Thanks to the obscenely narrow standards of beauty in the industry, modelling is a crazy difficult industry to crack into, and, despite the leaps that have been made recently, being trans in Australia is a rough as fuck gig – so I can only imagine combining the two must be pretty tough.
But that’s exactly what Adelaide woman Gemma Cowling has done, becoming the first Australian born transgender model after being picked up my agency Azalea Models.
Thanks for sharing your story, Gemma! See you on the catwalks of Paris & Milan soon! #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/T3PmA6eU9J
— #TheProjectTV (@theprojecttv) June 15, 2016
The 19-year-old says that, although assigned male at birth, she always knew something wasn’t quite right, as she told “The Project“:
“From really early childhood it was obvious to me that there was something different and I wasn’t necessarily fitting in the way I was supposed to and relating to the world the way I was expected to, but it took me quite a long time to answer all of those questions and say ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on here’.”
Cowling began transitioning in November, which involves taking medication to suppress the release of specific hormones. She estimates that the full transition will cost around $30,000.
The director of the agency (who discovered Cowling) says she has great hopes for her, saying she can picture her modelling in “Paris, London, wherever she wants to go.”
You can watch her interview on the project here.
Source and photo: The Project.
