Kris Fox, TV star, social media influencer and proud trans woman. Photo / Greg Bowker.
The Hustle NZ’s Kris Fox is her authentic self and is not afraid to shock. The no-holds-barred trans influencer tells Phoebe Watt why she’s no troubled side character.
Your first encounter with Kris Fox may have come a week or two ago when you laid eyes and ears on this over-the-top, sexy, “stunty”, Fijian-Indian trans woman in Three’s new reality show, The Hustle NZ.
My first encounter was a few weeks earlier at a speaking event run by a popular dating app, where Australian sex and relationships therapist Chantelle Otten moderated an intimate discussion around sex, sexuality, and representation. It was here that Fox – impeccably outfitted like Beyonce’s body double in a skintight animal print dress, long false nails and even longer eyelashes – offered her take on how trans bodies are portrayed in the media and specifically, scripted TV series.
“On the rarest of occasions where there is a trans character on TV, they are always troubled. They’re trans and they’re a prostitute or a drug addict, or they’re homeless. They’re struggling, their life is hard. It’s never a schoolteacher or an accountant that just happens to be trans and is shown dealing with the same kinds of issues – relationships dramas, work commitments, your own, everyday neurotic bulls*** – that a straight, cis character might.”
At 29 years old, working as a digital content creator, living in East Auckland with her boyfriend, Jordan, and, like most of her generational cohort, working non-stop to turn her former side hustle into enough cash to keep up with inflation, Fox’s point is clear. She is not a side character with a sad story. She is the main cast, and she is on a mission to make sure the next generation of trans or gender-nonconforming kids know that they can be, too.
“That was definitely my impetus for doing the show,” she explains a few weeks later, freshly applied nails tapping on a can of Diet Coke. “I mean, I love the camera. I think I was born to be on TV. But there had to be more of a reason behind it than maybe gaining a few more Instagram followers. It was going to require me to show sides of myself that I never had before. And being such a mainstream platform, expose myself to criticism that I haven’t really been exposed to since I was a bullied teen. So there needed to be something meaningful to justify it, and I realised that helping others was it.”
Fox’s other impetus was shock value. “Let’s shake these boomers to the core,” she says in one promotional clip for the show. Suffice to say, boomers, boomer-adjacents, and anyone who recoils at the C-word will be shaken. The first episode documents Fox preparing for breast enhancement surgery (“hormone replacement therapy only gets you so far, girl”). And that’s about the least confronting part. But Fox wants us to be confronted and sit with that. In doing so, you might be able to conjure just one fraction of the discomfort of feeling like you were living in the wrong body since you were basically sentient.
“Seriously, from the youngest age, my family knew. Even my nana would be like, “That’s not a regular boy. She’s a girl.” Fox understands that her “incredibly supportive” family makes her the exception to the rule as far as coming out as trans. “I know a lot of trans girls, especially brown trans girls, that have had it so much harder. Whether it’s religion or culture, like I grew up in Auckland but I’m half Fijian. It’s such a conservative society and the fact that my parents protected me from that and always had my back… I went to a Catholic primary school here and I remember once the priest taking my mum aside and being like, “Your child is acting too feminine, you need to pray for him,” and Mum was like, “Excuse me?” Looking back, I just think it’s funny, like this was my last year of primary school and if the priest was picking up that female energy, then what does that tell you?”
It’s a moment of levity in our interview, but school was hell for Fox. The bullying from her classmates was constant, and the totalitarianism from teachers who didn’t have the education, resources, or compassion to manage a transgender child made her feel both picked out, and totally isolated and alone.
“This was in the mid-2000s and the conversation around the gender and sexuality spectrum just didn’t exist. Trans kids today do have it easier in that there are positive conversations happening, there are safe spaces online and places for them to connect, there are resources for educators and families, and there’s counselling that’s focused on accepting who you are, and then talking through the options for transitioning, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and gender-affirming surgeries. In my day, they called it gender dysmorphia and it was a mental illness. Being trans is not a mental illness.”
To date, Fox has had the breast enhancement surgery we see documented in the first episode of The Hustle NZ, and what is termed “liquid facial feminisation surgery”, “which isn’t a surgery at all, it’s a mixture of Botox and injectable fillers as an alternative to having surgical face feminisation – I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of having my actual face torn off, shaved down and reshaped,” she grimaces.
The large scar that runs vertically down her torso was from heart surgery she underwent at the age of 7. Describing the procedure as “literally the most painful thing you can imagine”, it wasn’t until her early 20s that she began to see that pain as a strength and embrace the scar she used to go out of her way to hide. “One day I just thought to myself, none of these kids teasing me could ever handle that pain, so who gives a flying f*** what they say? Today, I see my scar as a symbol of strength that represents everything I’ve been through in life.”
Fox didn’t begin HRT until her second year of university, and it took her a couple of goes to commit. “I started taking the drugs and then I freaked out and came off them. I think because it’s such a big decision, and even though I knew who I was, there was still a stigma. In my head, it was almost like a “better the devil you know” thing. Like I knew how to be a woman in a man’s body. I knew the s*** I got for that, but it was s*** I could take. I had never experienced being a woman in a woman’s body, or how I’d be treated by society as an openly trans woman, and that was scary. Plus, the hormones! Oh my God, girl! Those little oestrogen pills, I would see a homeless dog in the street, or someone would accidentally brush past my shoulder, and I would literally burst into tears.”
The courage to restart HRT and stick with the programme came from her online audience, back when she was one of Aotearoa’s first viral YouTubers. “I would mainly be making beauty tutorials, but I would talk about my life and my trans journey, and the support from my followers and just that positive feedback loop… it was the extra push I needed.” Also supporting Fox was her boyfriend, Jordan Bryant-Bing. “I love him so much,” she says. “It’s so cheesy but he’s just the most amazing person I’ve ever met. We’ve been together for three years now, but we were best friends for like six, seven years before that – before I even transitioned. So, it’s like being with the person who has known and loved every version of myself. I’m so lucky.”
Bryant-Bing appears on The Hustle NZ briefly, “but that’s absolutely not his thing. He loves that I do it, and that being on TV and stunting and being fabulous makes me happy, but he also knows that it’s just work. And I’ll come home at the end of a day of filming the show, or making a video blog and being really extra, and I’ll wash my face and put on my ugliest pyjamas, and we’ll cuddle up on the couch and that’s the real me. And I think we are just like most straight couples in that way.”
Yes, if you’d been wondering, as I had throughout the interview, Fox and Bryant-Bing are in a heterosexual relationship. “People ask him all the time like, ‘So are you gay?’ and he’s like ‘No. I’m attracted to women. I’m in a relationship with a woman. It’s as simple as that.’” That the couple met and were friends before Fox transitioned has no bearing on how they label their sexuality, as individuals or a couple. The way she tells it, it’s as simple as boy meets girl, but girl was just in the wrong body for a bit.
Given the depth of their friendship and the enormity of what they’ve been through together, it’s no wonder that Fox feels her most authentic self with Bryant-Bing. “It’s funny, that’s exactly what the producers of the show said. Like I’d be performing like a seal for hours, because I know that’s what they want, and I enjoy letting that side of me come out to play so it’s fine. But then there’d be an in-between take, or just a scene at home with Jordan where I forget the cameras are rolling, and they’re like, ‘You are just so at ease.’” Note to viewers, if you want to see some real, reality TV, this is it.
Having spent the first two decades of her life not merely existing in the wrong body, it’s easy to imagine coming out the other side with an almost primordial need to ruffle feathers, to stunt and pout and preen and be obscene, and that’s the Kris Fox that her 100,000 Instagram followers know and love. Validated at last by her new body and new sense of self, it’s as though she’s finally been given permission to take up space, and she’s going for every damn centimetre in the room.
But Fox knows as well as anyone that people contain multitudes, and it would appear that letting the cameras capture her vulnerable side took a different kind of bravery than the one that allows her to walk into an event, tits and lashes first, and immediately pull focus. Vulnerability might, in fact, be the most shocking thing Fox has to teach us – whether you identify as a boomer, boomer-adjacent, or generationally fluid.
The Hustle NZ is screening on ThreeNow
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