Kim Petras

Petras made history at the 2023 Grammy Awards, when she and Sam Smith took home the award for best pop duo/group performance for “Unholy,” making her the first openly transgender woman to win the award.

“I just want to thank the incredible transgender legends before me who kicked these doors open so I could be here,” she said in her emotional acceptance speech.

The singer, who was born in Germany and moved to L.A. when she was 19 to pursue a music career, has been making an impact since releasing her debut album, Clarity in 2019, inspired by the ’90s and early 2000s pop music she was influenced by from artists including Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears.

“[Pop music] means everything to me,” she told PEOPLE. “When I was a kid, I used to not really have friends in school. I hated going to school — I got bullied pretty bad. I used to run home from school and watch Gwen Stefani music videos, and I felt like I could escape my problems with that.”

Fast forward to 2022, when her song with Sam Smith, “Unholy” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Smith the first-ever openly non-binary solo artist and Petras the first openly transgender solo artist to reach the top of the chart since its inception in 1991.

The feat “is a huge middle finger to all the [record] labels that were like, ‘We don’t know how to market you,’ and to everyone who doubted me and said I couldn’t achieve this because of my gender identity,” said Petras to PEOPLE in November 2022, as she released her single “If Jesus Was a Rockstar.”

But, she adds, her success is about so much more than her gender identity: “I feel like my songs are good because they’re relatable to anybody. I feel like that is a big part of the equality that I want: for people to realize that everybody’s just equal and the same and have the same issues and go through the same things emotionally.”