Nadia Almada: I almost certainly wouldn’t win Big Brother now as a trans woman
In 2004, I won Big Brother with a record-breaking 74% of the public vote.
I’m starting to hate the word ‘clarity’.
It seems like every single politician has said it when welcoming the recent Supreme Court ruling, which decided that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act ‘refer to a biological woman and biological sex’.
Keir Starmer might say the ruling offers ‘clarity’, but I would say it’s terrifying, dehumanising, and derogatory. As a woman of trans identity living in the UK, I have never been more scared of my rights being taken away.
I have always known I was supposed to be assigned female at birth. As a result, I never really had what you’d call a ‘coming out’ – I just acted how I naturally felt, then people around me were subsequently often unkind or abusive.
By the time I moved from Portugal to the UK in 1996 – aged 19 – I continued to live my authentic life as a woman first and my trans identity second. Then along came Big Brother in 2004.
