The Wonderful Laverne Cox Becomes The First Trans Person To Make The Cover Of Time

Earlier this year there was a bit of controversy when Orange Is The New Black star Laverne Cox was given a massive thumbs up by nearly topping the Time 100 Reader Poll. However when the actual list of the 100 most influential people of the year was published by Time magazine – as decided by the editors – Cox was nowhere to be seen.

Many people were pretty upset, but now Time has decided that better than putting Cox somewhere into an arbitrary list is to make her the first transgender person ever on the cover of the magazine, accompanying an article and interview about the ‘Transgender Tipping Point’.

The interview goes deep into Cox’s journey, such as the fact that in her youth she wasn’t allowed to learn ballet, because “ballet was too gay.”

She also looks back on her childhood when she knew she wanted to be a girl, but it wasn’t until third grade that she realised she wouldn’t just somehow become one simply because that’s how she felt inside. By the time she was in sixth grade she tried to kill herself.

Luckily as she reached her teens could start exploring androgyny and her creativity that she began to find a way through.

However as she notes, there’s still a long way to go for trans people until there is proper acceptance, with part of the problem being that the stories of transgender people are often filtered through non-trans media that doesn’t really have much understanding of what it’s talking about. However with more high-profile people such as Cox and Janet Mock, as well as the fact social media has allowed trans people a voice it’s been difficult for them to get before, they are now starting to own their own stories and control them.

It is an article that’s important not just because it puts a trans person on the cover of Time, but also because the article is about Cox’s internal, emotional life and experience of being trans, not about hormones, surgery, genitals and the other things that have a tendency to distance people from thinking of trans people simply as human beings.

The cover has already sparked a lot of comment, and also saw Time editor Nancy Gibbs and GLAAD’s Tiq Milan sitting down with Ronan Farrow on MSNBC to talk about it, which you can see below.