We present the sixth in a series of interviews conducted by Tom Sykes, author of the new travelogue The Years of Travelling Anxiously. In today’s instalment, University of Portsmouth academic and trades unionist Pip Sutton explains how learning about empathy and trauma as a young adult has made her a resilient traveller and shares some of the challenges she has faced as a transfemale tourist.
Tom Sykes (TS): Before we started recording you said that you’re generally not an anxious traveller.
Pip Sutton (PS): That’s correct.
TS: Why do you think that’s the case? Is there anything in your background that explains why you’re so resilient? A lot of people find travel or aspects of travel anxiety-inducing, but you don’t.
PS: I’m more the inverse. I find it the prospect of going to a new place exciting. A journey is going to be either a good or bad experience, but even if it’s a bad experience it’ll be educational.
TS: Have you done any travels that objectively could have given you reason to have become anxious?
PS: I travelled to Egypt in 2004 not long after there’d been some political strife. The internal security situation was such that, on my trip from the airport, I saw that hotels were guarded by soldiers with AK-47s at 3-400 yard intervals. Shops that were selling anything valuable employed private security guards, who were usually sitting in the sun asleep, also with AK-47s but lying across their laps. I didn’t feel any anxiety, as I’m familiar with firearms. Guns don’t scare me. I didn’t give the situation any more thought than it’s broadly safe to go out and the Egyptians are taking care with their security.
TS: Were you travelling with someone else?
PS: My then wife.
TS: Was she perturbed by the AK-47s?
PS: No, not really. Again, her attitude was, it’s what happens in some cultures.
TS: Have you witnessed other people get anxious or stressed out in travel situations and thought about the reasons for it?
PS: The only person I can think of is my mother. Due to age and relative fragility she’s cautious about certain trips. I recently went on holiday with my mother and father, and I looked after them. It was quite hard work because they are in their nineties. That is the only time I’ve seen anybody get slightly anxious about what they may or may not be able to do on arrival at a destination.
I worked as a police officer for nine years and that meant I was exposed on a regular basis to threatening and challenging situations. I developed and internalised a mechanism for dealing with this stuff through good planning and preparedness. So I guess that’s how I’ve approached travel ever since.
TS: When you started out in the police and before you’d built that resilience were there incidents that caused you anxiety and fear?
PS: Maybe not anxiety in the sense that it’s recognised today as a clinical pathology. A lot of what happened to me in the police involved the magnification of normal, healthy anxiety. When I was serving from the 1980s to the 2000s, what helped me through troublesome situations were reliable people: internal and immediate peer networks of support. In those days there was no mechanism for debriefing – you wouldn’t go to HR and say, “Oh, look, I’ve had a traumatic experience.” Thankfully, that’s more common now in the workplace. In my early days in the police I was young and exposed to some pretty gruesome and harrowing situations.
TS: Are you comfortable talking about any of those experiences? Did any of them involve dealing with people who themselves were anxious or maybe in some other kind of mental distress?
PS: Absolutely. You very quickly learn how to keep people calm and focused, and how to soothe, reassure and comfort them. I joined the police for altruistic reasons, to help other people. And because you’re able to help other people, you develop that mechanism in yourself.
When I was 19, early in my career, I attended my first ever road traffic collision. Somebody’s motorcycle had fallen on top of their leg, and the heat from the exhaust had burnt through their thigh. My colleagues and I switched the bike off but left it lying on the person because, if we’d removed the bike, we’d risk losing a large chunk of their leg. The person fainted in my arms as I was reassuring him he’d be okay. The ambulance crew came and doused the bike with water so that they were able to take the guy safely to hospital. The bike was left with flesh hanging off the exhaust. That was quite an extreme experience that I was able to deal with through the support of my peers.
I remember an incident I attended that involved firearms. A young farmer, 19 years old, had beaten his dad up and threatened his family with a shotgun. We were called to the farmhouse where this was going on in a remote area of the countryside. My colleague and I managed to disarm him by talking to him and showing compassion. We didn’t even have to handcuff him.
TS: What state of mind normally motivates someone to have a showdown with the police like that?
PS: That’s a good question. What motivated him in that moment in a way that led to that extreme behaviour was that his girlfriend had dumped him. He didn’t know how to process that. He got drunk. He was a farmer and there were guns in the house. That was very common in rural parts then, the laws on firearms being what they were at that time. I don’t believe he was thinking about anything except his own emotional distress, which is why my colleague and I talking to him seemed to make an impression. He cried pretty much all the way on the drive to the police station.
TS: Presumably there was some kind of penalty for what he did?
PS: I don’t know what it was but he would have been dealt with a hell of a lot more sympathetically than if he’d started firing a shotgun at police officers. Humanity has to triumph and on this occasion we were very fortunate that it did. Empathy can go a long way too. If you can understand why someone has done something, you can address the root cause of what they’ve done. That’s the restorative aspect of criminal justice. But in terms of where this experience in the police leaves me in terms of travel, does it add to my resilience? It has certainly added to my character, a character that isn’t challenged by foreign travel.
TS: Do you ever get even mildly annoyed by bureaucracy that you might encounter on the road?
PS: The thing for me of most concern – and I’m sure other people reading this will identify with it – is when I rent a car. I start wondering about things like, is the car rental desk going to be open when I get there? Have they definitely received my reservation? What version of my driving licence do they want? The government one or this international driving passport? That’s about it – it’s just a bureaucratic irritation.
TS: Have you had any other hairy trips that might have caused others anxiety if not you?
PS: My then partner and I were on a plane about to land at Schipol airport in the Netherlands. It was windy and we started banking left and right uncontrollably. The pilot slammed one side of the plane down onto the tarmac and I think the wing tip may have touched the ground. There was a big round of applause when everyone realised we were safe. I can’t speak for the state of the undercarriage after that.
Had I been an anxious traveller I might have dwelled on the fact that we were travelling at 500 plus miles per hour towards Schipol and we were full of aviation jet fuel. If we’d hit the ground, we’d have gone up. There’s nothing I or anyone but the pilot could have done about it, so that’s a reason not to worry, for me. There might come a point in my life when suppressed anxiety catches up with me in a travel context, but so far I’ve been able to just not care about problems that arise.
TS: Can I ask you about travelling since you’ve transitioned and whether you’ve had to put up with any judgment or bigotry?
PS: Interestingly, the most overt scrutiny I’ve come under is when I travelled from abroad back into Britain. My UK passport, which aligns with my gender, says female – well, specifically, “sex F”. A succession of customs officers would look at my passport, then look at me, then look over my body. They’d just keep doing this, looking at me and looking at my passport. Maybe they were thinking, “This passport’s for a biological female, but that person in front of me is trans.”
TS: Do you think that was because of ignorance or their own anxieties?
PS: They could have been projecting their problems onto me. At the end of the day, I could prove who I am with my documentation. I’ve got a clean record. So in the end they were just like, you crack on.
Early on in transition you’re more aware of your own gender identity and the way that you present. The more you get used to that and relax into it, the less people tend to stare, or the less you notice. So I’m less sensitive to it now. I’ve noticed people clocking me and looking at me for longer than they might look at someone who isn’t trans. But most people are so busy getting on with their own lives that it’s not an issue. The awareness of trans issues is now pretty good in most Western European nations where I tend to travel now anyway. If someone looks at me in a curious way, I tend to make eye contact with them and smile. If someone has a problem, that’s a ‘them’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem.
TS: Would you go to non-Western countries now?
PS: Yes, I would but in certain other cultures and societies there are religious beliefs that make people intolerant towards people like me. They’re trying to work through these issues in some of those places, though.
TS: In the UK do you find there are different reactions from people depending on whether you are in urban or rural places?
PS: You can draw looks wherever you go but in bigger cities you tend to be cloaked in anonymity. You’re one of hundreds of thousands or millions in that location. You stand out in smaller, rural or less populated locations. It’s about the numbers.
I don’t politicise my gender identity and I find that helps minimise anxiety on my part. I’m not trying to grind a political agenda, I just try to enjoy my life, and if people don’t agree with who or what I am, then that’s up to them. I may not like the colour of their eyes, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to behave in a certain way towards them.
