In 2004, she won the show by the highest margin to date, after a summer of chain-smoking, dancing and opening the eyes of the British public. She looks back on how her life changed for ever
’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.by the highest margin to date, racking up almost 4m votes despite starting the show as a 50-1 outsider.
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.
“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.”
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?”
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. “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.”
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 “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.”
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