When LGBTQ+ pioneers are discussed, a number of famous faces probably spring to mind. To mark the start of Pride Month 2025 we wanted to share a story you might not be quite as familiar with: Caroline Cossey.

Caroline Cossey – also known as Tula – was a Bond girl, dancer and top model who took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights in the ’90s in a bid to change discriminatory UK laws.

Defunct tabloid the News of the World outed her as trans in 1981 after she featured in the Bond film For Your Eyes Only.

Up until that point, the career that had led to her Bond appearance had been a successful and lucrative one. When she was 17 she left home and became an usher at a West End theatre, where a choreographer spotted her and asked if she wanted to become a showgirl.

When she told him she was hadn’t yet had gender-affirming surgery, he was unfazed and told her he should go for it anyway. She plucked up the courage to go to the audition and was soon working in Paris, then Rome. She used the money she made as a dancer to fund her surgery, before going on to forge a career as an international supermodel.

In 1978, after securing a part on the TV game show 3-2-1, a tabloid journalist contacted her to tell her he had discovered she was trans and was planning to write about it. She dropped out of the show. In 1981, she was cast as an extra in For Your Eyes Only, and shortly after that the News of the World publicly outed her, splashing the headline “James Bond’s Girl Was A Boy”. 

In her first autobiography I Am a Woman, written to take back control of her own narrative, she wrote: 

“There, I thought, went all my hopes of leading a normal life. I was hounded by journalists everywhere I went, and their lack of understanding – the kinds of ignorant questions they asked – made me determined to tell my side of the story.”

In a later interview with Cosmopolitan, she said that she’d attempted suicide after the traumatic incident.

“I woke up in my bathroom in vomit. I just felt ashamed and embarrassed. And then at a certain point, I just got sick of being ashamed of something I’d never had any control over, which was my assigned gender.”

Shortly after that, she met an Italian man named Count Glauco Lasinio at a skiwear shoot in Italy. He proposed and urged her to campaign for changes to the UK’s anti-trans laws, including the fact that she wasn’t legally allowed to marry a man. She began the seven year process that would take her petition against the British government’s refusal to treat her as a woman to the European Court of Human Rights. The lengthy case would outlast her relationship with the Italian count.

When he died in 2019, she paid tribute to him on Twitter, saying: “Deeply saddened to lose a wonderful and supportive friend. Count Glauco Lasinio was one of only a handful of men that stood up for me publicly and made me fight for my rights. He restored my dignity after the onslaught of being outed by the press and made me a proud lady again.”