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Nadia Almada has admitted she’s ‘terrified’ after the UK’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women.
The 48-year-old star, who made Big Brother history in 2004 as the iconic reality show’s first transgender winner, has opened up on her fears over the impact of the ruling.
Last week the UK’s highest court confirmed the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act ‘refer to a biological woman and biological sex’.
This means transgender women with a gender recognition certificate can be excluded from single-sex spaces, including changing rooms and toilets, if ‘proportionate’.
Appearing on Friday’s episode of Good Morning Britain, Nadia said: ‘It’s terrifying times for me. The whole idea we are not woman is terrifying.’
She added: ‘For me, or for us, people from my generation that lived with those experiences of being discriminated, now having those protected rights taken away from us, it’s very dehumanising and it’s terrifying.’
Nadia described the current climate as ‘troubling times’, while she also questioned being thought of as transgender above being ‘a woman’ first and foremost.
‘It pains me that my identity is being questioned, and also where does sex and gender comes first,’ she said. ‘For me, it’s more about my identity. And I think most of the time people identity me as transgender.
‘But I believe in my way of how I carry my life, I’m a woman first, and a second of trans identity. This is how I live my life, and navigate it in society.’
She also admitted if she was taken to a male hospital award as a result of the ruling, she would consider refusing life-saving treatment.
She added: ‘The idea of waking up in a male ward – I would rather refuse treatment than be subjected to that.’
Nadia noted she’s ‘been working through all of this and trying not to hyper-sensitive about things’, and has ’embraced all parts’ of herself.
However, the ruling has ‘triggered the whole idea’ of femininity, and how other people will ‘see her as’.
‘It was super dysphoric for me. You have to understand, I’ve been trying to work through this and tried to be not super vigilant and hyper sensitive about things,’ she explained.
Nadia pointed to the fallout of the ruling, which could see her and others ‘questioned by vigilantes under the pretence that they could call us trans women or not’.
Fighting back tears, she asked: ‘Where is my safety in that regard? We don’t have equal civil rights and freedoms.
‘That to me is very frightening because there is going to be a lot of interpretations and how we’re going to navigate in society and where is this going?’
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV1.
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