Schafer, who rose to prominence in her role as the transgender character Jules Vaughn in Euphoria, has been open about her experience with transitioning and living as a transgender person.
Model and actress, Hunter Schafer, has spoken candidly in an interview with ELLE about undergoing gender-affirming bottom surgery — a procedure wherein a patient’s genital anatomy is altered to align with their gender identity — in December of 2025.
Schafer, who rose to prominence in her role as the transgender character Jules Vaughn in Euphoria, has been open about her experience with transitioning and living as a transgender person, particularly in a world making it increasingly difficult. Speaking about the surgery, she told ELLE, “For a long time I’ve embraced the gender-expansive part of myself, and I really wanted to try to make that previous body work, because I thought there was something really cool and badass about it.” Ultimately, transitioning medically made sense for Schafer — a decision she said “was amazing, and I love it so much.”
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Having grown up in conservative North Carolina to two pastor parents, Schafer grappled with her trans identity as a teenager, telling ELLE she was “really angry at the world and at the restrictions I felt growing up in the church and with pastor parents.” When she was 18, Schafer was recognised as the youngest plaintiff listed in a lawsuit against North Carolina which prohibited trans people from using the bathroom of the gender they identified with. The 'bathroom bill', as it was called, was repealed. Despite all that, a decade later the plight of transgender people continues to be under threat, particularly under the Trump administration.
In the interview, Schafer discusses how she feels about gender and identity now, almost 14 years after she first began transitioning. The “magical thing about queerness,” she says, is that “On an ideological level, it’s about possibility and expansion and growth, and being on that journey and finding yourself.” She goes on to describe the tension that exists between queerness as an idea versus the way it exists in reality, saying that, over the years, she’s reached a 'flatter' place with her identity — “I’m a woman. I’m a girl,” she says.