Miss Benny, a former YouTuber gaining ground as an actor on the recently launched Netflix series “Glamorous,” has revealed she is transgender.
The 24-year-old Dallas native opened up for the first time about her gender identity, sharing her backstory in an essay published by Time magazine this week.
“By 8 years old, I was praying every night to wake up and somehow be like my sisters. In the morning I would wake up in the same body, and cry,” she wrote. “Over time I became highly aware of how unwelcome LGBT topics would be in my hometown. And so I kept my head down and looked for an immediate escape.”
After landing in Hollywood at the age of 14 and enduring “years of rejection,” the fate of the actor and makeup expert changed when “Glamourous” sought to cast “a gender-nonconforming queer Latino makeup fanatic” as its lead. After being encouraged to be herself during the audition, Miss Benny won the role playing opposite “Sex and the City” icon Kim Cattrall.
However, there was a years-long waiting period before Netflix picked up the series. During that time, Miss Benny “privately transitioned,” which presented a dilemma: “They hired me to play Marco — a boy. And that was no longer me anymore,” she explained. “I spent about a month just pacing around my room, trying to figure out what to do.”
She’s thankful the show’s creator, Jordon Nardino, and executive producer Kameron Tarlow, decided to allow the character to mirror some of her journey.
“It was really important that Marco’s trans-ness was not the plot of the show,” she shared. “It’s not a ‘twist’ to surprise the audience. Instead, we get to watch a young queer person experiencing first love and heartbreak, career success and failure, and everything else that comes with being a young adult… while also discovering their identity in the background of life. Because being transgender is not something you do, it’s who you are.”
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