Let me take you back in time.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2007 and Joseph Tenni, a Sydney-based modelling agent with Chadwick, is out for the night in Melbourne.

He ducks by McDonald’s on Swanston Street for a bite and spots a grey-eyed beauty doling out burgers and fries, with what looks like a lot of long blonde hair shoved up beneath the regulation Macca’s cap.

“It was the bone structure that got me,” says Tenni.

“And this undeniable presence, which you don’t see much, especially out in the wild. Everyone noticed it – women, men, children. It was powerful.”

Andrej Pejic ́ (pronounced ‘pay-itch’) was a 16-year-old kid from Broadmeadows, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, tall and willowy at 1.85m, with a tiny waist and racehorse limbs – not that you could really tell in those baggy clothes.

Tenni gave Pejic a Chadwick card and suggested a meeting at the agency.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to make you a star!’” says Tenni.

“But I knew there was the makings of a great model standing in front of me.”

Pejic ́ thought Tenni seemed OK, but admits, “I didn’t take it seriously; there was a lot of that going around.”

A lot of what?

“People who paid to try to become models, and people who went around selling dreams that were never going to happen.”

Anyway, “I had the McDonald’s uniform on. I definitely had an interest in style, but I don’t know how stylish I actually was.”

media_camera Andrej Pejic as a male model before gender reassignment surgery. She now goes by the name Andreja Pejic. Picture: Adam Berry/Getty Images

It was a few months before Pejic ́put the call in to Chadwick, having done research online.

“I realised it was a legitimate agency, but I saw they mostly represented women. I didn’t know if I could have a career in fashion; I didn’t fit in an obvious box.”

He made an appointment anyway and took himself into the Chadwick offices on Elizabeth Street.

He didn’t have any headshots. Really, he didn’t have a clue.

So it was “very surprising” to find them “so excited” by his look.

They signed him to their men’s division on the spot.

A few months later, in September 2008, Pejic ́quietly made his catwalk debut at the Melbourne Fashion Festival.

Ryan Lobo, who these days is a New York-based fashion designer, one half of the celebrated womenswear brand Tome, was the stylist.

“I knew we had found someone special. Minutes into the conversation with the then shy youth, it was clear that a uniqueness transcended mere physical beauty,” recalls Lobo.

“This kid was bright, funny, worldly and mature – a truly original creature, inside and out.”

media_camera Pejic walks the runway for Jean-Paul Gaultier in 2012. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images media_camera Pejic on the catwalk in 2011 for French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who supported her in the beginning.

This month, Andreja Pejic, ́ 23, will make a triumphant return to the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival, walking in The Grand Showcase Featuring Josh Goot.

She’s had some big stuff going on in between – modelling at the couture shows in Paris, becoming a Jean Paul Gaultier muse, starring in a David Bowie video clip with Tilda Swinton.

Notice, please, the addition of the ‘a’ in Andreja and the ‘s’ in she – but this is about way more than spelling.

Last year Pejic ́underwent sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) in America.

He is now officially she.

“It was a very, very intense year,” says Pejic. ́

“I achieved my personal dream and completed my transition to be able to live life as a woman.

“I came out to the world and the press, then started rebranding and planning my comeback.” Fashion quickly fell for Pejic’́ s striking looks.

After Melbourne, she modelled menswear in Europe for the likes of Paul Smith, Jeremy Scott and Thom Browne, designers who appreciated her androgynous look, but it was Gaultier who understood her feminine power.

“I started with his men’s shows,” explains Pejic, ́ “then did his women’s shows, the couture, the [women’s] campaign.

“[Gaultier] came along and supported me at the right time when I needed people to understand my aesthetic and what kind of career I could have.”

In 2011 Pejic ́ closed the Jean Paul Gaultier spring ’11 couture show in a tiered white wedding gown.

media_camera The changing face of Pejic over the years. Picture: Mike Coppola/Getty Images media_camera One of Pejic’s many different styles over the years. Picture: Raymond Hall/GC Images

Pejić knew she was “different” as a child.

She was born in 1991 in Tuzla, which was then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the second son of Jadranka, a Bosnian Serb, and Vlado, a Bosnian Croat.

They divorced soon after and Jadranka, a lawyer, became a single parent.

She and her own mother took the boys and fled to Serbia during the Bosnian War, where they lived in a refugee camp near Belgrade.

When the NATO bombing of Serbia began in 1999, Jadranka applied for refugee status in Australia.

They arrived in Melbourne in 2000. Pejic ́was eight.

“I didn’t speak English at all,” says Pejic. ́

“Australia was a very different world and culture from the one I left in Europe.

“Life was much more spread out, people drove everywhere, they built higher fences, neighbours didn’t interact so much.”

Isolating, then, but tricky in other ways, too.

“Going to school being different, it was kind of rough. You know how kids are – they can be quite cruel, especially when someone doesn’t speak.”

It was not, to put it mildly, the best of times for Pejic. ́

“We were away from home, and I was away from who I really was. I was having to act,” Pejic says.

“I was going through gender issues at the time and it was no longer acceptable for me to play with dolls, dress up and only have friends who were girls.”

type_quote_start “I achieved my personal dream and completed my transition to be able to live life as a woman. I came out to the world and the press, then started rebranding and planning my comeback.” type_quote_end

Pejic’́ s brother, Igor, is very masculine and was into sports.

He protected her from bullies, but, “It was time for me to grow up and be a boy and do boyish things,” says Pejic. ́

She believed she had two options: to be a gay boy or a straight boy – until she read about transgender people on the internet. She was 13.

She realised this was her story and she wanted to live as a woman, although until she had the surgery, she was ambivalent about defining her gender in public.

Now, Pejic calls becoming a woman “my truth” and to hear her speak so passionately about it is very moving.

When I ask if she was scared going into surgery – the hospital, the anaesthetic, pain, the possibility of complications – she says, “That was the least of it. The physical aspects of the operation did not worry me. I was more nervous about coming out to the press and how it would affect my career.

“I found out that transition was a possibility at the age of 13; every day since then was a waiting period.

“It took me 10 years to get here and there was never a moment when I didn’t want this. No amount of physical pain would have made a difference to that.”

media_camera Pejic knew she was transgender when she was a teenager. Picture: Graham Denholm/Getty Images

SRS, also called gender reassignment surgery (GRS), male-to female involves the surgical removal of the penis and the opening up of a neovaginal cavity.

Modern operations have been happening successfully since the 1950s, but today’s procedures are extremely sophisticated, involving all sorts of cleverness, the details of which I shall not go into over your Sunday breakfast.

Suffice to say, it’s possible to end up with authentic – and working – female genitalia.

Pejic ́was 14 when she told her mum she was transgender.

“It wasn’t easy because I knew she’d already been through so much. I didn’t want to cause trouble and worsen her situation.”

She refers to Jadranka as “my biggest inspiration, my everything, the love of my life”.

Was coming out one of those oh-darling-I-already-know moments?

“It was a shock, it took her a while to get her head around it. She didn’t really know anything about it; a lot of parents don’t.

“But she is someone who loves her kids so much, there was nothing that could take away from that.”

type_quote_start “It took me 10 years to get here and there was never a moment when I didn’t want this. No amount of physical pain would have made a difference to that.” type_quote_end

Pejic ́wishes all parents could be so understanding.

“We’ve seen, with Leelah Alcorn in America, what can go wrong when a parent doesn’t accept a child for who they are.”

Alcorn was a 17-year-old transgender kid from Ohio who was forced into conversion therapy, a brutal ‘solution’ to gender dysphoria that uses counselling, and sometimes hormone therapy, to try to ‘repair’ the patient – i.e. persuade them into accepting the gender they were assigned at birth.

The reasons behind it are often religious.

Alcorn’s conservative Christian parents felt unable to accept their ‘son’ Josh as Leelah, the name she chose for herself.

She committed suicide in December.

Writing about the case in Time magazine recently, American transgender athlete and activist Fallon Fox made this powerful plea: “If you know anything about the very real state of having gender dysphoria, you know that telling him or her it is wrong is one of the worst things in the world a transgender person can hear.

“It deepens the depression transgender people already seek help for because we suffer from having a body that does not match our mind.”

media_camera Pejic has made a documentary about her life.

It is stories like these that spurred Pejić into making a film about her life.

To make Andrej(a): The Documentary, Pejić and director Eric Miclette raised $US63,325 on Kickstarter, helped by Jared Leto, who filmed a message of support for the project.

They also dug deep into their own pockets, and hope to release the film next year.

It’s sure to be compelling – I mean, you couldn’t script it, with a cast that includes the archetypal strong mother, a beautiful lonely boy who wants to be a girl and some of the most flamboyant figures in Paris fashion.

It begins with war, displacement and refugee status, and explores vital modern issues around beauty, gender and belonging.

“I’ve been thrust into this extroverted role, but I am a pretty private person, really,” says Pejic. ́ “It wasn’t easy to decide to do this documentary, but I am in a position of power as a public figure.

“I have the opportunity to tell this very interesting story that should expose a lot of truth about society, about being a transgender individual and also about fashion, and about living life as a woman.

“I feel there are so many kids all around the world who will relate.”

media_camera Pejic’s modelling career has gone from strength to strength.

Pejic ́hopes to make them feel less alone. It’s good timing.

Behind the unbearable sadness of Alcorn’s story lies a society ready for change; transgender issues are becoming visible and discrimination is being addressed.

In the US, there is mounting pressure to enact Leelah’s Law, which would make conversion therapy illegal, and the associated Think Act Change online petition has more than 345,000 signatures.

In 2013, the NSW Parliament passed a motion, introduced by independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich, acknowledging the harm caused by ‘reparative’ therapy.

Still, Pejic ́says even the fashion industry – “often one step ahead of the rest of society in terms of expression” – is beset by tokenism.

“There are transgender models who don’t tell the world they are trans [for fear of not getting booked]. We have a long way to go.

“But this generation, the way they are seeing gender is so different even from when I was growing up.

“It’s much more open. There are more categories now; the old-school traditional views are breaking down.”

I point out that categories – be they girl, boy, transgender, transvestite, gay, straight, whatever – are still about labelling, and labelling means putting people in boxes.

By definition, that means building walls and pointing out difference.

“Oh, I would say more categories beats two or three,” laughs Pejic, ́ and suddenly there’s a lightness to this heavy conversation, and I’m reminded of the time I saw her being interviewed, a few years ago, on Australian television.

The journo, watching Pejic ́get her make-up done for a photo shoot, asked, “Does all this fuss and carrying on get to you after a while?”

Pejic ́ smiled coquettishly and fired back, “A little bit, but it’s better than bricklaying.”

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Now she says, “Ultimately, this is about breaking down the need to categorise, throwing all that away”.

“But you see yourself, categorically, as a woman now,” I say.

“There are times when categories make sense and times when we choose them for ourselves,” says Pejic.

“But those categories shouldn’t define us, constrict our lives [or] decide how we are treated as human beings.

“We’re all human beings at the end of the day, aren’t we? We should give people the freedom to express who they are.

“Humanity is – surprise, surprise – more complicated than we thought.”

Andreja Pejic ́is a VAMFF special guest. The Grand Showcase Featuring Josh Goot, on March 19, is supported by Sunday Style.

* Tickets from $80; visit ticketek.com.au/VAMFF

* Follow Clare Press on Twitter @mrspress