Vanessa López is originally from Chile and was assigned male at birth. She migrated with her family to Sweden in 1985. Growing up Vanessa never felt comfortable with societys expectations of being a boy which eventually lead to her starting transisioning to a woman at the age of 16.

At that time, Swedish law didn’t allow a legal sex change without having sex reassignment surgery, which lead to Vanessa going through with the procedure when she was 20 years old.

Vanessa is also involved with different support groups for transgender youth, wanting to influence society she wrote the norm critical children book ”Det är jag som är Mickan” (I am Mickan) which tells the story about a young transgender person.

Vanessa won the Miss Trans Star International contest in 2015, representing her native country Chile.