Mama Dragun

Mama Dragun was born on January 31, 1996 in Springfield, Virginia. Her father is Vietnamese and her mother is Mexican. She has two sisters – Allegrah Nguyen Capri and Taliah Nguyen Marriott – and a brother named Vincarlo Nguyen. She was trained as a male singer in school, but now intends to train again to rediscover her voice after her transition. She joined a four-year course at Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles in 2014. She has two dragon tattoos on her chest and her back, and a writing in Arabic on her wrist that means 'dragon'. She has often tagged people as boyfriend in her social media posts, but according to some sources they are not her actual boyfriends.

Mama Dragun started out on the image sharing platform Instagram, in which she had a very controlled image. As an avid YouTube viewer, she thought she could be an YouTuber as well, and brought her controlled image to that platform. In the early days, she never talked about her sexuality as she thought her followers would realize her transition. However, as that was not the case, she felt it necessary to come out publicly as transgender. She finally posted the emotional and confessional video 'I am transgender’ on December 28, 2015, which instantaneously went viral.

Growing up in Virginia, she had never met a transgender person before, but she started to receive helpful advice from people all over the world after opening up on YouTube, which convinced her about the power of the platform. In mid-2015, as she started to gain popularity as a YouTuber, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met with more people from the LGBT community and began to feel more comfortable about her own transition. She decided to be real on her YouTube channel and help others by documenting her journey. As a result, she shared her hormone replacement therapy, going under the knife to change her body, and even showed people staples being pulled out of her skull.

As a child, Mama Dragun liked playing with dolls and used to dress up prettily. Her mother first noticed that something was not right with her when, during her first physical education class, she lined up with the girls instead of the boys, and insisted on wearing shorts with side-cuts. As early as when she was only eight, she had started saving money for her transition after watching a documentary about transgender people. By the end of high school, she was so androgynous that she was "at the absolute peak of being gay". Due to LGBT issues being considered a taboo, she initially thought herself to be gay, and realized that she is a woman trapped into a man’s body only after growing up. After it became awkward for her to use the men's toilet, she decided on her transition, but was afraid about her conservative background. However, her parents were very supportive about her decision.

In February 2017, Mama Dragun received backlash after appearing in the ad campaign for Jeffree Star's Androgyny makeup line, which featured her alongside other LGBT models. In her Instagram profile, she posted a picture of herself from the ad campaign, in which her face appeared significantly darker than she normally looks. This created an uproar in the internet community against Jeffree Star, who had previously been accused of being racist. Critics asked why he could not hire an African-American model and instead decided to blackface an Asian model. She tried to defend herself in the wake of the controversy stating that being half-Mexican and half-Asian, her skin gets naturally very dark when she tans. In a later interview she expressed her disappointment over the controversy and stated that the campaign was "intended to welcome all gender identities, sexualities, and races to enjoy the makeup line".