‘I felt invincible!’: Nadia Almada on strength, glamour and trans rights – 20 years after winning Big Brother

‘I’m in denial,” says Nadia Almada, arching a well-groomed eyebrow. “I don’t understand how it’s been 20 years.” She pauses: “Twenty years? I need a trigger warning … ” Then comes that full-throated laugh, instantly recognisable to anyone who spent the summer of 2004 watching Almada chain-smoke, dance, cry, flash and fight her way through the fifth series of Big Brother. She won that by the highest margin to date, racking up almost 4m votes despite starting the show as a 50-1 outsider.

At the age of 27, she was also Big Brother’s first transgender winner – her gender identity shared with the viewers but not her fellow housemates, at Almada’s request.

It is inconceivable that producers would sanction a similar arrangement today, in particular given the heat around the question of trans women accessing women-only spaces. But Almada says the reason for not telling other housemates about her gender identity “was about claiming my time, my space, my womanhood, with no labels. All my life I’ve been dictated to about my identity by state, church, community and family – I still am! – but inside the Big Brother house I made my own rules.”

Her victory was a very personal triumph – she spoke powerfully afterwards of how it felt to be accepted on her own terms. But, coming in the same year as Labour’s Gender Recognition Act , which, for the first time, allowed transgender people to change their legal sex, it was also a pivotal moment in the public recognition of trans identity. As the show’s host, Davina McCall, later put it: “Britain opened their eyes.”

Now Almada lives mainly out of the public gaze, but she has agreed to speak to the Guardian to mark the 20th anniversary of her win and reflect on what has changed for trans women.

“I didn’t go in there with any plans to be a role model or a reference point,” she says. “But, by default, I became that person and there is that whole generation since that still uses me as their first moment of understanding what a trans woman could be.”

At 47, Almada is both a little more chic and a lot more relaxed than her younger self. Gone are the corset dresses and unruly dark curls; in their place are a sleek blond hairstyle and pale blue shirt dress. But she still lives in Woking, Surrey, surrounded by the friends she has known since they were teenagers together on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Back then “we thought we were the bee’s knees”, she says; nowadays “everyone has families, mortgages and kids”.

In her downtime, Almada enjoys travel, culture, spending time in nature and gardening. She works as a hair stylist, having trained with the Sassoon Academy. “It’s not as glamorous,” she says, with a hint of apology, “but then nothing is as glamorous as we perceive it to be”.

Of course, she has nothing to apologise for. She made the most of the opportunities that Big Brother presented – releasing a single that reached No 27 in the charts, and dipping in and out of other reality TV formats – but she was always a realist about her instant fame.

“I know how superficial this industry is,” she told the Observer in her first newspaper interview after leaving the Big Brother house, confounding expectations by not signing up for a tabloid tell-all. “If people want to consider me a celebrity, I’m very flattered but I don’t really think I’m worthy. I took part in an experience and had an amazing response and I’m quite content with that.”

From the jaded viewpoint of 2024, when it seems that every aspect of human experience has been pulped through a reality format, it is easy to forget the impact and ubiquity of Big Brother, the original “social experiment” entertainment, in the early 00s.

Arguments raged about whether it democratised celebrity or revealed the viewing public’s own banal narcissism. But it was ratings dynamite, broadcast six nights a week, with a 24-hour live feed available online where viewers could watch the contestants living in a specially constructed house, sealed off from the outside world, and gradually eliminated by public vote until just one remained.

It’s also worth remembering how contained celebrity was back then, when social media was in its infancy, attention was not yet atomised between TikTok feeds, and it was newspapers and magazines that guided the public on who to love and hate.

This was the landscape when Almada, already a fan of the show, decided to apply.

“Big Brother celebrated real people,” she says now, “and it brought forward minorities who were less visible on TV. That was one of its USPs, that it brought to the forefront conversations that needed to be had.”

But she applies the same realism to the public’s response to her as she does to the celebrity it generated. “The humanity of Nadia is what became relatable and endearing to people,” she says. “But I’m still debating: was it that seeing a trans woman in that scenario highlighted a curiosity or a voyeurism?”

Back then, the public discourse around transgender issues was in its infancy, she points out: “Even the word ‘transgender’ wasn’t so common – the word ‘transsexual’ was still used, which some people find derogatory.”

She still hears of individuals who saw her in the show and “even though they weren’t ready at that time, that was the first reference they could relate to. And now they are proud trans women.”

She smiles. “I believe deep down that I transcended all those things. I just became Nadia, a force to be reckoned with.”

Almada certainly brought her own tempestuous form to what was already an explosive selection of housemates – notoriously, there was such a serious fight during series five that security had to intervene and the live feed was temporarily halted.

But there was also a vulnerability to Almada that shone through in quieter moments: “For once in my life I feel like I’m a normal person,” she said in one Diary Room confessional.

“I wish I still had that Nadia in my life,” she says today.

“I felt invincible.”

Earlier she told me that she had closed her TikTok account because of disparaging comments about her appearance. But that’s not why she’s feeling so vulnerable, she insists: “It’s just that invincibility, that confidence that you have in your 20s is difficult to locate later on.”

It’s nothing to do with the culture wars? “It’s complicated,” she says. “Twenty years on we’re still debating the existence of trans women, and that means that we have not moved forward as quickly as I would have hoped back then.

“Although the community is more visible, more united and there’s a lot to be proud of, if the question itself still exists …” She shakes her head.

“I need to make clear that even though there is that toxic discourse in politics, I don’t believe it reflects the whole of this country. But there is a small minority who say these vile things – I don’t even know if they believe them, but they do so for political advantage and the consequence is to dehumanise.”

Has she experienced those consequences herself, whether with online abuse or encounters on the street … I can’t finish the full question before she is agreeing: “All my life, Libby, all my life, then and now, but now I am more attuned to it and I will not allow you to speak to me like that. I have a plan of action where I will report you or I will be very aware of my surroundings.”

So perhaps what has also changed is her response? “I grew up believing that all these things, the verbal abuse, physical abuse was part of being a trans woman, because everything was so underground,” she says. “So I grew up believing the abuse was my own doing and I had to just cry about it and move on to the next day”.

Almada was born the eldest of six siblings, and spent the first decade of her life in Madeira before the family emigrated to South Africa. But her father’s alcoholism escalated, along with his emotional and physical abuse, Almada says, and her mother returned to the island with the children when Almada was a teenager. Her father was a sick man, she says, who grew up under the Salazar dictatorship and was drafted as a youth to fight for Portugal in Africa.

I grew up believing that all these things, the verbal abuse, physical abuse was part of being a trans woman, because everything was so underground

“I now understand PTSD, and addiction is a disease. But by me talking openly about domestic violence, we break the cycle of shame and isolation that traps us.”

She remembers questioning her identity from a young age, and “being told not to behave in certain ways, because I was not corresponding to my gender.” The disconnect was especially tough in a strictly Catholic environment.

It was only after she moved to England that she “cemented” her “true identity”, and eventually consulted her GP, who referred her to a gender identity clinic.

“It was a difficult time,” she says, “but for some bizarre reason that self-belief was so present, I had it in me and I was able to move forward.”

She told her mother, to whom she remains very close, after she moved off the island. “She said she was going to pray to the Virgin Mary, Jesus and all his carpenter friends. But I said: ‘OK, listen, this is what it is.’”

Indeed, it was her appearance on Big Brother that helped bring her family together again – her “lovely” mother was waiting for her when she left the house as the winner. “It really helped us to unite as a family and allowed me to reconnect as a sister, and as an auntie soon after. And it became less of an issue.”

She keeps up with the latest iterations of Big Brother – a rebooted version started on ITV2 last year – and felt “very protective” of Hallie, an 18-year-old contestant who came out as transgender on the show last autumn.

After Brexit, and the questions it provoked “about our place in this country”, some of her Portuguese friends moved back, but for Almada: “Woking is my home.” Between friends and work, “I live the most heteronormative sort of lifestyle,” she jokes.

“The energy has shifted a bit from the loud, in your face, twentysomething me,” she says. “Now I’m a little bit more calm and reflective. But everything is good.”

She recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of her appearance on the show with Marco Sabba, a fellow housemate from 2004, who later qualified as a lawyer: “Marco is a dear friend to this day and we share great memories.”

She tells me a story about visiting the Shard in London with Sabba, taking along her yorkshire terrier, now sadly deceased and sorely missed. The Shard is not famed for its dog-friendliness, but somehow Almada talked the security guards around.

“I carried [the dog] in a handbag, and when we got to the security barriers we had to ask them to let him through. We were laughing about how we managed to get my good boy all the way up to the top.”

Nadia Almada: still a force to be reckoned with.

• This article was amended on 17 July 2024. An earlier version said that Nadia Almada was the only transgender winner of Big Brother. In fact Luke Anderson won Big Brother 13.