Emma Ellingsen Bio

Emma Ellingsen was around 11 years old when she first joined Instagram in the sixth grade. She quickly developed a passion for it and started posting her pictures. While early on she mostly followed celebrities and people from the Disney community whom she was watching, she soon became interested in following fashion pages, such as @passiionforfashion, for inspiration. She eventually started to focus on makeup and fashion and created her YouTube channel on November 5, 2014 to make beauty related videos. She, however, made her first video on March 10, 2016, answering fan questions collected from her Snapchat following.

Her channel grew consistently as she continued to upload makeup videos, storytime videos, Q&A’s, challenges, unboxing videos and vlogs in Norwegian in the following months. However, one of her makeup videos from early 2017 had attracted the attention of many English-speaking people who asked her to make videos in English. While she already had about 40K subscribers, it was her first video in English, titled I'M TRANSGENDER. and posted on June 25, 2017, in which she opened up about her experience of being a transgender person, that earned her widespread popularity even outside Norway. In summer next year, she signed to Norwegian talent agency Heartbreak Management and took a year off from school to focus on modeling. She had already gained over 250k fans each on her Instagram profile and YouTube channel when she posed for international publication W magazine, with a readership of around half a million, in September 2018 wearing products from only Norwegian designers.

Since she was a child, Emma Ellingsen, who was born as a boy, played with dolls, often dressed up as a girl after coming home from school, and mostly hung out with female friends. She was about eight or nine when she found out that it was possible for her to be transgender after learning about transgender people from a documentary. After watching it several times, she sent her mother a text message telling her that she wanted to be a girl. Both her parents and her friends were very positive and supportive about it and she started her transition shortly after, even though she changed her name at 11. It was in fact one of her friends who helped her choose the name “Emma”

Emma Ellingsen has always been open about her sexuality and transition and was featured in the 2014 Norwegian documentary Born in the Wrong Body with other transgender children. In her video I'M TRANSGENDER., she mentioned that she had taken medications to stop her “boy-puberty”, which prevented her from changing voice or growing a beard. She also mentioned looking forward to taking female hormone supplements, which she started after turning 16. She continues to take the blocker shots and hormone treatments every few months. In her book Emma, published in September 2020, she talked about her experience of going through breast augmentation surgery the previous year. She was also scheduled to go through a gender-correcting operation in August 2020, but it was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. She finally completed the procedure at Rikshospitalet in Oslo in May 2021.

Emma Ellingsen was born with the name Tobias on September 9, 2001 in Tønsberg, Norway. She has an older sister named Mia Ellingsen who is also a social media star and model. Her mother Tina Ellingsen works in a doctor’s office, while her father works on cars. She grew up in Nøtterøy, a town that is an hour's train journey away from Oslo. She still had two years of school left when she decided to focus on modeling in 2018.