‘Big Brother’ winner Nadia Almada thinks that trans rights have “gone backwards”.
Nadia Almada says trans rights have gone backwards
The 46-year-old reality star - who won the Davina McCall-fronted Channel 4 series in 2004 with 74 percent of the public vote - believes that lots of wins for the transgender community have been rolled back since her telly heyday when she was "embraced" for who she is.
She told Metro.co.uk: The best part of 'Big Brother' was the acceptance and embracement.
I didn’t know acceptance, or even tolerance was possible aside from through my closest friends. I had a complete absence of positivity and embracement in my life.
“When I got out of the show it was the complete opposite. I get goosebumps talking about it now because it was real.”
Nadia called being “embraced” by the viewers as “a beautiful thing” as she hadn’t really experienced that on a wide scale beforehand
She said: “I was embraced and that was a beautiful thing. It came from cisgender males, cisgender females, everyone! The whole country was behind me and they adored me.
“On Big Brother, I could finally just be me and it was embraced.”
The former ‘Hollyoaks’ star admitted that she was “marginalised by society” prior to entering the show - which is being rebooted on ITV1 with AJ Odudu as the host and Marcus Bentley returning as the narrator - and had a difficult childhood but used pop culture and comedy as “escapism”.
Nadia said: “I was marginalised by society. I was a survivor of domestic violence and had alcoholic parents. All of those things, and the abandonment issues I got from my childhood, you wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
“All my life I was labelled and put into boxes. I don’t know how I survived. TV and humour were my escapism.”
Tagged in Davina McCall