Trans And Non-Binary Celebrities Who Have Made History

This article references transphobia.

We love when celebrities make history, especially when it comes to firsts representing the advancement of minority groups in entertainment. And with transphobia still running rampant in today's society, positive representation is more important than ever. According to the ACLU, there have been a record 491 anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed across the United States in 2023, as of June 23. In a world where the transgender community is still fighting for basic human rights along with access to medically-necessary care and to use public accommodations suited to their identities, the visibility of trans and non-binary celebrities can provide hope and perhaps even open minds.

While transgender is a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, non-binary is used to refer to people whose gender identity or expression is not contained within the binary categories of "man" and "woman." This includes identifications such as agender, pangender, or gender fluid. While some non-binary folks consider themselves a part of the transgender community, others do not and so we use these terms in tandem in this article rather than simply "transgender."

Transgender people have been featured in media since the days of Christine Jorgenson — often called the first trans celebrity — but they have historically been portrayed stereotypically and negatively. This is still too often the case. However, on-screen, we are also seeing more complex characters and nuanced stories about transgender and non-binary people, helmed by artists of those identities. Here are some of the transgender and non-binary celebrities who have had history-making moments.

How cool is it that two uber-talented Broadway stars made history for non-binary individuals on the very same evening? No response is needed because the only acceptable answer is "very cool." The 76th Tony Awards was a huge night for gender minorities, as two individuals became the first non-binary folks to ever take home one of the highly coveted stage awards. Given how theatre has consistently been an LGBTQ+-friendly medium in modern times, we are not surprised that the Broadway community opened themselves up to reconceiving what those in the "actor" categories need to look like, or how they need to identify. The one-two punch was the highlight of the evening, especially given recent debates about the exclusionary nature of gendered categories at award shows. In 2023, Liv Hewson, a non-binary cast member on "Yellowjackets," even removed themself from Emmy consideration due to the issue.

But back to those memorable 2023 Tony Awards and the two actors who made history at it. The first was star J. Harrison Ghee, who won "Best Actor in a Musical" for playing Jerry-slash-Daphne in "Some Like It Hot." The second history-making winner was Alex Newell, who fans might remember from shows like "Glee" and "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist," on which they were a standout. Newell won the category of "Best Supporting Actor in a Musical," for their performance in "Shucked." In their acceptance speech, Newell said, "Thank you for seeing me, Broadway. I should not be up here as a queer, non-binary, fat, Black, little baby from Massachusetts."

The last few years have brought us a handful of shows centering notable transgender characters and, unlike many of the portrayals of the past — see "Ugly Betty," "Twin Peaks," "Nip/Tuck," etc. — a lot of these roles have been played by actual trans actors. But we are not entirely sure that people like Hunter Schafer (Jules Vaughn on "Euphoria") and Jesse James Keitel (Jerrie Kennedy on "Big Sky") would have ever been given a shot without Candis Cayne, a true trailblazer for transgender women on television. In 2007, she became the first transgender actor to have a recurring role on primetime television when she appeared as Carmelita Rainer on ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money."

Cayne's character on the soapy drama was not without its limitations — she was, after all, a mistress to Billy Baldwin's Patrick Darling IV, an Attorney General and Senate hopeful, and the network even digitally lowered her voice for the series premiere's "big reveal" moment where she is first introduced. Still, Cayne feels mostly positive about the 11 episodes in which she appeared. "It was written really well and my character was in love with this man and he was in love with her too," she told Out in 2015. "I realized that had never been portrayed, but I had no idea how big the impact would be socially until I was three to four episodes in and people started to realize that this was making the world aware of the fact that there are normal feeling trans women out there."

Speaking of television, it does not get more high-profile than Laverne Cox who, since debuting in the early '00s, has worked her way up from unknown to huge star thanks to her breakout role in Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black" in 2013. We could write a whole feature on the impact of Cox's incredible achievements, but since we are limited in space, we will just give you the highlights. The popular star became the first transgender actor to play a transgender character in a series regular role with her part in the short-lived law drama "Doubt." And in 2014, she became the first openly transgender person to appear on the cover of Time. Not bad for someone who got their first taste of fame by appearing on Sean Combs' reality show, "I Want to Work for Diddy."

Cox has also made history at the Emmys. In 2014, she became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category when she received a nod for her work as Sophia Burset in "Orange Is the New Black." Cox subsequently received three more nominations for her work on the Netflix show, but the Emmy on Cox's shelf is actually from the Daytime Emmy Awards. She won the award in the category of Outstanding Special Class Special for being an executive producer on "Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word" in 2015, making her the first openly transgender woman to win it.

Though not everyone is convinced they should still be around, beauty pageants remain a big part of our culture — and not just in America but on a global scale. Within mainstream pageantry, there have been a number of openly transgender contestants to make it far in the game in the years since Jenna Talackova successfully fought a ban to compete in Miss Universe Canada in 2012. This includes Angela Maria Ponce, Miss Universe Spain 2018, who was both the first openly transgender contestant to win her country's Miss Universe pageant and also the first transgender woman to compete for the national title. Transgender contestants have also competed in the Miss Universe pageants in countries such as Germany, Nepal, and South Africa.

There have not been many transgender beauty pageant contestants in the United States, but the ones who have competed have made waves. For instance, transgender contestant Brían Nguyen's win in The Miss Greater Derry Scholarship Program created blowback from segments of the public and even some former pageant queens. While Nguyen did not win Miss New Hampshire 2023, Kataluna Enriquez beat out everyone in her state back in 2021, becoming the first transgender woman to win Miss Nevada USA, and the first transgender woman to compete for the title of Miss USA. Enriquez may not have cracked the top 16 nationally, but she opened the door for transgender competitors stateside.

The organization that runs the Golden Globe Awards, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is not exactly known for embracing diversity. Many stars even boycotted the awards in 2021 for that very reason, after many Black creators and Black-fronted projects were snubbed for nominations. It was also shockingly revealed that there was not one Black journalist in the organization, out of 87 members at the time. The following year, NBC declined to air the Golden Globes, claiming the HFPA had more work to do. The lack of ceremony was a shame for one reason and one reason only — because Michaela Jaé Rodriguez deserved to walk that stage.

Rodriguez first made history the year prior when she became the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for a lead acting award at the Primetime Emmys, for her work playing Blanca Evangelista on the revolutionary series "Pose." The series centered on transgender women of color within New York's ballroom scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2022, Rodriguez again made history when she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series — Drama for the same role. This made her the first transgender actor to win a Golden Globe, the significance of which was not lost on her. "This is for the LGBTQAI, Black, Latina, Asian [communities and] the many multi-beautiful colors of the rainbow around the freaking world. This not just for me, this is for y'all," she said on Instagram Live.

In 2023, people were justifiably excited when Kim Petras and Sam Smith won a Grammy Award for their hit song "Unholy." When the pair were announced as the winners of the Best Pop Duo-Group Performance category, Petras became the first openly transgender woman to win the award (and Smith the first non-binary winner of it). But Petras — who was one of the youngest people to ever get gender affirmation surgery — is not the first transgender woman to win a Grammy in general. That title goes to Wendy Carlos, a transgender artist who specialized in the Moog synthesizer and was for decades an acclaimed composer in Hollywood (she wrote the score for "A Clockwork Orange," for example). Carlos was not open about her identity at the time of her win, a key difference that explains how Petras made history with hers.

Carlos won three Grammy Awards for her debut album, "Switched-on-Bach," released in 1968. When she accepted her awards for Best Classical Album, Best Engineered Album (Classical), and Best Classical Performance (Instrumental Soloist) two years later, Carlos was receiving professional treatment for gender dysphoria, taking estrogen, and living as a woman in private. Carlos had gender affirmation surgery in 1972 but kept releasing music under her birth name for years after. She came out in a Playboy interview in 1979, began releasing music using her chosen name, and stopped hiding — at one point, she had worn fake sideburns and a wig to present as male in public.

As we have established, Laverne Cox was the first transgender person to cover Time — one of the most important magazines in existence with a storied history dating back to 1923. Her 2014 cover had the headline "The Transgender Tipping Point," but clearly things did not tip enough because it took another seven years for a transgender man to hit the cover. Even then, it took a huge celebrity's coming out to facilitate the cover, despite there being various instances of trans-specific issues and events that could have earned a trans man the spotlight. Still, we do not want to downplay the importance of Elliot Page's March 2021 Time feature, which arrived three months after he announced his gender identity and transition on Instagram.

Page established himself in Hollywood with roles in blockbusters like "Inception" and "X-Men: The Last Stand," and won a slew of awards, earning an Academy Award nomination for playing the titular character of the hit 2007 film "Juno." As his first big interview since making the announcement, the article discussed not only Page but also the transphobia that persists in our culture. "My privilege has allowed me to have resources to get through and to be where I am today," he said. "And of course, I want to use that privilege and platform to help in the ways I can." When Page published his memoir, "Pageboy," in 2023, Time ran an excerpted chapter, so they are clearly a fan.

Andreja Pejic has broken down many doors for transgender women in the modeling industry, setting a number of records in the process. Though she was a popular model prior to coming out as transgender in 2013, her modeling agency dropped her when she publicly disclosed her gender identity. And honestly, the decision was extremely odd considering that Pejic had been modeling both menswear and womenswear for years. But she got the last laugh in 2017 when she was signed by the iconic Ford Models, making her the first transgender model in the agency's history. Considering Ford's prestige, it was an industry-changing moment. But by that point, Pejic had already been breaking barriers and making history for years.

Amongst other things, Pejic was the first model to cross gender lines and walk runways respectively assigned to male and female fashion. She was also the first transgender model to be on the cover of men's magazine GQ, and the first one to receive a profile in Vogue (back in 2015). Most versions of Vogue have since welcomed transgender models to their pages, and in 2017, Valentina Sampaio became the first transgender woman to make the cover when Vogue Paris led the way. In the years since, transgender women have been featured on the covers of American Vogue, British Vogue, and Vogue Thailand. Outside of runways and magazines, Pejic also broke barriers when she became a spokesperson for Make Up For Ever in 2015, becoming the first openly transgender model to land a cosmetics contract.

Emma Corrin is an acclaimed actor best known for their acclaimed work on "House of the Dragon" and also "The Crown," for which they won a Golden Globe Award in 2021. That same year, Corrin came out as queer and non-binary, telling Vanity Fair in 2023 that they received a lot of online abuse afterward. Thankfully, their identity has had no impact on their thriving career. Interestingly, Corrin has credited playing Princess Diana in "The Crown" with helping them to define their gender and sexuality. "She was so openhearted to everything and explored so much," Corrin told The New York Times shortly after coming out. "I feel like Diana helped me explore so many depths of myself and really do a big internal discovery of what I was feeling about everything because she was a very complex person."

In July 2022, Corrin made history when they became the first openly non-binary person to cover the American version of Vogue. And it was somewhat of a game-changer because non-binary models have popping up all over the Vogues of the world ever since. In 2023 alone, non-binary people covered Vogue editions in Scandinavia (Amanda Stenberg), the Philippines (Bretman Rock), and Britain (Janelle Monae). But American Vogue was not the first to make this big move of inclusion. Actor and model Indya Moore, who identifies as transgender and non-binary, graced the cover of three separate editions (Vogue Spain, Italia, and India) in 2020, and non-binary model Taira Go covered Vogue Japan the following year.

If there was any question that we love a list of hot men, please see our many lists devoted to them, including ones featuring young and not-so-young zaddies, and a slew gushing over the dreamiest male athletes. So, clearly, we are fans of People magazine's iconic "Sexiest Man Alive" issue and await their choices year after year. In recent years, the magazine has done a good job of expanding its definition of sexy to include a wider variety of ages, races, sexual orientations, and looks. And in 2021, it finally opened its pages to include its first transgender man in the must-read issue — a history-making moment.

The sexy man in question is actor Brian Michael Smith, who co-stars on Fox's "9-1-1: Lone Star" as firefighter Paul Strickland. The star was featured as one of the entries on the issue's "25 of the Sexiest Men You Can Watch on TV Now" list, which came as a huge shock for him. "I've been called many things, this is a first," he wrote on Instagram at the time. "Incredibly honored to be included in this list with so many actors I admire. Big love to [People] for the historic shout-out." It was not Smith's first historic moment, either. When he started on "9-1-1: Lone Star," Smith became the first Black transgender male in a recurring or regular role on network television (while he had previous recurring roles on "Queen Sugar" and "The L Word," which both aired on cable).

Angelica Ross shot to fame as scene-stealer Candy Ferocity on the FX series "Pose," beginning in 2018. After her character was — spoiler alert — killed off in a controversial but, unfortunately, realistic storyline, showrunner Ryan Murphy cast Ross in another of his shows, "American Horror Story," making her the first transgender actor to land two series regular television roles. This was likewise something her former "Pose" costar Michaela Jaé Rodriguez went on to accomplish a couple of years later when she was cast on "Loot," making her the second transgender person to achieve this feat. But that is not even why we included Ross on our list, because she has another first that is arguably even bigger and which certainly includes more jazz hands.

After making history on television, Ross turned her sights to Broadway, where she once again broke down doors for transgender performers. In September 2022, she appeared as Roxie Hart in "Chicago" for an eight-week run at New York's Ambassador Theatre, giving her the distinction of being the first transgender woman to have a leading part on Broadway. This happened only months after L Morgan Lee's historical Tony nomination for her featured role in "A Strange Loop," so 2022 was a huge year for transgender theatre actors. "I think about the trans women who are looking at me right now and are now thinking that this is possible," Ross told AP days before her debut. "I am really excited to embrace the audience as they embrace me."

The Marvel Cinematic Universe began in 2008, with the release of "Iron Man" and shortly thereafter, "The Incredible Hulk." To date, the studio has released more than 30 films, some of which are among the highest-grossing movies of all time. Indeed, as of July 2023 Marvel's "Avengers: Endgame" was second only to the original "Avatar." Other massive Marvel moneymakers include "Avengers: Infinity War," "The Avengers," and "Spider-Man: No Way Home," all of which crack the Top 10. For such a huge film series, Marvel Studios has not exactly been a hub of diversity, although far more women and people of color have been featured in more recent films.

While "Black Panther" and "Black Widow" are examples of films led by non-White or non-male superheroes, the LGBTQ+ community has not been well-represented by Marvel films, not even relative to the comic books which have boasted a variety of queer characters — the films have shown only a smattering of them. It was not until 2021's "The Eternals" that the MCU introduced its first gay superhero in Phastos, even though actors who are open as sexual minorities have acted in Marvel movies since Ian McKellan's run in the "X-Men" films, which predates the MCU. Things have been ever scarcer for transgender representation, though Zach Barack did break boundaries when he appeared in the 2019 film, "Spider-Man: Far From Home" as Zach Cooper, becoming the MCU's first openly transgender actor to do so.

We already have a model on this list, but there are simply too many important folks pushing the industry forward for us to not sneak in at least one more. Lea T got the spot because of the various records she has set, which includes being the first transgender woman to be a part of an Olympics opening ceremony when she participated in the torch lighting at the 2016 games. "At this time, in which Rio de Janeiro and Brazil will be presented to the world, it's essential that diversity is present. Brazil is a vast country and all its diversity should be somehow represented in this event," T said in a BBC interview (via The Advocate).

T was born in Brazil, but raised in Italy, which is the perfect place for a budding model to get started. She transitioned in 2008 and, at first, her transgender identity was controversial in the modeling industry. "It was kind of a big scandal when I started," she told Oprah.com in 2011. By the time of that interview, T was already a hit with fashion insiders and had made history by becoming the first transgender model to appear in a major fashion campaign (for Givenchy in 2010). She again hit a first when she became the first transgender global ambassador for the salon haircare brand Redken. In 2011, she was also the first transgender model to cover Elle Brazil — eight years before Indya Moore became the first one to cover the US edition.

We would love to tell you that transgender and non-binary people are well-represented in the mainstream comedy world, but that would not be accurate. Don't get us wrong — there are plenty of gender minorities doing comedy, but not typically on the size of stages that they deserve. Transgender and non-binary comedians like Jes Tom, River Butcher, and James Tison deserve bigger audiences but are all on the rise. Non-binary stand-up Mae Martin even scored a Netflix special in 2023, so progress is happening within this field even if it's been a slow burn. Genderqueer stand-up Hannah Gadsby has done much to move things forward now that they have taken off via their Netflix success, though even they have called out the industry as transphobic, in a statement published by the Independent.

Before Gadsby or Martin landed specials with Netflix, Ian Harvie was making history with his own comedy special. The transgender stand-up and actor became the first openly transgender individual to have their own comedy special when "May the Best C*ck Win" was featured on Seeso in 2016. "If I couldn't laugh, I'd die," he told The Daily Beast in 2017. "And I think a lot of trans people probably feel that way." In addition to stand-up, Harvie also acts and has appeared in TV shows such as "Mistresses" and "Young and Hungry." When he guested on three episodes of "Transparent," Harvie also became the first transgender male actor to portray a transitioned transgender man on scripted American television.

When a new generation of "Queer Eye" made its debut on Netflix in 2018, many were skeptical that it would be able to capture the magic of the original. Lo and behold, it has now lasted more seasons than the 2003 version (but less episodes, as Netflix's seasons are quite short) and received 10 Primetime Emmy Awards, on top of a total of 29 nominations to date (the original earned three noms and won once). Three of these Emmy nominations have been for the five hosts of the "Queer Eye." And while they have all broken out in their own ways, perhaps none more than Jonathan Van Ness, who identifies as non-binary and prefers male pronouns (although he's also cool with 'she' and 'they,' too). The star won fans over not only with his peppy personality but also with his raw vulnerability.

For instance, in 2019, the grooming expert was very open about his experience living with H.I.V., about being an addict, and about being a survivor of sexual abuse in a sit-down interview he did for a profile in The New York Times. Couple that openness with a great sense of humor and an unpredictable sense of style and you have a recipe for fame. In addition to starring in a slew of memorable commercials for brands like LG, Pop-Tarts, and Uber Eats, Van Ness gets plenty of media coverage. And his 2019 Cosmopolitan cover made him the first non-female-identifying celeb to cover the magazine solo since Boy George did 35 years earlier.