This Secret Valley: Danielle Laidley’s Don’t Look Away

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It is extraordinary that a person could live such a divided life—existing by day as a brutally aggressive AFL defender, and then head coach, within the bell jar of footy-mad Melbourne, while by night secretly embracing her trans identity in queer clubs. But this is the true tale of Danielle Laidley’s journey from leader of the men’s game to the unexpected trans icon she became when, accompanied by her partner Donna Leckie, she walked the Brownlow Medal red carpet in 2022. Don’t Look Away (2022), which was co-written with acclaimed sports journalist Konrad Marshall in the aftermath of Laidley’s forced public outing as transgender by St Kilda police in 2020, is a no-holds-barred account of Laidley’s troubled life as an AFL star player and coach privately battling with drug and alcohol misuse, gambling addiction and gender dysphoria.

Laidley was born in 1967 and raised in the hard-scrabble suburb of Balga in Perth. The memoir opens with an affecting scene of a six-year-old Laidley sneaking into her mother’s bedroom to try on red nail polish. After a few moments of joy, Laidley becomes terrified of being discovered, and to strip away the enamel she begins to rub sand and rocks against her hands until they bleed.

Around the time Laidley’s parents separate and she temporarily moves in with her grandparents, her grandmother encourages Laidley’s burgeoning interest in cricket. ‘Nan bowls to me for hours […] and she feeds my interests. I beg her to buy Omo washing powder because it has bios of Australian cricketers on the box.’ Her first footy is ‘plastic, and brown, and has fake seams and stitching melded into the surface’. She writes: ‘I kick that thing around barefoot until the skin on top of my feet is raw and bruised. It’s the best pain ever.’ By age seven, she is already playing in the under-10s, mentored by a coach who helps her to win Most Improved Player. ‘Footy has a hold of me, for sure,’ she says. ‘I chase hard. I tackle hard. I hit bodies hard. I think maybe I like to hurt people.’

As a nine-year-old, Laidley’s urge to dress in skirts and wear make-up paired with her ‘long, flowing, shiny white-blonde locks’ collides with the rigid gender expectations of 1970s Australia. But the force of her internal sense of gender, despite the absence of role models, is powerful: ‘Nan gets me to the barber shop perhaps twice a year; I physically fight her all the way, kicking and screaming so much that most times she gives up.’ When her cousin dresses her up in a skirt, with ‘red lips, rouged cheeks, eyes like the tail of a peacock’, Laidley feels a sense of peace, muted by a sombre undercurrent. ‘In flashes I wonder, Shit, should I be enjoying this? In other moments I know this is a rare chance, one that I cherish, so why am I mocking it? Fuck I wish this didn’t have to be a joke.’

The force of her internal sense of gender, despite the absence of role models, is powerful.

After Laidley is court-ordered to live with her dad and stepfamily at age ten, she is subjected to her father’s alcoholism and violence. Nonetheless, driven by ‘insecurity and fear’, Laidley begins winning best and fairest at her junior footy club. But at age twelve, she is uprooted again after her dad tells her he can’t afford to take care of her anymore. With no other options, Laidley moves into an outer suburban caravan park with her mum and her new husband. There, as a teenager, she continues to explore her gender in the privacy of her closet-sized room. ‘I am safe to daydream, gazing at myself in that mirror, imagining pert breasts—mine—nestling in a pretty bra.’ She tries on her mother’s make-up, but it’s a challenge. ‘The eyeliner stings. The lipstick smears,’ she laments. ‘But I have no online tutorials, no YouTube, not even any books. You can’t imagine what it’s like to learn this shit in the autumn of 1982.’ The lack of privacy is a constant source of anxiety. ‘I do panic occasionally, afraid someone will walk into the caravan and see me, look at me, point at me and yell, You. Dirty. Disgusting. Pervert.’

Despite her fears, Laidley continues to find success on the field. At age nineteen, with a pregnant girlfriend, she is drafted into the inaugural West Coast Eagles squad. She worries about how she will cope with the media scrutiny and manage the part of her that ‘buys make-up and dresses and stuffs them in a plastic bag in the boot’. As she begins her AFL career, Laidley channels her internal turmoil to become one of the most relentless defenders the league has ever seen. But though achieving success on the field, she struggles to find happiness: ‘I feel further from my true self than I’ve ever been.’ The pain of her new-found fame hits home as she describes a scene in a Perth pub where she stays silent when her teammates ridicule a group of transgender women: ‘I’ve become a minor star in the biggest game in town, the ultimate insider. But I am on the outside of the circle I really want to join.’ When her wife finds discarded tissues with make-up on them, Laidley falsely admits to cheating instead of the truth.

Cruelly sidelined by injury during the Eagles’ 1992 Grand Final-winning season, Laidley then sought a trade to North Melbourne. Here, she won another premiership in 1996, earning the nickname ‘Junkyard Dog’ for her ferocious aggression. Laidley ties her sporting success to her struggles with gender dysphoria. ‘My vice is the work, the training, the game—it’s the need to win, to dominate, to control something or someone, since I have no control over the secret that dominates my inner life.’

As she wrestles with her identity, feeling that her ‘female side is growing stronger’, Laidley fears that if her secret is discovered, she will lose her young family. She continues to hide dresses and makeup in the boot of her car, only wearing them when her wife and children are interstate. When she dresses in feminine attire and heads to the BDSM Hellfire Club during winter school holidays, she spots a fellow AFL player in the queue and dashes back to her car to avoid being outed.

Laidley retired as a player after the 1997 season. Unsure of what else to do, she begins a new life as a junior football coach, earning the role of head coach back at North Melbourne in 2003. (For footy fans, there’s plenty of fascinating on- and off-field intrigue throughout Don’t Look Away, including the proposed merger and relocation of the North Melbourne Football Club, along with the infamous Wayne Carey affair. For those less enamoured by the minutiae of the sport, it may be wise to skip a few chapters in the middle.)

Laidley channels her internal turmoil to become one of the most relentless defenders the league has ever seen.

By 2012, and coaching Port Adelaide, Laidley’s ‘gender dysphoria is common knowledge now, an open secret’ in the AFL. Her marriage comes to an end, and she begins to dress in female attire and socialise with trans women in Melbourne venues the Greyhound, the Peel and DT’s Hotel. Laidley reflects on the unexpected joy provided by the anonymity of her feminine gender presentation: ‘Dressed as Danielle, no one notices who I am or used to be […] I’m free now, to go out and live my life […] Every errand feels like a trip to the moon.’

She begins her post-AFL career as a learning and development consultant for the Department of Justice, working in prisons across Victoria. It is during this time that her drug use ‘goes into freefall’. When she inadvertently sends pictures of herself in womenswear to her two adult daughters via Snapchat, they are shocked and cut her out of their lives, causing Laidley intense anguish. The physical pain from all the injuries to her back, ankles and knees during her playing career also becomes harder to bear, leading to a suicide attempt. ‘I’m mixed up and messed up and falling apart,’ Laidley writes of this episode. ‘I’ve done things I don’t want to think about, things I can’t outrun, things that are going to detonate in the media and go on the public record.’ Later, she calls the police from her car, who arrest her after finding an ice pipe on the seat.

This traumatic event precipitates the Victoria Police’s disgraceful and dangerous public outing of Laidley. Officers will go on to leak via WhatsApp a photo of Laidley dressed in feminine attire while in custody that night. The image goes viral and is reprinted by newspapers across the country, making Laidley the most famous transgender woman in Australia overnight, and further damaging the perception of police within the trans community. (The case brought against the offending officers was later dismissed by a magistrate on a technicality.) It’s hard to imagine just how horrifying and damaging being publicly outed like this must have been for Laidley, all while locked up in a remand centre psychiatric ward.

But this is a tale of survival against the odds. Laidley is released without charge, and from this point manages to start putting her life back together with the love and support of her childhood sweetheart Donna, as well as key AFL figures Mick Malthouse and then CEO Gillon McLachlan.

Eminently readable, Don’t Look Away joins of list of recent AFL memoirs with an explicit focus on players’ mental health. Brandon Jack’s 2021 book 28 explores his pain at never quite making it as a star player for the Sydney Swans. In 2022, former number one AFL draft pick Tom Boyd released Nowhere to Hide, revealing his battles with depression and anxiety, leading him to retire from the game at just twenty-three. But despite an increasing number of suicides of former players being linked to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) from repeated head knocks, there have been no subsequent AFL memoirs published that centre on mental health issues since the release of Don’t Look Away.

Laidley’s mental health, gambling problems and problematic drug and alcohol use are all sadly familiar in the lives of former professional athletes. But what separates Don’t Look Away from most other sports memoirs is Laidley’s candidness and willingness to admit to her many lies, poor financial management and reckless behaviour. Importantly, she doesn’t shy from considering the harm she caused former players, road users and many of the women in her life as she spiralled out of control.

Craig Silvey, the cisgender author of the bestselling trans coming-of-age novel Honeybee, celebrates Don’t Look Away in the foreword as a ‘reclamation of [Laidley’s] narrative […] [a]fter her truth as a trans woman was cruelly and disgracefully publicised without her consent’. Australian colonial history is littered with examples of trans people being forcibly outed and condemned by the courts and media, the most famous being nineteenth-century Bendigo gold miner Edward De Lacy Evans. So it is wonderful to have a contemporary text that speaks back to this gruelling legacy that demonstrates that one can survive and eventually thrive, even after the harshest public exposure.

Don’t Look Away joins of list of recent AFL memoirs with an explicit focus on players’ mental health.

This memoir is also a welcome contribution to Australian trans literature. Unlike in the United States and United Kingdom, where the works of transfeminine authors such as Torrey Peters and Shon Faye have been the most popular writers of contemporary trans literature, in Australia it has been predominantly transmasculine authors who have found their way into mainstream trade publishing. Don’t Look Away sits alongside a small list of celebrated books by Australian trans women penned in recent years, including Cadance Bell’s 2022 memoir The All of It: A Bogan Rhapsody and McKenzie Wark’s cerebral Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir from 2023.

Don’t Look Away has perhaps most in common with Still Point Turning: The Catherine McGregor Story, a play written by Priscilla Jackman and based on conversations with the titular former Australian lieutenant colonel. A decade older than Laidley, McGregor also spent much of her life in a fiercely masculine environment before publicly transitioning in her mid-fifties. In words reminiscent of Laidley’s experience, McGregor states in the play that: ‘I arrived at the same point every trans person does. If I am to live on, it would be as the person I felt myself to be, or I would die.’

As Australia’s only out LGBTQIA+ AFL player until very recently, Don’t Look Away stands alone as an account of life as a queer and trans person within the upper echelons of Australia’s most popular game. While the circumstances of her horrific public outing were not of her choosing, Laidley’s brave decision to provide a raw, honest account of her life is a gift to anyone who feels they will lose it all if they admit who they really are. Since its publication, Laidley has worked on AFL diversity and inclusion initiatives, been featured in a Stan Original documentary and created a supported independent living business for people with disabilities. While not a ‘literary’ book in the rarified sense, Laidley and Marshall’s collaboration has produced a work of unusual sensitivity and insight that will continue to be read by generations to come for its depiction of internalised shame, heteronormative masculine sports culture and Australia’s queer scene.

KYD’s Queer Critic Series is supported by the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency.