Photographer David Bailey’s son Sascha has announced that he and his girlfriend are expecting a baby boy.
The gender reveal comes three years after Sascha considered transitioning and starting hormone replacement therapy.
The 30-year-old former model, whose parents are celebrated photographer David Bailey and model Catherine, said he was deeply depressed during his marriage. At the time, he believed he was experiencing gender dysphoria and seriously considered taking hormones to transition.
Now preparing to welcome his first child with Lucy Brown in August, Sascha said he had finally emerged from what he described as the “worst years of my life”. Lucy is a former assistant to political activist Tommy Robinson.
He told MailOnline: ‘We’re having a boy. We’re calling him Wolfgang Robert Bailey.
‘Wolfgang was going to be my name, but my Dad vetoed it. I always wanted it, so now I’m passing it on. And Robert is after Lucy’s uncle, who has passed away.’
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Photographer David Bailey’s son Sascha has revealed he and girlfriend Lucy Brown are expecting a baby boy
Sascha, 30, is preparing to welcome his first child with Lucy Brown in August after emerging from what he called the ‘worst years of my life’
The news has been made even more meaningful, he said, by the fact that his divorce from 49-year-old Japanese lawyer Mimi Nishikawa is finally nearing completion after three turbulent years.
‘It has been a nightmare but the divorce is in the final stage and is due to go through next month,’ he said. ‘So this will be a whole new beginning. I’ve never felt happier.’
Sascha is currently living with his parents in London, while he and Lucy prepare to move into a new flat in the coming weeks.
Marriage, however, is not an immediate priority. ‘I’m still traumatised from the last one,’ Sascha said. ‘But with Lucy, I see it in our future. I want to do it properly this time.’
His outlook marks a dramatic change for the former model, who later became an art curator. In 2021, he said he experienced a mental health crisis so serious that he considered taking his own life.
‘I felt totally lost. I didn’t want to be alive,’ he told the Mail at the time. ‘I convinced myself I must be transgender – that I was living the wrong life in the wrong body. It felt like the only way out.’
Sascha began researching gender transition online, where he said he soon encountered what he described as an echo chamber of chatrooms and forums.
‘There was so much encouragement to “just do it”,’ he recalled. ‘I saw a private doctor who spent ten minutes with me, said I was trans and gave me a prescription for female hormones. That was it.’
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Sascha told MailOnline: ‘We’re having a boy. We’re calling him Wolfgang Robert Bailey. Wolfgang was going to be my name, but my Dad vetoed it. I always wanted it, so now I’m passing it on. And Robert is after Lucy’s uncle, who has passed away’
Sascha said his divorce from Japanese lawyer Mimi Nishikawa, 49, is finally nearing its conclusion after three turbulent years; pictured in 2022
Sascha is staying with his parents in London until he and Lucy move into their new flat. He said marriage is not yet planned, adding: ‘I’m still traumatised from the last one’
He said he was only days away from beginning hormone replacement therapy when he experienced a change of heart.
‘I just stopped and thought: hang on, this isn’t right. This is trauma. I don’t need a new body – I need to understand why I’m in pain,’ he said.
Sascha credits both his famously forthright father and Lucy, whom he met shortly after leaving his marriage, with helping him regain his sense of self.
He said: ‘Lucy saved my life. She helped me feel grounded again. Like I wasn’t broken.’
As he prepares to become a father, Sascha said he has considered how he might respond if his child one day raises the subject of gender dysphoria.
‘I’d be very against it, obviously,’ Sascha mused. ‘You can’t get a tattoo. You can’t change your gender. It’s really as simple as that.
‘If you give someone one little piece of control, one little thing they can do, they will gravitate towards that little bit of control.
‘Kids have no control over their life. So we have to look after them, we make sure that they don’t make bad decisions.
‘If you allow them to have this one avenue, a lot of them will take it just because it’s a bit of control.’
Having moved beyond that painful period, Sascha has become an outspoken critic of what he calls a “rushed” approach to gender-related treatment, particularly for young people.
He said dozens of detransitioners had contacted him after he shared his story publicly. ‘So many of them regret it. But the system doesn’t want to hear from them – they’re treated like they’re an inconvenience.’
His memoir, Try to Hit the Pool, due to be published next month, explores his mental health struggles, the collapse of his marriage, his decision not to transition and his journey towards finding himself again.
Sascha added: ‘The book is a way for me to close that terrible saga of my life.’
For now, Sascha is concentrating on the arrival of baby Wolfgang and creating a new future with Lucy, who has earned the approval of her famously hard-to-impress father-in-law-to-be, Bailey Snr.
