Robert De Niro’s Daughter Airyn De Niro Opens Up About Her Transition Journey

Please give a heated welcome to Airyn De Niro. In a story for Them, Robert De Niro’s 29-year-old daughter has introduced herself to the public as a trans woman—opening up about her childhood, her aspirations, and how she has navigated her transition journey.

Born in 1995, Airyn is one of the legendary actor’s seven children. The Raging Bull star shares two kids with his first wife, actor Diahnne Abbott: Drena, 57, Abbott’s daughter from a previous marriage whom De Niro adopted, and Raphael, 48. Abbott and De Niro divorced in 1988. De Niro then had twins Airyn and Julian, 29, with actor and model Toukie Smith; he and Smith were in a relationship from 1988 to 1996. In 1997, De Niro married actor Grace Hightower, and together they had Elliot, 27, and Helen Grace, 13. De Niro and Hightower divorced in 2018. In May of 2023, the 81-year-old actor welcomed his seventh child, Gia, with his girlfriend, 45-year-old Tiffany Chen.

Airyn De Niro spent her childhood mostly out of the spotlight, despite the massive success of her two-time Oscar winning father. “Obviously no parent is perfect, but I am grateful that both my parents agreed to keep me out of the limelight. They wanted it very private,” she told Them. “They have told me they wanted me to have as much of a normal childhood as possible.”

But on March 19 of this year, De Niro’s privacy was interrupted when the The Daily Mail posted paparazzi pictures of her as she went to visit her father at the Greenwich Hotel. In the accompanying article, Airyn was simultaneously misgendered and outed as a trans woman, described as a “barely recognizable” “nepo baby” undergoing a “shocking transformation.”

“I actually didn’t find out about the Daily Mail thing until like a week after it was posted,” De Niro told Them. “Not only did they get information wrong about me… They just sort of reminded me that people really don’t know anything about me.”

Here are a few things you should know about Airyn: She’s an aspiring model and voice actor who’s also studying to be a mental health counselor. She also wants to achieve success on her own. “I wasn’t brought up having a side part in one of dad’s movies or going to business meetings or attending premieres,” she told Them. “My dad was very big on us finding our own sort of path. I would want [success] to happen on my own merit.” De Niro revealed that she auditioned for the role of Jules in Euphoria, which ultimately went to Hunter Schafer, as well as a character in the video game League of Legends. Her twin, Julian, is also an actor who recently played a young Barack Obama in The First Lady, and appeared on Broadway in a recent revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein‘s Window.

As a child, De Niro said, she felt out of place as a “bigger bodied person,” which was difficult for her to process. “Everybody else in the family [was] relatively thin or fit; I was not, so I sort of stood out like a sore thumb and there wasn’t anybody in my family that could relate to that experience,” she said. She also opened up to Them about other issues she faced growing up as a femme, biracial queer person. “[Gay men were] ruthless and mean. I didn’t even fit that beauty standard, which is thin, white, muscular, or just super fit, masculine,” she told Them. “I was always told I was too much of something or not enough of something growing up: Too big, not skinny enough. Not Black enough, not white enough. Too feminine, not masculine enough. It was never just, ‘You’re just right, just the way you are.’”