‘Glamorous’ Star Miss Benny Comes Out as Transgender in Candid Essay: ‘I’m a Proud Person’
In a raw essay for 'TIME' magazine, the breakout star details how she navigated her personal and Hollywood life as she transitioned into a woman in private
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Miss Benny is ready to open up about her transgender identity.
The 24-year-old Glamorous star, who wrote on Twitter that she uses she/her pronouns, wrote a personal essay for TIME magazine detailing her experiences as a transgender woman, beginning with her restrictive childhood years growing up in a conservative community in Texas.
“Let’s just say I’m one of those girls who grew up in a religious Texas household where queerness was totally not the vibe,” she wrote in the article published Monday, adding that she was homeschooled so as to not "tamper with the Christian faith my parents raised me in.”
She continued, “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. 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.”
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Charley Gallay/Getty
That escape for Benny was Los Angeles, where she found herself at 14 and by then facing rejection in Hollywood and relationships in which her “femininity was subject for negotiation.”
By 19, she received the call for a role in Glamorous as Marco Mejia, a young, non-binary makeup artist who is recruited as an assistant to makeup mogul Madolyn Addison (Kim Cattrall).
“At my first audition, I arrived as a diet version of myself so as not to subject myself to the usual rejection I’d faced. But this time, I was met with the encouragement to be myself and let my full femininity shine. They told me in the room that the role of Marco was mine, and I fell to my knees with tears in my eyes,” she remembered.
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Courtesy Of Netflix
However, the show did not move forward until it was picked up by Netflix. By the time it was, Benny began “privately transitioned in my day-to-day life.”
“It felt as if I had lived with a stuffy nose my whole life and then suddenly my breathing airways opened, and I discovered everybody else has been breathing freely the whole time," she wrote.
When the television project started to move forward, Benny’s dream did too, but there was still one roadblock. “They hired me to play Marco—a boy. And that was no longer me anymore. I spent about a month just pacing around my room, trying to figure out what to do,” she explained.
JC Olivera/The Hollywood Reporter
Benny met with the show’s creator, Jordon Nardino, and then its executive producer Kameron Tarlow to discuss the change. The producers and Netflix were supportive in melding Benny’s own personal transition with Marcos' for an ”authentic” storyline.
“It was really important that Marco’s trans-ness was not the plot of the show," she wrote. "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."
Benny recalled feeling hesitant about coming out on such a large platform during a politically challenging time.
“But then I am reminded that this fear is exactly why I wanted to include my transition in the show,” she wrote. “I know that when I was a terrified queer kid in Texas, it was the queer joy I found in droplets online that guided me to my happiness. And if someone like me is out there feeling the weight of being othered, I want them to have a place they can see someone like us thrive and be celebrated.”
Glamorous is now streaming on Netflix.
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