Euphoria star Hunter Schafer has revealed that she had gender-affirming surgery in December. The 27-year-old shared the news in a new Elle cover story.
Hunter Schafer has revealed that she had bottom surgery in December 2025, the gender-affirming operation that aligns a person’s genitals with their gender identity.
The Euphoria star shared the news in her new Elle cover story, as she promotes the upcoming Amazon series Blade Runner 2099. “I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much,” she said.
She told Elle it felt worth sharing because of a tension she’d been describing throughout the interview, between how gender is talked about in theory and how it’s lived day to day.
How her thinking changed
For a long time, Schafer said she embraced a more fluid, gender-expansive view of herself. She said she wanted to “make that previous body work,” partly because she found something “really cool and badass” in it.
Over time, though, it stopped adding up. She kept hitting the same wall again and again: an idealized queer world that didn’t match the one she met every day, or how she personally wanted to move through it. In the end, a medical transition was the right choice for her, even though it also came at the cost of experiencing her gender as “flatter.”
“I’m a woman. I’m a girl,” she said, while still underlining she sees something magical in what queerness has to offer.
A quiet recovery
After the surgery Schafer said she rented a big apartment and had friends and family visit while she spent much of her time lying down. “I think my limit was 150 steps per day, which is nothing,” she said.
Schafer began transitioning in her early teens and has been part of the public conversation ever since. Teen Vogue named her on its 2017 “21 Under 21” list because of her activism, which was before she became a model and the star of HBO’s Euphoria.
In the interview she also reflected on the privilege of being able to focus on her career beyond her gender identity, and said she sometimes feels guilty about not using her platform more.
Schafer’s last big public moment on the subject was in February 2025. She posted a video saying her renewed US passport had been issued with a male gender marker, after Donald Trump signed an executive order recognizing only two sexes. She said the letter on the document “doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness.”
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