Kim Petras says she’s ‘proud’ that she transitioned at 12

Kim Petras has no f***s left to give.

Three years after her historic Grammy-winning collab with Sam Smith on “Unholy,” the German singer is reflecting on her new self-released album, leaving the industry in the dust, and regrets about being so public about her transition before she turned 13.

She confessed to having no marketing budget, being dependent on sponsors and “partnering with people” to make her new album Detour.

“If you work with the wrong people who don’t care about the artist and the artistry first, it becomes about money,” Petras told The Fader. “You become a product and you become a joke in many ways. That’s what it felt like to me.”

Whether it was touring for “Unholy” or dealing with corporate assholes, Petras said “it all felt pointless.” She also recalled being repulsed when one label executive told her: “You’re our first trans artist.”

“That felt icky. It just didn’t feel good, being paraded. I want to be an artist. It just means not doing things that don’t fulfill me, like I just played Berghain and that was amazing.”

In her new interview with The Fader, Petras explained how her new song “Brutalist“ marks her first time addressing her transgender identity.

“It’s the story of my dad and I driving around in Germany to get my hormone therapy when I was a kid,” Petras said. “Now that I’m in America, there’s so much shame around sex, sexual education is such a taboo, and it’s such a weird climate right now, especially about trans kids in particular. They’re the enemy right now… in this political climate. I’m happy I can stand for trans kids who can transition and then be a grown up. I made the right choices that I’m proud of to this day.”

Petras is also clapping back at haters who say she transitioned at too young of an age and ‘ruined’ the course of her life.

“I have people saying I ruined my body and I ruined my life. They don’t know me at all. They don’t know my history, that I went to so many psychologists and so many doctors and that it was a real thing that had an assessment. It saved my life and then there’s people who are like, ‘This saved your life, but you ruined everything.'”

Detour is available now on all platforms.