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10 Celebs No One Knew Were Trans

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An Adelaide teenager just became the first Australian-born transgender model with an agency contract.

TheThings Celebrity’s video countdown, “10 Celebs No One Knew Were Trans,” published September 20, 2016, profiles public figures and models whose transgender identity caught fans off guard. The centerpiece of the rundown is Gemma Cowling, a 19-year-old from Adelaide who made modeling history this year, but the video also situates her story next to two more familiar names: Carmen Carrera and Caitlyn Jenner.

• Gemma Cowling, 19, became the first Australian-born transgender model to sign with a modeling agency when she joined Adelaide’s Azalea Models in 2016.
• Cowling came out and began her gender transition in late 2015, right after finishing high school, then made her runway debut at the Adelaide Fashion Festival in 2016 before landing overseas representation.
• The video frames her breakthrough alongside Carmen Carrera’s signing with Elite Model Management and Caitlyn Jenner’s high-profile 2015 transition.

A Model’s Breakthrough in Adelaide

Cowling grew up in Adelaide and, by her own account, sensed something didn’t line up long before she had the language or the support to act on it. She waited until she had finished high school before coming out and starting her transition in late 2015, a timeline that put her walking into Azalea Models as a fully out teenager rather than someone hiding a secret from a new agency. Azalea signed her in 2016, and with that signature she became the first Australian-born transgender model on an agency’s books — not just at Azalea, but anywhere in the country.

That distinction mattered in an industry that had, up to that point, treated transgender representation as an import from Paris or New York rather than something happening in South Australia. Cowling’s signing gave the local fashion scene its own reference point, and it happened fast: less than a year after she came out, she had a contract and a booking sheet.

Signed at nineteen, Cowling became the first Australian-born transgender model on an agency’s roster — and the offers from overseas started before her first year on the books was up.

From Runway Debut to International Attention

Cowling’s first real test came at the Adelaide Fashion Festival in 2016, where she made her runway debut in front of an industry crowd that had watched local designers for years but hadn’t watched a moment quite like this one. The show gave her a stage her Azalea contract alone couldn’t provide, and it worked as the launching point the agency needed: word of her debut traveled past Adelaide and into agencies overseas, who began signing her for representation outside Australia.

It’s the same pattern that’s carried other trans models into the mainstream over the past few years, the kind covered in pieces tracking where former reality-show modeling contestants land after their initial breakthrough — a domestic debut that becomes the credential for international bookings. For Cowling, going from a hometown runway to overseas representation in the same calendar year as her agency signing is an unusually fast climb.

Context From Carrera and Jenner

The video doesn’t leave Cowling’s story standing alone. It draws a direct line to Carmen Carrera, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” breakout who went on to sign with Elite Model Management, one of the industry’s most recognized agencies, giving transgender talent a foothold at the top tier of fashion representation years before Cowling’s own signing. It also points to Caitlyn Jenner, whose transition in 2015 became the most visible of its kind in entertainment, pulling mainstream television cameras toward a subject the industry had largely avoided.

Placed next to those two names, Cowling’s signing reads less like an isolated local headline and more like the next rung on a ladder that Carrera and Jenner had already started building — visibility on a drag competition and a reality-TV transition eventually clearing space for a teenager in Adelaide to walk into a modeling agency as simply another new signee, the story that outlets like those covering the next generation of models entering the industry keep circling back to.

The Barriers Still Ahead

None of that erases the harder parts of Cowling’s account: the difficulty of not fitting the expected mold as a kid, the wait until after high school to come out, and the adjustment to sudden recognition once the Azalea contract and the Adelaide Fashion Festival appearance put her name in front of an audience she hadn’t previously had to answer to. The video treats those struggles as part of the story, not a footnote to the signing itself.

What happens next for Cowling is the part worth watching — an Adelaide teenager with one runway show and one domestic agency contract behind her, now fielding interest from agencies overseas who signed her purely off that first year of work.