The moment a pregnancy test reveals a thin blue line is a poignant one for any couple hoping to start a family – and it was no different for Sascha Bailey and his girlfriend Lucy Brown.
It was shortly before Christmas when they realised they were going to be parents. ‘We were thrilled,’ says Sascha, son of the renowned photographer David Bailey and his fourth wife and model Catherine. ‘It was something I’d always wanted, so it was special. We were both emotional.’
As well they might be, for the pair – and 30-year-old Sascha in particular – has overcome a great deal of tumult to get to this point.
Just over two years ago, this handsome, rakish-looking young man was so deeply traumatised that he was on the verge of taking action that would have decisively ended any chance of fatherhood.
Struggling in a toxic marriage, and wrestling with the legacy of past trauma, he had become fixated on changing gender as a solution to his despair.
Sascha Bailey with his girlfriend Lucy Brown, who is expecting a baby
‘It was a way of killing myself without dying, because I was so unhappy with my life,’ as he memorably told the Mail in a brave and unflinchingly honest interview last year.
Only through intensive therapy and the unwavering support of 34-year-old Lucy, whom he met in the midst of what he now calls ‘losing his mind’, did he see his obsession for what it was – the desperate cry for help of someone battling deep-rooted issues that had nothing to do with his biological sex.
Had that not happened, in time he would have started on the hormone therapy he had already been prescribed. And that would in turn have irreparably damaged his fertility.
‘Thank God I didn’t,’ he says now. ‘I actually always wanted to be a father but, at one point, it felt like there weren’t many options left for me.
‘So to have left the marriage and permanently taken away that future option, when I was so young as well…’ He trails off, his emotion unmistakable.
It is one reason he is giving this interview, despite the backlash that he endured when he spoke to the Mail last year in the midst of his recovery, warning against the rush to medicalise those – particularly children – who express uncertainty about their gender identity.
He did so with great sensitivity, emphasising that he was sharing his experience in the hope of giving another perspective on why becoming, as he put it, ‘someone new’ might prove so attractive to a vulnerable person.
His reward? To be trolled by online bullies, to find social invitations withdrawn, and even to prompt discomfort among friends, made uneasy by his candour on a subject that has intensified the culture wars. As he told me last year: ‘It’s almost like society has a gun to its head. You are either for it or you’re transphobic; there’s no middle ground.’
So despite the fact he had spoken movingly about wanting to end his own life, it was his outspokenness on trans issues that invited the most criticism.
‘I saw some old friends recently and, without asking me how I am, they jumped to the issues of the trans community,’ he says.
‘I’m the bad guy. Why? At no point did I say that anyone should be stopped from doing something that is right for them – the end goal is for everyone to be happy. It was just sounding caution. The only really hardline opinion I have is about prescribing hormones to kids, which I think is completely inappropriate and makes no sense to anyone who thinks about it for more than a second.’
Sascha with his estranged wife Mimi Nishikawa in 2017. He is still technically married to her, but doesn’t know where she is
If the ‘end goal’ is indeed happiness, then Sascha certainly seems to be on his way there.
‘I’m still recovering in many ways from what I went through, and I’m still going through therapy. But I am so much stronger,’ he smiles.
And he’s palpably thrilled to finally be able to publicly share his news after attending the nerve-shredding 12-week scan last month. ‘The baby’s very healthy. The guy said it’s a very beautiful baby and has great legs,’ says Sascha with a grin.
‘It’s too early to know the sex yet, although we’re going to find out,’ adds Lucy, a statuesque and beautiful blonde, who confides that, while excited, she also can’t help but worry about what lies ahead.
‘I’m still a bit of a teenager in my head. I’m all ‘I need to call my mum’, and now that’s going to be me,’ she laughs. ‘You’ll be fine,’ Sascha reassures her.
The conversation seems so wholesome and, indeed, ‘normal’ that it is hard to imagine Sascha was recently so unhappy that he genuinely wanted to die, or kill off the man he was.
‘Looking back at it now, I was in quite a dissociative state,’ he reflects. ‘I think another force almost took control of me, in a sense, and pushed me towards leaving in whatever way I could.’
The story of what Sascha would now call his breakdown seems, initially, a world removed from the glamorous one in which he grew up, one of three siblings born to David and Catherine.
Raised in bohemian middle-class privilege, the family flitted between homes in West London and their country estate in Devon, where David’s third wife, supermodel Marie Helvin, was among their visitors.
Educated privately at a special school for dyslexics, Sascha initially found work as a model, then, at 19, met Mimi Nishikawa, a charismatic Japanese lawyer 20 years his senior, and married her three months later, despite the misgivings of friends and family.
After a spell in London the newlyweds moved to Mimi’s native Tokyo, where the marriage became increasingly toxic, which he feels added to a legacy of trauma he endured from being sexually abused as a child, the details of which he cannot disclose.
Unhappy and isolated, he became reliant on Valium to get through the day, and at one point tried to take his own life.
It was then, in the autumn of 2022, that the idea of changing sex started to crystallise in his troubled mind.
‘I’d already been thinking about it and it’s an idea that just grew,’ he says.
Sascha as a young boy with his parents David and Catherine Bailey in 1999
This possible ‘solution’ was reinforced on the chatrooms that Sascha had been frequenting, where changing sex was talked about as a means to a new life.
He emphasises that at no point did he officially join the ‘transmaxxing community’ – an internet subculture where males investigate transitioning to females to cash in on the perceived benefits of womanhood, set out in a manifesto written by the movement’s anonymous Swedish leader Vintologi.
However, he was certainly drawn to a culture where transitioning is seen as a way of solving problems, particularly for those who don’t believe they conform to traditional societal expectations.
As someone who had struggled to identify with male role models as a child, something about it chimed. ‘You’re being told everything about you boils down to this one thing that is wrong, and if you can fix this one thing everything will be perfect,’ Sascha says.
‘For many men the pressure of having money, providing, being strong and tough is not something they can do or is necessary, but the perception sticks.’
Within weeks of making his decision, it took a mere ten-minute appointment with a private doctor in Japan to be ‘diagnosed’ as transgender, referred to a surgeon and sent away with HRT patches.
He didn’t begin using them immediately as things became untenable in his marriage in October 2022, which led to him fleeing his Tokyo home with little more than the clothes on his back and boarding a flight to London, where he could get a second month’s supply from the NHS before beginning treatment.
Back in the sanctuary of his family – who were, he insists, nothing but supportive – he got in touch with Lucy, a friend that he had connected with through Instagram and met previously a couple of times.
‘I didn’t really have anyone to talk to, so I messaged Lucy. And then we met up, and things just went from there,’ he says.
At this point, Sascha admits he was still horribly confused and had only taken the hormones he had been given because of his anxiety about being unable to continue his prescription.
‘And thank God for that, as Lucy massively helped me snap out of my thinking. She helped me see myself from the outside.
‘She kind of laughed about it, not in a horrible way, but when you realise that what you’re doing is silly, it becomes impossible to carry on doing it.’
Lucy, meanwhile, says that she instinctively knew that the trauma with which Sascha was grappling was not rooted in gender dysphoria.
‘I can’t really explain it, but I suppose I had known other trans people, and they had just not presented in the same way,’ she says.
Her approach was to try to talk Sascha through his thought process. She recalls: ‘Things like, so what procedures exactly are you going to go through? And what kind of relationships do you want to have afterwards?
‘And when he said women, I asked him what kind of women he thought would relate to him as a transwoman?
‘It was just getting him to step back and think about it in real terms rather than purely fantastical ones.’
She also asked him if he was ready to embrace the impact on his fertility. ‘And when confronted like that, I realised I wasn’t,’ Sascha says. ‘In the end, I guess she really grounded me.’
Perhaps they grounded each other. Privately educated Cambridge graduate Lucy admits that she was something of a rebel who liked to push boundaries – one reason that, in her 20s, she took a job working for a production company called Rebel Media, who had been employed to follow the then English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and film him on his travels.
Photographer David Bailey with his son Sascha at the Royal Academy Of Arts summer exhibition preview party in 2018
‘It doesn’t mean I had the same beliefs, everyone just assumed that,’ she says. ‘In fact, I was interested to see the conversations he was having.’
She left Rebel Media in 2018 after a fall-out with Robinson – who she emphasises she has ‘no time for’ and is now writing a book about her time on what she calls ‘the Right-wing front line’.
‘I still get trolling and hate mail from the far-Right,’ she confides.
She was also recently evicted from her flat-share after her flatmates googled her, told her she was hateful and asked her to leave.
‘So I think we’d both had quite mad lives when we met,’ she says.
Sascha, too, is writing a book about his experience, which also investigates the ongoing culture war between the gender-critical and trans-activists communities, and which he will be releasing a chapter at a time on his social media feeds.
Beyond this, though, he admits he is at something of a crossroads in his career.
Having worked in the art world, curating exhibitions and creating one of the first platforms for artists to create NFTs (non-fungible tokens, which are digital collectibles often tied to pieces of online art), he has latterly been ostracised by the art community.
‘The fashion world and the art world, I think, are forever closed off because of everything I’ve spoken about,’ he says. ‘In Japan, I was having meetings relating to big brands like Pokémon, and I’ve come back here, and that’s all gone.
‘It’s a weird thing to be back at the starting point, but I’ve come to terms with that. I have no regrets. I’m glad that I spoke out.’
In time, he plans to start an online tech venture. ‘The great thing about that space is that no one can cancel you from it,’ he says archly. For now though, both Sascha and Lucy want to focus on the exciting months ahead, and find a permanent home to raise their new baby, who is due in August.
At some point he would love to propose, although he’s currently restrained by ongoing issues with his estranged wife Mimi, to whom he is still technically married, but doesn’t know where she is.
Luckily both his and Lucy’s family are thrilled about the impending arrival and have been a huge support.
Lucy has met her new in-laws on several occasions, while Sascha’s siblings, and older sister Paloma in particular, are delighted at the thought of new cousins for her own offspring.
They’ll find out the sex at a later scan and have already settled on names – ‘Ava’ for a girl, ‘Wolfgang’ for a boy, which Sascha’s mother had wanted to call him until it was vetoed by his father.
‘We don’t mind either way – a healthy baby is all we ask for,’ says Sascha.
A gift that, for a brief and ghastly time, this delightful young father-to-be nearly denied himself.