Mat Stevenson’s transgender daughter has said that she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps and become an actress.
Grace Hyland, a TikTok celebrity who began her gender transition at the age of 12, told New Idea that playing a trans character in a TV series would be her “dream.”
Her ideal job, she claimed, would be on Home and Away, the long-running Australian soap in which her father starred as Adam Cameron in the early 1990s.
‘I’ve always wanted to play a transgender character in a series.’ ‘It’s amazing to look back on and observe my dad’s career because he was on Home and Away for three years,’ Grace added.
‘It’s a show about real people, and I believe it’d be beneficial for shows like that to include trans tales,’ she says.
It comes after Mat symbolically adopted Belle Bambi, his daughter’s best friend, when her own father sent her away when she transitioned from male to female.
Grace broke the news to her 304,000 followers on TikTok in August, saying: ‘Now we’re sisters!’ My BFF’s father abandoned her because she is trans. So that’s what we did!’
Grace gave Bambi a bunch of flowers in the accompanying film, which then moved to Mat caressing her cheek while carrying an adoption certificate.
‘He’s always been supportive of me, and he wants to be supportive of Bambi as well,’ Grace explained.
On her TikTok account, Bambi posted a video of Mat signing the bogus adoption papers while exclaiming, ‘He’s adopted me!’
While the adoption wasn’t legally binding, the certificate indicated that Mat would be Bambi’s ‘chosen father’ in the future, and Grace would be her ‘chosen sister.’
Grace has been documenting her male-to-female transition on social media since she was 12 years old, when she first identified as a girl.
In January, she shared a montage video on Instagram showing off her spectacular ‘glow-up.’
Mat, who rose to fame after portraying Adam Cameron in Home and Away, has always been a strong supporter of his daughter.
On The Sunday Project earlier this year, he talked about Grace’s gender transition and how his friends responded when they found out about his child’s gender identification.
While some of his pals were ‘very seamless’ and ‘understood it,’ he added that others struggled and begged them to just’show some empathy.’
Grace said she knew she was supposed to be a woman when she was ‘four or five years old,’ and she began transitioning at the age of twelve.
She spent a year consulting doctors, psychologists, and authorities in the subject before beginning any physical therapy.
‘I came out when I was 12, and then I went through a gradual transition until I was 14, to grow my hair out, get my name changed, and get my blockers arranged,’ she said.
‘By the time I was 14, I was fully presenting as Grace in public and at school,’ she says.
Grace, who has 229,000 TikTok followers, says she wouldn’t be where she is now without her father’s help.
Mat also brought up the alarming suicide rate among transgender kids, adding that he didn’t want his daughter to be “one of those statistics.”
‘Unfortunately, we have a very high adolescent suicide rate in this country, which is a tragedy.’ He claims that trans-adolescents are 36 times more likely to self-harm or commit suicide.
‘There’s a clear link between self-harm and a lack of support.’ I didn’t want my daughter to end up as a statistic.’
