Growing up with a secret

Tshiamo Modisane is an award-winning producer, actress, and fashion and celebrity stylist. She began her career in entertainment as a wardrobe stylist intern, has worked for True Love, Move! and Drum magazines, written a lifestyle and entertainment column for The Citizen, and starred in television series African Dreams and House of Zwide.

Accolades include being named the 2022 Sowetan SMag Woman of the Year in Fashion and Beauty, Hot Chick of the Year at the 2019 Feather Awards, and being the first gender-non-conforming brand ambassador for global brand Lux.

Since her transition in 2018, Modisane has graced several magazine covers, produced her own podcast and, in 2021, after surviving being sexually assaulted, established the Linzy-Linsay Foundation to create a safe space for people like her to develop skills and make a greater contribution to society.

Her story is published in I Am Tshiamo - My Transition to Self-acceptance and Womanhood. Below is an extract from the book.

I spent my early years, from birth till the age of five, living with the paternal side of my family.

This was home; this was what I had come to know as a safe space. Although I knew I had a secret I couldn’t share with them, I found solace in knowing that they loved the version of me they imagined in their minds.

This version would, of course, grow up to be the heir to the family name and would one day marry and have kids, who would continue the family dynasty. To this day, I can’t put into words just how much of a failure I still feel when I have to engage with anyone in my family because of choosing to be true to myself and who I truly am. I can only imagine the conversations that take place behind my back whenever my name is mentioned.

During our time in Kwa-Thema, I spent most of my nights sleeping in the outside room with my parents. Each night, my mother would prepare my bed on the floor, and I would blissfully fall asleep almost immediately.

This, however, changed when I moved inside the house, where my uncle Peter slept. He was the coolest guy I knew back then: he loved music, even though he couldn’t dance to save his life, and he had a certain charm about him, which I later grew to recognise as confidence. He was a ladies’ man, witty and charming, with the height and, later on, having graduated, the funds to match.

I would often lie awake at night, praying that through some miracle I would be woken up by people who had come to take me back to my rightful family, and that those I had come to know as my parents would tell me the truth: that I was, in fact, adopted and had been born a girl, and that they had had a doctor operate on me.

I would finally fall asleep to the soothing thought of being taken back to my real family, who would not only believe me when I told them who and what I was but would love me enough to want to fix this painful error and be wealthy enough to have it done.

But each morning, I would start from a deep level of disappointment and resentment. On nights when it was harder to believe that I was adopted, I prayed that my mother would walk into my room and tell me that we were leaving my father and that she would marry a king who would let me be who I knew I was.

It might seem dark for a child to conjure up such thoughts, yet I had no choice but to find light in the lie that I was living.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was understand the responsibilities placed on me based on the names I had been given. I knew with each sunrise just how much of a disappointment I was to my paternal side, particularly my father, and it gutted me that no matter how much I might try, I couldn’t be the son he wanted.

When I turned six, my parents and I moved to live with my mother’s side of the family in Daveyton. I can admit that a part of me hoped that things would be different there, and they were at first … But, as the saying goes, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.

I cannot recall having had a relationship with the maternal side of my family until then; I knew of them, of course, and would occasionally see them, but we’d never really had an intimate bond.

The big move happened on a Saturday morning. I remember a truck being loaded with all my parents’ possessions, most of these being the gifts they had received from their wedding celebration the previous year.

(This was not a fond memory. I had been a guest at my own parents’ wedding: I’d had to sit in a side pew, in the same church where I’d been christened, and watch my cousins, as ring-bearers, lead my parents into church on their wedding day. It was as if I didn’t exist, as if I wasn’t smart enough to be a ring-bearer, and I felt gutted for days afterwards. Knowing what I knew about myself, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the reason I wasn’t allowed to be a part of the festivities. As with most things in my life, I had become familiar with disappointment and either being second best or not being selected at all, and I had my family to thank for it.)

Because of my assigned first name, it always felt as if there was a spotlight on me, that I was the main act in everything concerning my family, and for some time I lived up to it. I made sure to own my power – heck, I was a KING! I was KGOSI, and people had no choice but to respect that. However, my attitude was often not well received.

I remember a conversation with my father – well, more an exchange of words, as it always was – where he made it clear how regretful he was that they had named me Kgosi. I cannot truly recall what had sparked the exchange, but I can remember the words that were uttered. Bearing in mind that such exchanges were, and still are, normal between us, it is almost impossible to think back to a conversation where he and I were either seated at the same table or in the same room and I didn’t end up having to bite my tongue out of ‘respect’ and mince the words I actually felt like saying.

Like any first-born child blessed with being the centre of their parents’ attention, finding out that you might have to share the spotlight is never an easy adjustment. One day you wake up to find a beaming bundle of joy, wrapped in a sky-blue blanket; someone with big, glassy blue eyes, coiled hair like a perm and skin so soft that making a fist is the only hardness he can manage – all of which makes it impossible for you to hate him, although you are not immune to jealousy.

To top it all off, this fool had the nerve to be born fifteen minutes before your own birthday!

From that day forth, you stood by and watched as the shadow in which you had been living grew darker and wider as all the lights beamed down on your new little brother. You endured even harsher beatings under the guise that you were modelling the example for his behaviour, and it became clear that although you two were siblings, you shared two different sets of parents: yours were stern, impatient tyrants, whereas his were affirming, gentle and playful, and never spoke a harsh word to him.

Added to this was the fact that you couldn’t show up for yourself as the person you truly were, but rather had to present a false image on a daily basis.

As time went by, all the resentment you harboured towards your parents and your own self was reflected in the relationship you had with your brother, but as you witnessed him grow from a boy into a young man in the face of adversity, you woke up one day to a horrifying truth: that he would be the only and best gift your mother could ever have given you.

• I Am Tshiamo - My Transition to Self-acceptance and Womanhood is published by Penguin Random House at a recommended retail price of R270.