WARNING: This article discusses confronting and potentially triggering topics.
Danielle Laidley has told of the moment she tried to end it all after an eight-day ice binge, saying she was “mentally insane”.
The former AFL great’s attempt at suicide – involving drugs and self-asphyxiation – came in mid-2020, locked in her bedroom at home in Melbourne.
“I was at such a low point in my life,” Laidley said in an exclusive interview with News Corp newspapers.
“I had been smoking ice for about eight or nine days, I had not been to sleep. I had been planning it for a while, a few months. I just thought I was at the front of the queue.”
But it failed. Laidley’s flatmate heard her “banging and gasping for air” and managed to break in.
And because of that the 55-year-old former player and coach, formerly known to millions as Dean Laidley, is here today: a proud, contented transgender woman, happily living with her partner Donna and sharing her astounding story.
Laidley spoke out ahead of the release next week of her autobiography Don’t Look Away: A Memoir of Identity & Acceptance.
It is a rollercoaster account of a troubled childhood, the rise to sporting glory, the dark depths of addiction and arrest, and ultimately, hope and recovery. And the thread throughout is Laidley’s own extraordinarily difficult journey of coming to terms with her gender.
On every page, there’s a white-knuckle story: and today Laidley reveals not just the details of that awful night in Melbourne – but that it wasn’t her first attempt.
“The other time, I overdosed on sleeping tablets, that was just after I finished in the AFL, I think 2016,” she said.
“The first time was just a case of depression, you know, I did it without any thought.
“The second one I was very lucky …. I was completely insane and I look back now and that person wasn’t me.”
Laidley had never taken an illicit drug – other than some high school pot – until she was 48. But in retiring from footy after falling out of her marriage to the mother of her three children, all while wrestling gender dysphoria, she got lost – and a family tendency towards addiction caught up.
“I was always living in fear, in shame and in embarrassment of my gender identity, and now I had this other problem that manifested out of my family history, and I was too scared to reach out to anyone … it was just a bonfire waiting for the match.”
DRUGS, MATES AND THE WAY OUT: READ DANIELLE’S FULL INTERVIEW
In the News Corp interview, Laidley says that long before she got professional help with her transition she was trying to reconcile her outer life as Dean with her identity as Danielle.
Her quest for that identity started as a child; and as an adult she began to chase it ever harder, snatching private opportunities to wear women’s clothes and make-up, finding brief moments “of peace and warmth and calmness, just to be myself”.
But there was always that fear of being caught, of the industry rumour-mill, plus the worry of what it would do to her marriage and family if the secret came out.
“I was scared that people would label me either gay or a cross dresser or whatever,” she acknowledged. So life had to be compartmentalised – a crucible for frustration and anger, which she took out on the field and in her role as a coach; and other periods when she was withdrawn.
One former player called Laidley the “Bible” because she was so hard to read. But the mood swings explain “what was going on underneath”.
“It wasn’t me and it drove me insane because my life was compartmentalised,” she said.
“Underneath I was wishing I could tell them why.”
Eventually the marriage did end; the story emerged; and drugs took hold, before Laidley kicked them firmly out of her new, less complicated and more joyful life.
She tells how her brother, Paul, likes to say she was an arsehole brother but is a fabulous sister. She shares heartwarming accounts of reconnecting with her old team-mates and how the various compartments of her life – family, friends, colleagues, members of the trans community – are finally coming together.
“It’s taken a while to get here, but life is a hell of a lot easier just being you.”
And while Laidley modestly denies being any form of hero to others in a similar situation, she is clearly a woman with a mission: to use her platform to help.
“If I can break down barriers and it makes life easier for them, that’s what I will do.”
Don’t Look Away: A Memoir of Identity & Acceptance by Danielle Laidley will be published by HarperCollins on August 30 and is available to pre-order now from Booktopia.
