Actress Laverne Cox appears on the June
9 cover of Time magazine next to the headline The
Transgender Tipping Point: America's Next Civil Rights Frontier.
In the cover article, Katy Steinmetz
talks to various transgender people from all walks of life, including a
Google software engineer and 17-year-old homecoming queen Cassidy
Campbell.
“We are in a place now where more and
more trans people want to come forward and say, 'This is who I am,'”
Cox is quoted as saying. “And more trans people are willing to
tell their stories. More of us are living visibly and pursuing our
dreams visibly, so people can say, 'Oh yeah, I know someone who is
trans.' When people have points of reference that are humanizing,
that demystifies difference.”
Cox, who plays a transgender woman in
the Netflix hit series Orange Is The New Black, tweeted that
the cover was a “wonderful” birthday gift.
“Yes today is my birthday and I am on
the cover of @TIME magazine. I realize this is way bigger than me
and about a tipping point in our nation's history where it is no
[longer] acceptable for trans lives to be stigmatized, ridiculed,
criminalized and disregarded. This is for my trans siblings out
there and for anyone who has ever been told that who you know
yourself to be at your core is not legitimate. You are who you know
yourselves to be,” Cox messaged.