Munroe Bergdorf meets the moment

“My life looks extremely different now,” she says, “different boyfriend, different management.” Bergdorf’s relationship with the media has also, hopefully, entered a new phase having first came to prominence through a series of hiring-and-firing scandals beginning in 2017. That August she made history as the first trans model to front a UK campaign for international cosmetics brand L’Oréal. Then the Daily Mail dug up a Facebook post she’d written in the immediate aftermath of the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville rally.

In the post, Bergdorf decried the “racial violence of white people […] Yes ALL white people,” and described white supremacy as “the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth”. This resulted in her being dismissed by L’Oréal and taken to task across Britain’s right-wing media. It transformed Bergdorf from a face on the London clubbing scene to a divisive public figure.

This pattern of events was to be repeated twice more. In February 2018, Bergdorf resigned as an LGBT adviser to the Labour party over some resurfaced tweets from 2010 that some found offensive. Then, in June 2019, she was stripped of her role as a Childline ambassador just two days after her appointment, following objections from anti-trans campaigners who described her as a “porn model” and an inappropriately “sexualised” role model for children. The NSPCC, which runs Childline, said that "an ongoing relationship with Munroe was inappropriate because of her statements on the public record". They later apologised "unreservedly" for the way her dismissal had been handled, saying: "She deserved better from us."

Looking back, Bergdorf accepts a share of responsibility for these situations. “I felt like, at the beginning of my career, I didn’t really have anything to lose, so I was just going to say what I felt was true.” But she rejects the suggestion that she intentionally courted controversy. “I think we’re in this time of extreme polarisation, when anything can be controversial, depending on who you are.”

She says in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, wider public opinion on race largely caught up with her. “People were saying what I was saying in 2017 – essentially that all white people benefit from racism.” Perhaps the most convincing proof of this turnaround came in June of that year when L’Oréal apologised to Bergdorf for her earlier treatment and appointed her to their newly created UK Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Board. “I felt a great sense of pride in that moment, that we had come a little bit forward,” she says, before quickly adding: “Although obviously, with the attacks on DEI now, we’ve taken steps back.”

Almost every aspect of Bergdorf’s identity – her looks, her race, her sexuality – has attracted ire at points, but it’s the increased media visibility of trans people, especially since the 2010s, which, she says, is a particularly sharp double-edged sword. “There wasn’t a feeling that we were being protected or represented in politics. It was more just media representation, film representation, music representation – but not political engagement with our community.” This visibility is disproportionate to the community’s tiny size (approximately 0.5% of the population) and has, therefore, left trans people in the UK vulnerable to being scapegoated. It’s a dynamic that Bergdorf describes with patient, practised logic. “Find a group of people who society doesn’t understand; weaponise fears, and project that on to [the group]. We’ve seen it time and time again with fascist governments.” And it’s meant that great strides forward (Nadia Almada winning Big Brother in 2004, the same year the Gender Recognition Act was passed) have often been followed by backlash (a steady increase in transphobic hate crime since 2011).

Watching Love & Rage, it’s evident from the clips of Bergdorf’s 2017 TV appearances that even back then she had the ability to remain calm under attack. Piers Morgan may raise his voice, but she never raises hers. Is that something she’s had to cultivate? “I think, throughout my life, the way I come across has been extremely different to how I feel,” she says. This formidable poker face seems to have developed early on, as a coping mechanism. Bergdorf grew up in the village of Stansted Mountfitchet, on the Essex-Hertfordshire border, where, as the child of a white English mother and a Black Jamaican father, and the only Black kid in her school, she experienced “a lot” of racism. She also came out, first as gay, at 14, at a time when Thatcher’s Section 28 was still on the statute books. “A teacher who saw I was being bullied took me aside and told me he would do something if he could, but he couldn’t, because [under Section 28] teachers couldn’t ‘promote homosexuality’.” After school, Bergdorf moved to Brighton for university and began identifying as genderqueer. She then found her way to London, worked in fashion PR, and became a mainstay of the queer club scene. She began the medical process of transition aged 24.

This was before that period of increased acceptance, circa 2014, known as “the trans tipping point”, when Laverne Cox was appearing on the cover of Time. “The wheels were starting to turn, but I was still being spat at in public,” she says, recalling an incident when a stranger threatened to push her in front of a tube train. “It was a very busy platform – and he knew I was trans, I was so early on in my transition – and he just kept jumping at me.” These experiences traumatised her to an extent that she’s still processing. But they also made her unusually resilient to the rough and tumble of the British media. “I felt like: you can’t do anything worse than what’s happened to me already. I’ve had white men shouting at me my whole life.”

Bergdorf’s new book, Talk To Me, is a combination of self-help and activists’ manual, aimed at empowering young adults through the kind of open-hearted conversations that would have provided solace to her 14-year-old self. It’s less about how to debate your political enemies and more about how we talk to the people who are already, broadly, on side. Take the “Protect the Dolls” T-shirts, a covetable fashion item designed by Conner Ives and then worn at red carpet events by celebrities, including Pedro Pascal and Tilda Swinton. Bergdorf is conflicted: “It’s difficult when a cause becomes a trend, because even though Conner’s intentions are great, a lot of people will just wear the T-shirt without becoming an active ally.”

But then, isn’t that “cause becomes a trend” junction exactly where “model-activists” like Bergdorf build their careers? As an advocate for women, does she ever worry about her complicity in an industry that pressurises women to live up to such punishingly narrow beauty standards? “I do, because I feel that pressure, too,” she says. But also: “It’s an extremely nuanced thing. It’s habit, it’s ritual, it’s survival.” For her, “glamour has become something of a shield”. Along with that poker face, it’s part of how she’s learned to protect herself. Although maybe she’s now readying to let down her guard?

Today, Munroe looks glamorous but relaxed. She’s got a full face of makeup in neutral tones and she’s in 70s-cut double denim – the kind of outfit that Farrah Fawcett would wear to go roller-skating. This is a change, too. “I’d never wear jeans in the beginning of my transition, because I didn’t want anything that would be perceived as even a smidge masculine.” It’s also a reflection of the ease she feels in her current relationship, with a playwright she met on a dating app. “I never thought I’d be in a relationship where I’m in a pair of joggers and one of his old T-shirts, and he’d still find me attractive.”

Lately. she has been spending more time at home, dressed down. She’s been happily sober for the past four months. “I love a rave, but I feel like at the moment I really want to have a clear mind.” Yet even in the days when she was knocking back margaritas as resident DJ at the queer-inclusive east London club night, Pussy Palace, Bergdorf’s preferred party mode, as she recalls it, was low-key. “I feel uncomfortable when people come up to me and it’s all about ‘the look’, or the fabulousness of the fashion. I just find it a little asinine.” Indeed, a lot of what Munroe wants to say to her various communities – to women, to queer folk, to anti-racist activists – boils down to some version of this: don’t be content with the superficial; make deeper connections. Her ongoing dilemma is how to do so without opening herself up to attack, and both book and film are attempts to side-step the increasingly hostile space of social media. “I don’t need to give a one-directional expression of my vulnerability, and then have a stream of comments from faceless profiles. That doesn’t feel like an actual exchange.”

Being in the public eye for nearly a decade has taken a toll on Bergdorf’s mental health. When she was first invited to make a documentary, she was in rehab receiving treatment for symptoms of complex PTSD, the result of pre-fame traumas being compounded by her media trials. Her experience at that time oscillated between “feeling like a zombie” and “extreme” panic attacks: “I think I’d just been in survival mode for so long, heavily masking how I was feeling. So when the lockdowns happened, everything fell apart.”

Then, a few weeks after filming wrapped at the beginning of 2024, she found herself struggling again, on what was supposed to be a restorative solo holiday to Thailand. She says, lowering her voice, “When the cameras came down, I was in a really bad way.” The mask of composure drops briefly, and a look of physical pain crosses her face. “And yeah, I was suicidal, and I felt like I just wanted to end it.” What happened then? “The hotel staff noticed something was wrong and stayed with me,” she says, before adding with a brittle laugh: “Shout out to the W Hotel Koh Samui!” She reassures me: “It was a long road to recovery,” but she’s been feeling better for several months. “I’m not on any medications and with therapy my life looks so different. It’s night and day.”

Bergdorf’s regained sense of equilibrium comes just in time. Amid much confusion over how the new Supreme Court ruling will work in practice, people are looking to her for answers. “The EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] guidance will only work if they take away our legal documents, because then they can just ask for people’s ID at the toilet,” she explains. This controversial “interim guidance” states that “trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in places like shops, hospitals and restaurants, but also that “in some circumstances trans women (biological men) [are] not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities”, effectively barring them from many public spaces. “At the moment, they can’t do that,” Bergdorf continues, “because a lot of us trans people have documentation that shows the gender we identify with.”

And a number of experts have pointed out the judgement might not be as clearcut as initial interpretation. “But, as you’ve seen with America, [where] they’ve started putting ‘M’ on trans women’s passports… it’s not out of the realms of imagination.” Will everyone be forced to show ID documents before entering a public toilet or changing room? And who will be in charge of deciding who is gender-conforming enough to use the facilities?

When we catch up a few weeks after our meeting, Bergdorf is fuming over a speech that the prime minister Keir Starmer has just given on another matter: immigration. “It was extremely reminiscent of Enoch Powell, talking about how we risk becoming strangers in our country. Just so, so grim.” Bergdorf is often casually labelled as a “trans activist”, but this does not accurately describe the wide-ranging nature of her campaigning. In an Instagram post she made when the government announced plans to cut benefits to disabled people she wrote: “Only caring about your own rights is exactly how you lose them.”

Bergdorf understands the persecution of trans people as part of a larger, global slide towards authoritarianism. “We just hear ‘small boats, small boats, small boats’. These aren’t just ‘small boats’. These are people fleeing extremely dangerous and unfathomable circumstances.” And, similarly, “People just hear ‘trans people, trans people, trans people.’ [The message is] ‘Be scared. Here is your culprit…’ So I have a lot of empathy with migrants, because I feel like the way in which we’re presented in the media and within politics is very similar.”

There is, however, one bright spot that Bergdorf sees in the current dystopian outlook. The Supreme Court ruling has brought about a clarifying moment in trans ally-ship. “I feel like people are starting to understand what has been going on this whole time. I’d been saying ‘trans rights are human rights’, but it wasn’t really landing.” Now, though, interim guidance has effectively left it down to individual workers – restaurant servers, teachers, lifeguards and receptionists at Soho members’ clubs – to either enforce the law or take a stand against it. “It’s like, ‘Do you want to become a gender cop?’ And I think a lot of people are like, ‘OK, well, this is how it involves me.’”

Being simultaneously trans and a woman and a woman of colour, means that Bergdorf herself has rarely enjoyed the luxury of sitting out a fractious debate. But now that everyone is being pulled into the fray, her intersecting identities make her well placed to meet the moment. “Instead of engaging in ‘cancel culture’, now I think, go after the system, not the person. Because the person is just a symptom of the system.” Bergdorf is seeking a resolution that liberates and empowers us all. “It’s pick-a-side time, but it’s also pick yourself time,” she says. “Like, ‘Who do you want to be in this moment?’ Because trans rights really do involve everybody. At a very basic level it’s about autonomy; it’s the right to be who you are.”

Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf will be screened in UK cinemas on 10 and 11 June. Talk To Me By Munroe Bergdorf is published by Penguin at £16.99

Photographs by Rachell Smith; fashion editor Jo Jones; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; hair by Aminata Kamara at Aminatacreative using Cloud Nine and Redken; makeup by Bianca Spencer using Huda Beauty and Isamaya

For free confidential support, contact the Samaritans on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org

For LGBTQIA+ mental health services, visit mind.org.uk

• This article was amended on 10 June 2025 to include additional information about the NSPCC's decision to remove Munroe Bergdorf from her role as a Childline ambassador.