Activist Munroe Bergdorf: 'We need to bring the transgender conversation back to a human level'

There’s a clip, in Munroe Bergdorf’s new documentary Love & Rage, in which she is grilled by tabloid titan Piers Morgan. 

“When you say ‘all white people are racist’, as a white person, I find that offensive!” he thunders across the Good Morning Britain desk. “You’re playing your old trick, of being the victim!”

The nasty encounter is one of several Bergdorf endured in late summer, 2017. Enraged by a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, USA, she’d penned a Facebook post condemning the “racial violence of white people”.

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The backlash was rapid and brutal. The documentary captures some of it: Bergdorf cornered on live television; Bergdorf blinking back tears; Bergdorf struggling to interrupt a journalist’s tirade.

They’re painful clips to revisit, she tells Big Issue. 

“I had a lot of hatred, had death threats, and it felt really unsafe,” the 37-year-old recalls. “So, when I watch that back, I just want to reach into the screen and hug myself.”

We meet in a Central London hotel, where Bergdorf is in full promo mode: juggling interviews for both the documentary and a new book, Talk To Me: How to Talk about the Things that Matter. The former is billed as “an intimate portrait” of the activist’s personal and professional life, while the latter promises a roadmap through today’s polarised landscape of cancel culture and identity politics.

Bergdorf is no stranger to public battles over identity. The Facebook posts row came just days after she was announced as L’Oréal’s first transgender model. The beauty brand dubbed her the “face of modern diversity”; days later, she’d been sacked for her social media output. 

“All hell broke loose,” Bergdorf recalls. “Somehow I’m the problem for speaking about the problem.

“I think I beat myself up a lot and maybe believed a lot about what people in the media and people online would say about me.”

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The backlash – which included that Piers Morgan interview, and a deluge of anti-transgender trolling – was deeply unpleasant for Bergdorf.

But why does it still matter, nearly a decade later? After all, she’s far from the only public figure to endure a Morgan diatribe or a firestorm over a controversial post. Well, because her public “cancellation” – and the identity-based culture war it ignited – was a harbinger of what was to come. And not just for the model.

“I mean, that was just the beginning, really,” she tells Big Issue. “Things have definitely got worse.”

Until 2015, Brussels-based advocacy group ILGA-Europe consistently ranked Britain as the most LGBTQ+ friendly country in Europe. Since then, we’ve plunged to 22nd place, named alongside Hungary and Georgia as countries with the biggest falls in rankings.

Public support is slipping too – only 64% of Britons described themselves as “not prejudiced” against transgender people in 2022, down from 82% just a year earlier.

As one of Britain’s most recognisable trans women, Munroe Bergdorf has had a front seat to this downward spiral.

“If you look back at when we were gaining visibility in 2015, public approval was good,” she reflects.

“People didn’t feel threatened by trans people, and they genuinely felt that trans people deserved equality and respect, and self-ID wasn’t a contentious issue because there was no reason for it to be.”

What changed? Bergdorf pauses. 

“I think that homophobia never really went away,” she says. “The will to demonise queerness never really went away, and suddenly we have a very visible community that is visible enough to exploit, but small enough to not have to pander to for votes. I think all that hatred really got directed towards us at a time of convenience.”

At the same time, “anti-woke” has hardened into ideology. The political Overton window has shifted right.

“We do not believe in DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and that madness in any way at all,” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said last month. His party leads Labour in an increasing number of voting intention polls.

Section 28 all over again

But the past was no utopia either. When Bergdorf was growing up in 1990s Essex, she was “consistently bullied” for her effeminate mannerisms and mixed-race heritage.

“I was raised during Section 28 so I legally couldn’t talk to my teachers about my sexuality,” she recalls. “I felt embarrassed that I was being bullied, I hadn’t come out yet as queer. I had no one to talk to.”

Introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1988, Section 28 barred schools and local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”, effectively cutting off support for queer youth. The law wasn’t repealed in England and Wales until 2003.

It’s so recent, I say. Surely, we should celebrate that progress?

“Well, I don’t know,” Bergdorf replies, “because Keir Starmer introducing the inability to speak about gender identity in schools is basically Section 28 all over again. So we definitely haven’t come that far.”

She’s referring to a 2024 Conservative proposal to ban educators from teaching the “contested view that gender identity is a spectrum”. Then-opposition leader Keir Starmer agreed he was “not in favour of ideology being taught in schools on gender”.

Legal protections are shifting too. In April, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of “woman” is based on biological sex, allowing authorities to exclude trans people from single-sex spaces – even those with a legal gender recognition certificate. Gender-critical campaigners called it a “win for common sense”. Trans activists condemned it.

“The judgment does not remove the legal protections trans people currently enjoy under the Equality Act,” a panel of United Nations experts said. “But it may be used to justify exclusionary policies that further stigmatise and marginalise an already vulnerable population.”

The guidance is a devastating blow for trans rights, Bergdorf says. “The EHRC guidance [the Equality and Human Rights Commission interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling] could function as segregation. 

“Trans rights are very much a litmus test in what we will accept. And if we accept the segregation of trans people, we accept that they can be harassed, demonised and dehumanised, then we really condemn ourselves to that narrative.”

In this view, trans rights are a bellwether for other civil liberties. If discrimination against this tiny community is allowed to continue, Bergdorf argues, other rights, “say, gay marriage, or the right to not be discriminated against if you have an abortion, or the freedom of religious expression” could be next.

It’s a bleak picture; a parochial society governed by fear and hostility. We’re already seeing such a society take shape across the Atlantic. Despite everything, Munroe Bergdorf refuses to give up hope. 

“A large swathe of the population can be forgiven,” she says: they are “misguided, not malicious”. 

We can’t be in the situation where pinkwashing is continuing  

“We have been told that, you know, the government is there to serve us, and that the media is there to educate us. And there’s been a very clear bias in both media and politics that ultimately lands on seeing trans as the worst-case scenario.” 

But being trans is nothing of the sort – as Bergdorf herself shows. Eight years on from the L’Oréal scandal, she’s now an advocate for UN Women UK and a patron of trans young people’s charity Mermaids. In 2022, she became the first trans person to appear on the cover of Cosmopolitan UK. L’Oréal has even welcomed her back, appointing her to its UK Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Board.

Politically, there are glimmers of progress. Pride organisers in Birmingham, Brighton, London and Manchester have banned political parties from their events in “unequivocal solidarity” with the trans community. That’s a good start, Bergdorf says. 

“The two-party system especially and political parties have failed the trans community – and now we’re left in a situation where we’re seeing the Labour Party post, ‘Happy Pride everybody.’ 

“We can’t be in the situation where pinkwashing is continuing.”

This Pride Month, Munroe Bergdorf will lead various marches, speak at events and uphold a noble tradition: “Getting drunk somewhere in Soho.”

But before that, there’s work to do. On the day of our interview, she’s preparing for the release of Love & Rage.

“I hope that it makes people feel less alone if they feel alone,” Bergdorf says, leaning forward in her chair. “And I hope it just brings the transgender conversation back to a human level, instead of seeing it as a sensationalised, alien topic that a lot of people have come to understand it as.”

Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf will be available to rent and own on digital globally from 14 July 2025.

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