Transgender model Andreja Pejic became the first transgender model to be featured in Vogue and now she's landed a major beauty contract

Update

Transgender model Andreja Pejic just became the first transgender model to be profiled in Vogue – and now she’s landed a major beauty contract.

Pejic has been announced as the face of Make Up For Ever, making her one of the few transgender models to score such a campaign.

We seem to be reaching a transgender tipping point, with Laverne Cox appearing nude in Allure and being named one of People magazine’s Most Beautiful people for 2015.

“There are just more categories now,” Pejic told Vogue. “It’s good. We’re finally figuring out that gender and sexuality are more complicated.”

What Mamamia said earlier…..

We couldn’t happier that the pages of our favourite magazines are stepping up.

They’ve accepted plus-size models, short models, black models, disabled models and older models into their ranks like they’ve always been there (which they should have been).

But never before have they openly embraced, spoken about and given rise to the topic of transgender models.

Until now.

In US Vogue’s May issue, transgender model Andreja Pejic shares her war-stricken history, arduous gender-confirmation surgery, struggle to reconcile with her identity, and now, a willingness to excel in a job description that usually favours the “majority.”

Read more: Andreja Pejic just became the first transgender woman to walk the catwalk.

This deserves a standing ovation.

Born Andrej Pejic in Bosnia, just months before the start of the Bosnian War, Andreja fled to a refugee camp with her family before emigrating to Melbourne, Australia.

“Society doesn’t tell you that you can be trans. I thought about being gay, but it didn’t fit… I thought, Well, maybe this”—the fantasy of living life as a girl—“is just something you like to imagine sometimes. Try to be a boy and try to be normal.”

She admits that for a long time there was a general lack of empathy directed towards her and the trans community.

Read more: First photos of Glee’s transgender character, post transition.

This is confirmed by a set of statistics from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, conducted in 2011, which found that 90 percent of trans people said they have dealt with discrimination at work and almost 20 percent reported being denied a place to live. Forty-one percent have attempted suicide.

However, we are changing.

President Obama became the first American President to give a speech that included the term ‘transgender.’ Medicare has dropped its transgender exclusions. More than 62 American universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, provide hormones and gender-confirmation surgeries for their students. And that’s just the beginning.

Andreja’s decision to live a life she desires is courageous.

And Vogue’s decision to openly accept and encourage her wishes is just the icing on the cake.

Acceptance is the movement. Let’s keep this rolling…

Want to see more of Vogue’s firsts? Click right this way.

Are you surprised this is the first time the fashion world has opened up about transgender?