When Maria Thattil was growing up, she felt she was “nowhere to be found”. Things are a little different these days – she’s an author, media personality and pageant winner who was crowned Miss Universe Australia 2020 and then represented Australia at Miss Universe 2020 (she was placed in the top 10). All these years later, she’s finally found herself – and she’s working hard to help other women and gender-diverse people do the same...
“Feeling like you’re nowhere to be found also makes you feel like you don’t belong,” she says. Back in 2022, Maria announced she was bisexual on the TV show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! – it changed her life. “We’re all conditioned to be ashamed of these human parts of ourselves, but that is what the world is yearning to see, because that’s how we connect and that’s what makes us human. It was incredibly empowering,” she says.
Talking about sexuality with families is something Thattil is passionate about. Both Thattil and her brother came out as queer, and she knows from lived experience what it’s like to have tough conversations with parents. To parents, she says: “My advice is please come to these conversations with a level of compassion and open-mindedness and realise that sexuality and gender identity is something that is part of your child’s experience as a human being. It’s something that they’re going to navigate, and it’s really important for their mental health, life, identity and belonging that you don’t come at it by already treating it like it’s something they need to be ashamed of, because it is not. It’s a beautiful part of who they are.” Her brother Dominic came out at a time when her parents were, by her own admission, not as open-minded and inclusive in their thinking as they are now. “He is the reason my parents ended up opening their minds. I’m so proud of my mum and dad for this. In their late fifties and late sixties, they were able to shed decades of cultural and religious conservative conditioning to realise that these ideologies they once wedded themselves to, were actually conflicting with the underlying messages of love and non-judgment that they as Christians stand by, and they’ve now shed anything that is judgmental and harmful, to fully embrace not only us, but my parents are the biggest allies for queer folk.”
Maria started speaking up about diversity in beauty back in 2016 – namely so future generations didn’t have the same experience she did growing up. “When I was growing up, dark skin was made fun of. Would you believe I was made fun of for having big lips?” she says. As a young girl, she’d cover her lips in foundation to try and make them look smaller, which seems ironic given how many women now want big, full lips. “The beauty standard is largely dictated by whiteness,” she points out. “Our features are often commodified when someone who is influential and Eurocentric, or Anglo Celtic takes them on. They will take features that are common to people of colour, like darker skin, bigger lips or thicker eyebrows and commodify them. I grew up being very confused by this – I didn’t feel great in my skin because of what the world was telling me, and then all of a sudden these features are celebrated on white bodies.” This confusion just made Thattil feel like she didn’t fit anywhere. But the more she used her voice, the more impact she made, the more beautiful she felt. The more she felt she belonged. “I realised the issue has never been me… The issue has been society’s the beauty standard and how it has convinced us that we’re not enough.”
In a world that tells us constantly that we need to be more, knowing you’re more than enough is a work in progress for all of us, even Thattil, who is open about those in-between moments of life which many describe as that feeling of languishing. “I felt like I was very much in the in-between last year, and I had that moment of feeling lost. I navigated it by realising that life is not a series of just high after high after high. You have to navigate the peaks and troughs and those moments of stillness or the lows, they’re just as valid and important as the highs. Taking moments to rest and be comfortable with not constantly having something going on is really important. A big realisation for me was that I was putting too much stock in my career and sitting on that as my self-concept, like ‘I am my achievement’. I am the Maria Thattil that is doing this, this, and this, and putting this out in the world. And when you strip all that back, I was kind of like, “who am I?”” Many of us define our self-worth by our achievements, which ultimately leads to discontent. While meaningful work is important (researchers argue that helping others leads to increased happiness in life), ultimately what matters is our relationships, not our job title. “It has been a very healing journey for me talking to a therapist and realising that actually Maria Thattil is not all these big achievements. It’s not Miss Universe, the TV presenter, the book, the author, this and that, Marie Thattil is a human being who just loves her connections with her friends and her family, and these are the things in life that make it worth it,” she says.
Thattil is the face of L’Oreal Paris’ ‘Not in Our Streets’ campaign which seeks to support the 78 per cent of Australian women who have experienced street harassment at least once in their life*. “We have a goal to train an Australian community of 40,000 people in five years. Imagine having 40,000 people in the streets who know what to do when they see it? Imagine the difference this will make to our lived experience? It’s tremendous.” In partnership with girls’ rights charity Plan International Australia, the campaign and intervention program is focused on raising awareness about street harassment, and providing training in the 5Ds – Distract, Delegate, Document, Direct, and Delay – to support bystanders to safely stand up to street harassment when they see it.
Given at 30 years old, she’s wise beyond her years, we can’t wait to see the impact she has on future generations.
Read the full interview below and to find out more about the campaign, visit www.lorealparis.com.au/stand-up
*Ipsos survey of 2,000 Australians aged over 18.
You've spoken about how growing up you felt you were ‘nowhere to be found’. Can you tell me what you meant by this?
I talk about this in my book Unbounded. Growing up in Australia as a young kid of colour, in a time where diversity and inclusivity was not just not celebrated, it was blatantly not represented and almost denied in public spaces, makes you feel like you are nowhere to be found. When you don’t have representation of people who look like you in public and powerful spaces like media, business, politics or beauty, it really shapes your self-concept in a way that confuses your identity and your belonging. It really made me feel like what constituted being Australian, wasn’t me and my ethnic background was a compromise to that. In a time where beauty standards were largely Anglo Celtic, it made me feel like I wasn’t beautiful. When you then look at statistics around women in leadership roles and women in power, and then add in women of colour, I wasn’t someone who could have a voice and be a leader. Feeling like you’re nowhere to be found also makes you feel like you don’t belong.
You talk about not feeling beautiful - do you remember the moment or the stage in your life where you felt beautiful?
Interestingly, the funny thing about beauty and our collective perceptions about it, is that it’s so sadly largely dictated by what the beauty standards are. Now people might say, “Okay, brown skin and big lips and my features, they’re what’s considered beautiful. Being petite is beautiful.” When I was growing up, dark skin was made fun of. Would you believe I was made fun of for having big lips? I used to put foundation all over my lips to hide that they were bigger. It’s crazy because I’m watching how very often, the beauty standard is largely dictated by whiteness. Our features are often commodified when someone who is influential and Eurocentric, or Anglo Celtic takes them on. They will take features that are common to people of colour, like darker skin, bigger lips or thicker eyebrows and commodify them. I grew up being very confused by this – I didn’t feel great in my skin because of what the world was telling me, and then all of a sudden these features are celebrated on white bodies. That made me feel like my look is only beautiful when it’s on someone who is not myself. I really started to feel beautiful, not when these things started to become a beauty standard, but when I started speaking up about diversity in beauty on social media. I realised the issue has never been me or what I should have been. The issue has been society and the beauty standard and how it has convinced us that we’re not enough. I started to feel beautiful when I realised the things that made me different, they’re fine, and it’s never a hurdle I have to jump. If I’m accepting myself, that’s what matters.
Tell me about the moment that you announced that you were bisexual and how did it feel to speak your truth?
Completely empowering. I had lived 28 years so closeted and despite having given my parents a heads up, I was so nervous and anxious about what the world would say. When I came out, it was so empowering because I realised how healing it was for other people and that these things that we think we need to apologise for or hide or change, like myself being queer, I thought that was something I needed to hide and change. When you embrace it and you own it, you actually end up connecting with people. We’re all conditioned to be ashamed of these human parts of ourselves, but that is what the world is yearning to see, because that’s how we connect and that’s what makes us human. So it was incredibly empowering. Especially now, where we’re seeing legislation around LGBTQIA+ rights going backwards in certain countries.
When your brother came out, he almost lost his relationship with your parents. How have you helped one another navigate the complexities of sexuality? And what is your advice for parents who might have children who are exploring their sexuality. What's the best way to parent?
I’ll start by saying my brother and I, despite both being queer, have had very, very different experiences growing up. Dominic came out at a time where our parents were not as open-minded and inclusive in their thinking as they are now, and so that was a really big challenge. I’ll let him speak to his own story, but he is the reason my parents ended up opening their minds. I’m so proud of my mum and dad for this. In their late fifties and late sixties, they were able to shed decades of cultural and religious conservative conditioning to realise that these ideologies they once wedded themselves to, were actually conflicting with the underlying messages of love and non-judgment that they as Christians stand by, and they’ve now shed anything that is judgmental and harmful, to fully embrace not only us, but my parents are the biggest allies for queer folk.
It brings me to tears when I hear my mum watch the news and she’ll hear about what’s happening with transgender rights and the way that trans kids are spoken about, and hearing how passionately she defends them. She’s ready to go to war for queer kids anywhere because they nearly lost their own kids. I love that love is what is triumphed here, but in many cases it hasn’t. I am not a parent and I will fully acknowledge that I don’t have that lived experience. Just recently on one of my social posts, I had a lot of parents speaking up saying, “You don’t even have kids. Why should you have a say in talking about education and what is discussed in the classroom?”, because there’s debate at the moment around whether sexuality and gender identity should be discussed in the classroom. I think as parents, and I don’t need to be a parent to say this, I’ll say this with my whole chest. As parents, your only job is to love and protect and support your kids.
My advice is please come to these conversations with a level of compassion and open-mindedness and realise that sexuality and gender identity is something that is part of your child’s experience as a human being. It’s something that they’re going to navigate, and it’s really important for their mental health, life, identity and belonging that you don’t come at it by already treating it like it’s something they need to be ashamed of, because it is not. It’s a beautiful part of who they are.
In your book you spoke about the in between moments in life. I think we all have so many in between moments, and they're the moments after perhaps a really big career high or life moment where we can feel quite lost. So what have been the in-between moments in your life and have you ever felt lost?
Oh, absolutely. I spent a year and a half working up to Miss Universe, and whilst I did well, I placed in the top 10 and I had the impact I wanted to have, I kind of felt a little lost afterwards. You question what’s next? I knew that I wanted to build this big career in media, but I really did feel lost. And when you put so much of your self-concept in your career or an achievement or one part of your identity, when that changes or it doesn’t go to plan, it’s very easy to feel like you’ve lost your sense of self. I had that last year for a really big part of the year and I haven’t really spoken about it a lot, but I had some health issues that contributed to it, that exacerbated it because I was very susceptible to depression and anxiety because of physical things that were going on in my life.
I was working behind the scenes on my book. I felt like I was very much in the in-between last year, and I had that moment of feeling lost. I navigate it by realising that life is not a series of just high after high after high. You have to navigate the peaks and troughs and those moments of stillness or the lows, they’re just as valid and important as the highs. Taking moments to rest and be comfortable with not constantly having something going on is really important. A big realisation for me was that I was putting too much stock in my career and sitting on that as my self-concept, like ‘I am my achievement’. I am the Maria Thattil that is doing this, this, and this, and putting this out in the world. And when you strip all that back, I was kind of like, “who am I?”
It has been a very healing journey for me to go see doctors and deal with the health issues that were happening in the background, talking to a therapist and realising that actually Maria Thattil is not all these big achievements. It’s not Miss Universe, the TV presenter, the book, the author, this and that, Marie Thattil is a human being who just loves her connections with her friends and her family, and these are the things in life that make it worth it. My advice to anyone who’s feeling lost and they’re not navigating the in between well, is get help. Please talk to a professional because I would not be here stable and functioning if I didn’t get help. You’re so much more than the things you are using as a compass. Often it’s career and achievement and relationships, and where am I in life? You are so much more than that. It’s the little connections and the love you have in your day to day, and I hope you find it.
I think so many of us feel like we are our achievements, and if we're not achieving then what are we and are we of any worth to anyone?
On the outside it looks like I’m achieving so much, but I hit some really deep lows last year where I found myself going, “I feel worthless.” That must seem crazy on the outside, but that sense of worth a purpose for living, it doesn’t come from that stuff. It doesn’t come from material wins and external achievements. It comes from realising you are worth something just because you exist, and everything else is a beautiful sense of purpose, that’s your contribution, but you are worth it just because you exist.
I want to move on to Not In Our Streets. What is your experience with street harassment?
The Not In Our Streets campaign is so much bigger than just street harassment. My experiences with street harassment as a queer woman of colour have been different to what most Australian women have experienced. My experiences with street harassment started in high school. As a vulnerable child, I was not exempt from it. Nor was I exempt from it when I’ve been standing on my doorstep with my brother and a Ute pulled up to my doorstep, and men were howling at me. Or a year ago when I was alone in a car park and three men made me feel unsafe when I was just trying to get from A to B. Street harassment happens every day – 78% of Australian women experience it. It’s such a normalised part of our experience because we grow up thinking that the price to pay as women to exist, to walk the street, you just expect that being objectified, being sexualised, having people call out to you and make you uncomfortable, is something we need to experience and accept as part of the female experience.
The Not In Our Streets campaign teaches people, firstly what constitutes street harassment, because a lot of people don’t even realise that whistling, cat calling, those sorts of things, they’re not just failed attempts at flirting. That is harassment. We’re also educating people on what they can do as a bystander. My brother and his partner were harassed after Mardi Gras, people openly battered them for being a gay couple out in the streets. My brother was in the middle of World Pride and everyone was wearing rainbow merch and waving their flags, and not one person stood up for them. I was angry for a really long time because I saw my brother go into a post-traumatic stress response for a number of weeks. He didn’t want to leave the house, he wanted to change how he dressed. This what happens to victims of street harassment. They feel like they need to change who they are, but what we teach is that very often bystanders are worried about speaking up because they think they need to put themselves in harm’s way, and that’s how I’ve made peace with it.
Street harassment is never a victim’s fault, but we have a responsibility as a community to stand up safely to it, and we can. That’s the beauty of it. Genuinely, I really think that everybody should do this training because it has changed my sense of competency around what I can do if I witnessed it, but also made me feel very hopeful that there’s actually something we can do and that we can do to change what the culture is. We have a goal to train an Australian community of 40,000 people in five years. Imagine having 40,000 people in the streets who know what to do when they see it, what the difference will be to our lived experience. It’s tremendous.
What is your advice on fostering self-worth and confidence?
I think my advice to young girls on fostering self-worth and self-confidence is to know that they don’t have to subscribe to blueprints that they are going to come up against. They are going to get these blueprints for how they should look and how they should present. It’s going to subconsciously come from their friends, their parents, what they watch on TV – so be conscious in how you’re choosing to consume information. Curate your space – the kind of people you choose to keep around you, what you choose to listen to, what you choose to follow and consume on social media, because that all feeds your mind too, and realise that who you are and what you are capable of, it’s so much bigger than what the world will tell you. Your inner voice and your gut feel, that’s what is most important and you have a responsibility to live up to all that you are. Don’t let other people’s voices change that.