Ann Thomas was born on October 14, 1962 in Seattle, Washington. At age 3, her family moved to Vashon Island in the middle of Puget Sound, where she grew up in an old farmhouse. Her father worked as a nature journalist and her mother worked as a piano teacher. From her father, she grew up loving nature and media; through her mother, she got involved in music and performing arts from early childhood. 

Assigned male at birth, Ann had mostly female friends because she related to them more than her male friends. She did not want to have body hair or anything between her legs. When her parents got divorced, her mother remarried and became incredibly religious and conservative, instructing Ann to suppress everything to do with her body. Ann, too, became very religious and looked up to her church leaders. 

Ann met an LGBTQ+ person for the first time in her 20s, and heard the phrase “sex change”  for the first time in her 30s. In the meantime, she married a woman from her church, which she thought was the right thing to do. In her mid to late 30s, all her suppressed feelings of wanting to be a woman welled up. After she and her wife divorced, she left home and moved to Eastern Washington in the late 1990s.

As she was trying to meet and learn from other trans people, Ann came across an interview with Stu Rasmussen, an Oregon mayor who was openly trans. She resonated with Stu’s approach to gender — Stu used the term “transgender” to describe herself and identified as between man and woman. Ann was inspired to transition and present as a woman full-time. In 2000, Ann returned home to care for her father, and, as he was passing away, learned that he, too, dressed and presented as a woman in secret. 

Ann moved to Los Angeles in 2009. Coming from 25 years of technical directing live theater and running her own TV production company in Washington, she started looking for jobs in entertainment. In 2014, she was cast as part of a trans choir for a Glee episode. Partnering with another trans woman artistic director who graduated from Juilliard, Ann then helped found the Trans Chorus of LA, a trans choir that performed live for the first time on the Trans Day of Remembrance. She also started talking with the episode’s casting director, and from that connection launched her company, Transgender Talent, a talent agency that pairs trans performers with agents with cultural competence and willingness to learn about the trans community. The agency started with 35 of Ann’s Glee castmates.

Since then, Ann has gone on Dr. Drew’s Show with people from her agency to talk about difficulties faced by the trans community. Her episodes led to subsequent new episodes focusing specifically on the struggles of trans women of color. Ann has also partnered with Russell Boast, VP of the Casting Society of America, to coordinate free auditioning lessons for all underrepresented minority groups in Hollywood. Ann has also taught in transgender patient care for UCLA Medical School for 7 years. She tells us of her ongoing projects in film and in healthcare advocacy for trans people.