally, I may get to know her a little better.

Yaz is a 22-year-old games design student at the London College of Communications. She is the graphic designer for the unisex streetwear brand, Wall Street Mafia. She is the daughter of a priest. She is an amateur tattoo artist. She is a woman. And, she is transgender.

However, Yaz has not yet had the opportunity to begin hormones for her transition. Planning to see a doctor in about a month’s time, she tells me, “there’s loads of hoops you have to jump through to actually get hormones”. One such ‘hoop’, is a legal name change. Though she is choosing to go by Yasmine Margot Tremlett at this time, she has not definitively decided what her name is to be and admits that she needs to very soon due to her upcoming appointment. The unjustified nature of this law poses many setbacks for the trans community - but it remains the reality of transitioning in the UK.

Despite having only come out to close friends – of which I am the friend of a close friend - Yaz was willing to speak with me about her experience as a woman, not born of the same sex as gender identity. When I ask her what it’s like living as a transgender creative in London, she tells me that as far as the creative world goes, with that encompassing her professional and student life, “It’s like I’m still a guy basically”. She explains to me that coming out to people she’s not close with is, “just a conversation I don’t really want to have”. She adds, “You never know how someone is going to react”. And for Yaz, like many others, the conversation is invariably daunting.

Describing herself as awkward, the tattooist squats rather than sits as I ask her why she dresses in a primarily masculine style. “Because I’m still pre-transition, I feel like if I was to wear a dress I’d just look like a man in a dress, and that’d make me feel worse about myself,” she tells me over the phone. Yaz explains that she has spent much of her life steering clear of any interest in fashion due to the way it made her feel wearing the boy-ish clothing that was customary while growing up. She says, “Before you realise you’re trans, the clothes never feel great.” However, she confesses that since coming out, fashion has helped her to embrace her femininity.

She explains that altering the way she wears, even just small things, can make her feel more feminine. “Simple things like tucking my shirt in and wearing my trackies more high-waisted, is such as small thing, but it does make quite a lot of a difference to how I look, and it’s a subtle thing where I can be more feminine - and no one else would really notice - but it helps me.” Along with wearing her trackies high-waisted, Yaz tells me that she does her nails religiously. “I always have to have them perfect,” she laughs. When she’s not obsessing over her usual white-flame nail art, the engineering and architecture dropout is also learning to do her makeup; you won’t catch her anywhere without her signature white eyeliner. She tells me that she’s also trying to learn contouring but admits, “My Lord that shit is hard!” Laughing, I offer to give her my unused Kat Von D face contour palette once lockdown is over, which she gratefully accepts in hopes of perfecting the art. Reminding me of my own question, Yaz adds that shaving “religiously”, also boosts her confidence. “Literally everything below my eyebrows, I shave,” she says.

In light of discovering the little things that the pre-transition woman does to feel more comfortable in her body, I wonder how she plans to dress after she has in fact transitioned. She tells me that she can’t really see herself changing the way she dresses too much. Right now, you could describe Yaz’s style as boy-ish with aesthetic nods to streetwear. She loves her trackies, her Eytys, and her pink; and generally speaking, her style is quite androgynous. She even describes it as like “a closeted lesbian”, which she of course acknowledges as stereotyping, but nonetheless I cannot deny that she dresses in a somewhat ‘hypebeast- butch-queen’ way, if you catch my drift. However, she does add, “I’d like to be able to wear crop tops. But I’ve never really had the desire to wear a skirt or anything like that. So, I’ll probably just stick with my trackies.”

Seeking inspiration from her Instagram feed, but from no one person in particular, she reckons her favourite commercial brand is probably Nike; but at the same time admits that the majority of her wardrobe is made up of androgynous styles by Wall Street Mafia – its clothes being her favourite. With an appreciation for androgynous fashion, she adds, “ It just makes it easier for trans people, early on in their transition.”

The first time Yaz had ever really pondered the thought that she was truly a woman was at the age of 16; only last year did she accept this as her reality, after a long period of denial. She tells me that the only transgender person she had ever heard of up until her own self-acceptance, was probably Caitlyn Jenner - who she says is likely all that most people even know about the trans community. With this in mind, by no means has the young designer ever felt represented in the media. “I didn’t even know ‘trans’ was a thing; I just knew I wanted to be a woman. It was only a year ago that I first looked into it and was like ‘oh my god this is something I can actually do!; like there’s actually a way to do this!’” she recalls, before adding, “There’s like a whole world of people out there, but just none in the mainstream media where I could see them.”

That is, until she watched Pose.

Ryan Murphy’s ground-breaking TV series is the first ever production to feature a cast where all the trans and queer characters are actually trans and queer actors. Yaz notes how important the show has been in bringing many trans actors into the limelight – and in her own journey to accepting her femininity. She believes that the public, and in particular the fashion media, has responded especially well to its release. Yaz says, “It’s wild”, that Pose is the first ever production to do this.

We speak then of the transgender actors that she follows, many of which have been featured on the covers of various fashion magazines. I ask her if she believes that the employment of a trans model for a large media corporation is positive or if it’s a method in tokenism – a massive topic of discussion for the industry. “I guess it’s both,” she says, adding that representation is good “for normalizing being transgender,” but that it shouldn’t be made into any kind of momentous thing. “Trans people just want to be treated like normal people. And I think that special treatment is like positive transphobia; like we’re being treated differently because we’re trans, but not necessarily mistreated.”

When I ask Yaz what she think the future looks like for trans women, true to her comedic character the first thing she says is, “Um, shit. Let me go get my crystal ball.” But then, with careful consideration of my question, she adds, “Hopefully just the same thing as it holds for women. I feel like trans people should just be able to live normal lives, the same way a cis person, a cis woman, would… But yeah, here’s to hoping.”

Yaz, I’ll cheers to that.