Without a doubt, “Orange Is the New Black” star Laverne Cox and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Carmen Carrera have become the entertainment world’s biggest transgender celebrities and have broken major ground for other trans people. Recently, the two powerful women came together on an episode of “Katie” to discuss life as transgender celebrities.
While sitting on the couch with host Katie Couric, both women fielded some rather personal and invasive questions about their surgical transition from men to women and both of them let Couric know that part of the problem of living as a transgender person in the world is that other people tend to focus on their genitalia instead of their character.
“I don’t want to talk about it because it’s really personal,” said Carrera after Couric asked if she’d had surgery to change her genitals. “I’d rather talk about my modeling stuff. I’d rather talk about being in W and maybe being in Italian Vogue and doing fun stuff and showing people that after the transition there’s still life to live.”
“I wanna focus on that instead of what’s down here because that’s been spoken about so many times in interviews with other trans people. They always focus on either the transition or the genitalia and I feel like there’s more to trans people than that,” she added.
Cox shared the same sentiment with Couric and added how the world’s limited view of trans people has left them vulnerable to being treated as subhuman.
“I do feel like there’s preoccupation with [transitioning],” Cox said. “I think the preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people and then we don’t get to really deal with the real experiences. The reality of trans people’s lives is that so often we’re targets of violence. We experience violence disproportionately to the rest of the community… when we focus on transition we don’t get to talk about those things.”
We commend Cox and Carrera for opening up their lives and their experiences in the trans world to the masses and, hopefully, people will be more willing to learn about the trans community as opposed to simply focusing on the fact that they’re different.
Check out some other trans celebs below. –nicholas robinson
