Does Anastacia Tomson aspire to be South Africa’s Caitlyn Jenner? Oliver Roberts asks some difficult questions and gets some interesting answersShe digs into her handbag for a pen. "Oh, that's an eye pencil - that's not going to work," she says, grinning privately. "Ah, here we go."She opens her little notebook on a blank page."Let me explain," she says. Then, in blue ink, she writes:F/M(female/male)XX/XY (chromosomes)E/T (estrogen/testosterone - hormones)U/P (uterus/prostate - internal reproductive organs)O/T (ovarian tissue/testicular tissue - gonads)V/P (vulva/penis and scrotum - external genitalia)"So you know that the XX and XY chromosomes are only one of the biological determinants of sex, right?" she says. "There are actually five and, spoiler alert: they do not always line up. Have you ever actually tested to see which chromosomes you have? Have you ever seen inside your own body and actually identified a prostate or uterus? Have you had tissue sampled from your gonads?"We're about an hour into the interview and this response - Anastacia Tomson's response - refers to an article I printed out and brought to the interview. The headline reads: "Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist: It is starkly, nakedly false that sex change is possible".The article was published last year, shortly after Bruce Jenner's transition to Caitlyn, and in it writer Paul McHugh suggests that gender dysphoria is a kind of delusion and should be treated with psychotherapy instead of surgery."Let me stop you there," Tomson says. The article is dangling from my fingers, swaying microscopically in the breeze of the restaurant's aircon. "Was it written by someone called Paul McHugh?""Yes.""Paul McHugh has been discredited universally by all his colleagues and the American Psychiatric Association has publicly decried him as a crack and a bigot. People like to harp on about his background at Johns Hopkins, like it gives him credibility, but the man is very well respected for bigotry and very little else. And a lot of his assertions have been debunked by scientific evidence."Tomson - as a trans woman who's a doctor who's Jewish who's written a book about her gender conflict and transition - knows her shit.Going into this interview I had a vision of pressing some or other red Anastacia button too often - asking, for interest and fact's sake, whether Tomson aspires to be South Africa's answer to Jenner. "All the suffering, all the trauma, all the vulnerability and exposure - what could possibly be worth that?" she says. "What payoff could possibly make all of that worthwhile if I wasn't in it for the right reasons?" A lot of transphobia stems from the idea that trans women are really men, or that they used to be men and that they're deceiving and trying to fool everyone This makes sense. I won't go into great detail because you should bloody well buy the book and read it (and this is not a PR punt from the publishers - it's a mostly well-written book that's worth the cover price to gain valuable insight into the complexities of transgenderism), but Tomson's struggles have been severe.Never mind enduring nearly 30 years of gender dysphoria (Tomson had been aware of her dysphoria since childhood), she has also had to contend with an emotionally abusive father, a near absent mother and a community - both personal and professional - that received her dysphoria with ignorance, dismay or indifference."I think one of the more interesting aspects for me [since the publication of the book and subsequent publicity] is the delineation between the personal and the political - where does my personal life stop and the Anastacia brand begin? There is still a lot of conflict around that," she says."I joke about being a professional trans person, but a lot of the time it feels like I am. There's that struggle to say, 'Well, I represent trans interests but I'm not representative of every trans person and I fight to defend human rights as they're applicable to trans people.' But where does that stop? And after you take that away, when I'm not 'at work' who am I and how do I not become typecast in that way?"I imagine that when you have gender dysphoria you become pretty adept at self-examination, although while plenty of us have pondered the notion of self, very few of us have felt drawn into questioning whether we're existing in the right body.What's so compelling about Tomson's history is the very real idea that her past is basically irrelevant to her and that she has only become her true self in the year since her transition. From this comefantastic questions and insomnial conundrums regarding the true nature of one's existence and whether it's possible to shed one "false" existence and replace it with another, "truer", one through physical or emotional means, or both.Tomsons's response to this is typically swift and thorough: "There are two sides to this. The one is the political thing about how a lot of trans representation feeds into some damaging tropes and one of the damaging tropes is male-to-female transgender. I don't identify like that. I say I'm a trans woman, I say I was never male."A lot of transphobia stems from the idea that trans women are really men, or that they used to be men and that they're deceiving and trying to fool everyone into being something they're not. I'm not comfortable with identifying in that space. I don't feel like I was ever a man. But when it comes to what was the 'old life' - and I try not to appropriate any experiences that aren't mine - I liken it to bondage, slavery. I was imprisoned by a pretence that I had to maintain in order to survive at that time. I didn't have a choice in it; it was on the rest of the world's terms instead of my own. It reflects no truths about me - it was what I had to do otherwise there would be consequences."Why are you fixed on who I had to be instead of who I am? What is your fascination with it? It was inauthentic, it was a lie and a pretence and an act and I kept it up because I had to do it. Seeing photos of that time is a painful reminder. Does anyone want to be reminded of when they were in slavery?"Tomson will not bring out photographs of herself taken more than a year ago. That person does not exist nor did they ever exist. What you'd be seeing is photos of ghosts. Tomson, too, will never reveal her "deadname" (her previous "male" name) and over the past year she has committed to the arduous effort of legally changing her name and her sex, and getting her medical certificate amended so that she can begin practising as Dr Anastacia Tomson.She wants to be a doctor who people in similar situations can go to without fear of facing the ignorance and sometimes blatant prejudice she experienced . There might even be another book. But right now she's off to the US to take her place in the Mandela-Washington fellowship, which will culminate in meeting President Barack Obama.Interview over, we part ways. I stand for a moment to watch her make her way through the lunchtime crowd. Just another woman on her way home. 'Always Anastacia: A Transgender Life in South Africa', by Anastacia Tomson, is published by Jonathan Ball (R240)..