Ten years ago, a Black trans actress headlining a major studio film would have been unimaginable. Even today, Eva Reign, the star of Billy Porter’s directorial debut Anything’s Possible, cannot believe she is setting that precedent.
“My whole life, I’d wanted to be an actress,” she told Them writer Michael Love Michael. “But even after I got that call, I was telling myself, I’m a Black trans girl — I’m not going to be the lead in a movie.”
For Reign, it will be her first time acting in a feature-length film. For Hollywood, the MGM-made high school love story (initially announced as What If?) will be the first major studio film to star a Black trans actress as a romantic lead — an especially significant first given how white the rom-com genre has been.
Reign’s casting is proof that the entertainment industry has been changing — albeit slowly and not without an ongoing fight. The success of the St. Louis-born actress comes eight years after Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of TIME alongside the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point,” announcing that transgender people had entered the mainstream for good. At the time, Cox had made history herself by co-starring as Sophia Burset in the wildly popular Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.
The story made waves, leading some to see Cox's success as reflective of a society that was finally ready to see its trans members flourish. Before long, though, Cox's wider presence gave rise to another conversation, one that connected her visibility with a worsening epidemic of fatal violence against Black and brown trans women. As Cox told Them contributor Kimberly Drew, the heightened visibility of the mid-2010s gave way to a “fierce backlash” in American culture and politics. Media representation continued to expand, even as attacks on trans people from state legislatures and the Trump administration continued apace.
Then came Pose. Starring Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, the AIDS-era drama premiered in 2018 and quickly transformed television through its unprecedented attention to the lives, loves, and talents of Black trans women. Even after the end of Pose, GLAAD reports that the number of trans actors playing series regular and recurring roles in TV shows across broadcast, cable, and streaming has increased from a total of 29 last year to 42 in 2022. And while Hollywood isn’t nearly perfect in terms of representation, TV shows are increasingly giving us characters whose transness is just one aspect of their identity, like Jojo Brown’s Mindy in Single Drunk Female; or who, like Elliot Pages’ Viktor of The Umbrella Academy, are rewritten to reflect an actor’s own identity.
Meanwhile, Cox has cemented her position in Hollywood, full-stop. This year, she began hosting the E! News Live red carpet and co-starred in the viral hit Inventing Anna, playing a role with no tie to transness. Rodriguez is poised to follow in her path, launching out of a role that she once worried could pigeon-hole her and into a new chapter as both an actress and singer not restricted to LGBTQ+ audiences. “I’ve had the exposure and I understand what my goal and purpose is as far as being in the limelight,” Rodriguez told Them editor-at-large Michael Cuby, “and now, I’m realizing the sky’s the limit.”
Still, a growing onslaught of legislative attacks against trans and queer people have thrown LGBTQ+ Americans into a state of crisis. As Jules Gill-Peterson recently wrote in Them, conservatives are not looking merely to restrict the rights of trans people, but erase them from public life altogether. And they are taking aim at some of our most fundamental venues for storytelling: school classrooms and libraries.
Trans storytellers and performers have undoubtedly served as “arbiters of empathy,” as Cox phrased it, fostering allyship and fueling the concrete gains of the last several years. But she, Rodriguez, and Reign all understand the need to push beyond the tipping point, toward a future when media representation and the reality of trans life are no longer so discordant.
For Cox, the best response to backlash has never been to hide, but to continue taking up the space that's rightfully hers. “We trans people have said we will no longer be in the shadows,” said Cox. “We will no longer be marginalized. We have a right to exist in the light.”
While a film like Anything’s Possible might have seemed impossible to entertainment industry power brokers a decade ago, it exists because actors like Cox and Rodriguez have always been able to imagine this future, and have spent their careers bringing it into existence.
Given that, debuts like Eva’s take on a particular weight, not only bringing us closer to a future where we no longer have to count firsts, but redefining what’s possible in life — for a Black trans actress today, and for young trans people at large.
For Rodriguez, the vision is crystal clear: “Honey, I see myself having a long-lasting career while sitting at the table with every single last one of my trans sisters.”
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