Team Bruce! After putting a face to the transgender movement last year in her role on Orange Is the New Black and on the cover of Time magazine’s “The Transgender Tipping Point” issue, Laverne Cox is now praising another member of the trans community who is making history: Bruce Jenner.
The former Olympian broke social media records and made endless headlines for his daring interview with Diane Sawyer, in which he confirmed his plans to transition from a male to a female.
“I think a lot of people tuned in expecting to see a spectacle, and they tuned in and saw a profoundly nuanced, complicated, beautiful human being,” Cox, 30, told msnbc’s shift of Jenner’s interview at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, April 25. “I thought ABC handled it really beautifully. I had spoken to Bruce several months back. The same person who I spoke to on the phone, who really just loves their children so much and wants their family to be happy was the person I saw on television last night.”
The Netflix star also revealed that Jenner, 65, was “really pleased” with the interview.
“What Bruce said to me today, I was like, ‘This is like another gold medal,’ and they said, ‘This is better than a gold medal,’” Cox added.
But the spokeswoman for the trans community thinks its also important to focus on all transgender people, not just one person's story.
“Bruce’s story is very specific,” she said. “Most trans people don’t have that kind of privilege. At the end of the day, the visibility that I had last year and continue to have, didn’t save Blake Brockington from suicide, didn’t save Leelah Alcorn from suicide, didn’t save the seven trans women who were murdered the first eight weeks of this year. So visibility matters, but structural change and policy change is what needs to happen so the lives of all trans people will be better.” (Brockington was North Carolina’s first transgender homecoming king and an outspoken trans activist prior to his death. Alcorn’s parents refused to let her undergo transition treatment, and she eventually posted her suicide note on tumblr, which gained national attention.)
