Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf was sacked from her role with L'Oreal when she spoke out about inequality on Facebook. Faima Bakar was in the audience at Wadham College as she spoke about the controversy and her experiences as a trans model from a minority ethnic background.

WHEN transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf spoke out against inequalities in a Facebook post earlier this year it saw her sacked by beauty giant L'Oreal.

On Tuesday she received a warm welcome at Wadham College when she spoke about the experience and being transgender – which refers to someone whose personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex – as well as race and privilege.

The 29-year-old model and DJ came under fire for her Facebook post, in which she said there is a racial system in the UK that disadvantages minorities and favours white people.

After a wave of publicity she was dropped from L'Oreal's diversity campaign.

The Londoner highlighted the irony of being hired as part of a diversity campaign and then fired for speaking out about gender, race, and diversity.

At Wadham Ms Bergdorf took questions from a diverse audience.

She said: "It's always great to get out, meet people, hear what people have to say, ultimately that's what matters."

The model, who is leading clothing chain Uniqlo in its 'This Way to Utopia' campaign, said: "Being trans isn't a choice, it's being talked about as if it's a choice.

"That intersects with racism, if you're trans and you're black, that's two battles you've got to go up against.

"I do what I do because I want to make sure other people have that support system.

"Growing up, I couldn't put being trans into language, because I didn't know what being trans was, I always experienced racism, but we weren't talking about racism as an experience, we were talking about racism as individual acts, when it's really a system.

"If I had the language to speak about what I was experiencing, it would've made things a lot easier.

The first transgender model to be part of a UK beauty campaign, she added: "I draw power from my communities, I feel like it's great to listen to the people around you, there's so many influential people within the communities, right on our doorstep that aren't listened to, that are written off as too radical, too rebellious, it's really important to get a real world view, as well as take a neighbourhood approach to activism.

"Where I grew up, there weren't a lot of people of colour, so I felt really alienated.

"Youth projects and even investment within the youth is so overlooked, especially for trans kids, it's diabolical.

"The way they're talked about in the press, the lack of support, lack of understanding of issues about body image or even down to the changing room debate, people assume it's something that involves adults, but it involves kids. "For kids to go into a changing room with a gender they don't identify as when they're still presenting as the gender they were assigned with at birth, is a highly intimidating thing, so we need to be thinking about the kids as well, not just adults.

"I don't think tokenism is a necessary evil, it's on brands to make sure that they're being diverse, not tokenistic, it's very easy to be diverse, it just means that you're being more ethical as a company, you need to actually make an effort to address the diversity issue."