When I meet Munroe Bergdorf, the transgender activist and model, it’s a bitterly cold January afternoon in Shoreditch. Appropriate weather, since it also happens to be Blue Monday, notoriously the most depressing day of the year and reason enough to make minimal effort in appearance. But not for Bergdorf — she arrives for our interview wearing a full-length, ribbed black dress and heels and a face so perfectly made up it looks airbrushed.
For someone who has half a million Instagram followers and has harnessed social media throughout her career as a tool for change, she is surprisingly a very private person. ‘I won’t share my life on social media,’ she says. ‘This is the way I want to share.’ Bergdorf is referring to her new book, Transitional, a 200-page memoir that takes readers through some of the biggest challenges she has faced, from growing up in (and often running away from) the sheltered village of Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex in the 1990s, to mental health battles and toxic relationships, before eventually finding community in London. For most, penning a memoir at the age of 36 might seem premature — so why now? ‘I think I’m at the point where I’m really coming into a new chapter of my life. While writing the book I realised how much I hadn’t processed [and] I wanted to draw a line under the chaos of my youth,’ she explains.
