Profile of a man: Balian Buschbaum

The Beauty of Balian.

Macho, macho man

Friends, what if I told you this delectable example of machodom was, in fact, born a woman?

I can pretty much hear the sharp intake of your breath, can see the crinkling of your face as you peer disbelievingly at the picture above, convinced I’ve got it all wrong. ‘No. No waaaaay,’ you’re saying. ‘NO WAY, HOSE!

Amigos — yes way.

The early years

Balian aged 9 (left) with his younger sister. (Source: http://www.fem.com)

Balian Buschbaum was born Yvonne Buschbaum on 14 July 1980 in Ulm, a relatively small city in the federal German state of Baden-Württemberg, which is situated on the River Danube. In the National Geographic’s ‘Taboo’ series, in which Balian appeared in the Changing Gender episode, he admits that, from early childhood, he felt he’d been born in the wrong body. ‘I had always had the feeling, even before my puberty, that my penis was missing. I can’t describe it any other way.’ In a 2008 interview with Die Welt’s Jörg Winterfeldt, Balian recalled other early signs of his male-oriented sexuality: ‘I played football with the boys and annoyed the girls.’

Balian was approximately thirteen years old when his body underwent puberty and his breasts began to grow. ‘It felt like they didn’t belong to me. So I began weight training. I did double the amount I was meant to — far too much for my body. My intention was to stop menstruating and keep my breasts small. I wanted my breasts to look like pecs, not breasts.’

Rise of the pole vaulter

While researching for this post, I didn’t manage to find out the exact age Balian was when he took up pole vaulting. My guess is that he must have started in late childhood or adolescence. By 1998, at 18 years of age, he had placed fourth in women’s pole vaulting at the World Junior Championships in Athletics (Annecy, France). ‘To me sport was always a passion,’ Balian has said, ‘but pole vaulting was my utmost passion. It lifted my heart; I got joy from the very motion of it.’

According to the biography section on his website, Balian joined the Bundeswehr (basically the German Army) in November 1998 and undertook basic soldier training before joining the Bundeswehr’s sports promotion group while continuing to pole vault professionally.

Between 1998 and 2003, Balian — then still Yvonne — enjoyed tremendous success as an athlete at various national and international athletics championships. The highlights included:

Success. Yvonne Buschbaum. (Source: http://www.smh.com.au)

• a junior world record at the 1997 European Junior Championships
• a bronze medal at the 1998 European Championships (Budapest, Hungary)
• a gold medal at the 1999 European Junior Championships (Riga, Latvia)
• a silver medal at the 2002 European Indoor Championships (Vienna, Austria), and
• a bronze medal at the 2002 European Championships (Munich, Germany).

Add to this mix a very respectable sixth place in the women’s pole vault event at the 2000 Olympic Games (Sydney, Australia) at the tender age of twenty. For the full list of his attendance as Yvonne at international sports competitions and placing, see the Wikipedia page about Balian.

‘In hindsight, I think my anger drove my success. When you feel uncomfortable in your own body, you feel rage. I was able to channel that rage into my sport.’ Balian doesn’t elaborate on this in the ‘Changing Gender’ interview. He might in his first book, Bleu Augen Bleiben Bleu (Blue Eyes Are Blue), but my German is worse than rudimentary, so I haven’t been able to check this. I can only begin to imagine the anxiety and pain that must come from feeling estranged from your own body. Not to mention the effects this estrangement must have on other aspects of one’s life, such as relationships and gender identity. Balian has said that he has always been attracted to heterosexual women.

A forced break and personal reflection

I wasn’t able to find out much about what Balian was up to between 2003 and 2006. However, I did discover on Germany’s TZ website that at some point a ruptured Achilles forced him to take a break from pole vaulting, with the injury apparently requiring him to undergo four operations. During this forced break, Balian said he ‘read a lot and discovered that the Achilles tendon is related to the soul’.
 
With the benefit of having had time to think and soul-search, in 2007, Balian made an important, life-altering decision — to make the physiological transition to become a man. With his decision made, he began hormone replacement therapy by injecting himself with testosterone. This is actually considered doping in the sports world. Balian’s decision to follow his heart effectively ended his career as a world-class pole vaulter and cut short his Olympic pursuit. Given his success at the Sydney Olympics, it was obvious that there was a very real potential for him to collect medals as a female athlete at future Games. In the photos of him competing in the pole vault as Yvonne, you can see the determination and joy in his face. One can take from this that there was obviously a monumental need inside him to live life as a man, one so strong that it moved him to give up a career in a sport he clearly loved.

Asked in an interview with Yahoo!News about the name he chose for himself when he decided to become a man, Balian has said this: ‘There was a Balian of Ibelin, who left everything that was important to him. He lost his house, his job and his wife and embarked on the journey to find himself. His determination was to help people.’ (Some of you may recall that Balian of Ibelin was Orlando Bloom’s character in the Hollywood film, Kingdom of Heaven.). An aptly-chosen name, methinks.

The physical transition

When a biological female injects with testosterone it leads to masculine physical changes in her body. The changes include obvious things like increased muscle mass, a male pattern of hair growth on the face (as well as a male pattern of receding hair around the temples), and a deepening voice. You can see from his pictures that Balian has certainly undergone the physical transformation. (Incidentally, I understand testosterone can also make you feel aggressive and anxious, and increase one’s libido – something that came through in some of the clips on YouTube I’ve seen in which other FTMs offer insights on their personal experiences.) Not one to do things by half-measures, Balian also opted for phalloplasty surgery, and has been endowed with a penis that can become erect when inflated with a small pump hidden in one of his new testicles.

The picture of masculinity: Balian Buschbaum. (Source: queer-iv.blogspot.com)

 

 

Life as a man

In 2007, Balian earned his coaching ‘A License’ and from 2008 was a base coach at the German Athletics Federation / USC Mainz at the Olympic Training Center MZ. On his decision to become a coach, Balian has offered this: ‘I wanted to leave my sport behind but I am more addicted to the drug that is pole vaulting than I thought.’ However, because of ‘discrepancies’ with the German Athletics Association he parted ways with it, saying that working with the association had been ‘too tight’ with ‘too little freedom’ and that he’d been ’too caught up in a construct.’

Coach Balian. (Source: poppaganda.net)

Since becoming a man, Balian has provided coaching and sports consulting services. He has, in fact, become something of a celebrity in Germany. A high profile FTM convert, he has given countless television interviews with incredible frankness. He is the author of two books Bleu Augen Bleiben Bleu (Blue Eyes Are Blue) and Frau Wollen Reden, Männer Sex (Women Want to Talk, Mex Sex). In April 2012, he starred in the German reality dance show, ‘Let’s Dance 2013’, which I can only assume is something similar to our ‘Dancing with the Stars’ program.
In all of his most recent photos and interviews, it strikes me that he looks happy, content.
And that, my friends, is a wonderful thing.

A man at peace. (Source: queer-iv.blogspot.com)