'I AM 100% WOMAN’

From a shy boy to a dazzling dame, Elise Bishop tells her story as SA’s oldest known transgender woman  

- PIETER VAN ZYL 

KOEKSISTERS and cups of tea have been neatly laid out in the kitchen and her cosy nest of a cottage is filled with comfy couches and original South African artworks.

She describes her granny flat as fun and stylish with plenty of depth – “just like me”.

Elise Bishop certainly is stylish, elegantly dressed in a gold and black pants suit, her hair freshly done at a salon close to her home in Strand near Cape Town.

“That hairstylist is the first person I had to explain myself to after I moved here,” she says. “‘I was born a boy’, I told her.”

Elise (70) is the oldest known trans woman on record in South Africa, having undergone gender-reassignment surgery in the 1970s when she was 23 years old.

Her story made headlines in the early ’80s and she says she spent seven weeks on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. “More than any prime minister!” she says with a chuckle.

Elise has now written a book, Twee Lewens, which is currently being translated into English under the title Two Lives, about her journey.

She chronicles her experiences from being a little boy growing up in the Karoo to making history as the country’s first transgender woman.

“I’m transgender but this modern terminology still sounds so strange to me,” she tells YOU, sipping on a blend of rooibos and English breakfast tea.

“I’m a sex change, finish and klaar. That’s what I was and still am.”

ELISE was born Pierre van der Merwe in Graaff-Reinet on 12 June 1952 and spent most of her childhood with her grandmother, Georgie Barnard, and grandfather, Kwas Barnard.