Miss Benny is stepping into the spotlight — and she’s doing it as her true self.
“The gap is quickly closing between now and June 22: the day that my television series Glamorous will come out on Netflix,” the 24-year-old star of Glamorous wrote in a recently-published coming-out essay for Time magazine. “And along with it, I too will come out as the transgender woman I’ve been privately living as for the last few years.”
In the essay, Benny mentions how the HBO series Veneno about a Spanish trans woman named Cristina Ortiz who shot to fame in the ’90s when a newscaster interviewed her, changed the way she looked at herself.
“There’s a scene in the series where the main character, a young queer person, meets their icon, an elder transgender woman who goes by the stage name La Veneno. The young queer person gets to ask her, ‘When did you start transitioning?’ And Veneno answers and turns to her admirer to ask, ‘And when will you start?’” Benny remembers.
“It was a punch to the gut,” she continues. “Because I knew that if somebody asked me that question, I would become painfully aware of how much time I felt I had wasted by not transitioning sooner.”
She also reveals that when she revealed her transition to Glamorous creator Jordon Nardino, the two agreed to have Benny’s character Marco, be trans in the show to reflect Miss Benny’s real-life journey.
“Netflix came onboard,” she says. “In fact, the only concern was ever about my own personal comfort and, funnily, whether or not the pitch of my voice would change over the course of filming (lol!). And so, from that moment on, I worked closely with Jordon to ensure the authenticity of Marco’s identity in the show.”
She also shared the good news on her social media.
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“Thank u @TIME for letting me write about my transition for the first time,” she wrote on Twitter. “My pronouns are she/her. I am overwhelmed with hard-earned joy. Happy Pride.”
Congratulations to Miss Benny! It’s truly wonderful seeing her shine like this.