Çağla Akalın

Çağla Akalın — Biography

Çağla Akalın is an actress, model, singer, columnist and human rights advocate closely identified with the visibility of trans women in Turkey. Because she set several firsts, the press often calls her "Turkey's first trans leading actress". In October 2025 she appeared in the new season of Jemile Cabaret.

Her public breakthrough came in 2013, when she was chosen Turkey's first trans beauty queen at the Miss Queen contest for trans women; around the same time she became known as the country's first trans model. In a Hürriyet interview that year she explained the origin of her stage name: she took her first name from the model Çağla Şıkel and her surname from the singer Demet Akalın. A second turning point came in 2015, when she played the lead in the film Köpek and became the first trans actress to carry a film in Turkey. In the years that followed she continued acting alongside music, column writing and stage work.

In May 2021 an episode of a programme she appeared in on Exxen was taken off; early reports blamed a decision by the broadcasting watchdog RTÜK, but it later emerged that the platform itself had removed it.