Transgender actress Ivory Aquino has made history after being cast in the upcoming HBO Max Batgirl movie.
Aquino will portray the first ever transgender character in a live-action DC Comics film, Alysia Yeoh, the best friend of Batgirl.
Yeoh is a groundbreaking character, having been the first major trans character in a comic book at the time of her debut in 2011, Daily Beast reports.
Leslie Grace, who will star as Barbara Gordon — aka Batgirl — in the film, previously teased Aquino’s casting on her Instagram story earlier this month.
Sharing a photo of the characters crossing a street and holding hands, Grace wrote: “Barbara and Alysia 😍🦇” and tagged Aquino in the post.
HBO Max has yet to set a release date for Batgirl. The film will also star J.K. Simmons as Gotham police commissioner and Barbara’s father James Gordon, Brendan Fraser as sociopathic pyromaniac Firefly, and Michael Keaton — reprising his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman after previously portraying the character in Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns.
Aquino publicly came out as transgender in 2017 during the press tour for ABC docuseries When We Rise, about the history of LGBTQ rights advocacy between the 1970s and 2010s.
Aquino told People that she had considered quitting acting prior to When We Rise, as she “didn’t feel at the time that there were any roles” for transgender actors.
Speaking to NBC News, the Filipina-American actress said, “As soon as I was born, I was always a girl; I was just assigned differently at birth.”
“At some point in high school that desire to express that need in me was so strong that one summer I ended up plucking my eyebrows and colored my hair, and I walked into school and there was a collective gasp in the classroom in the change of appearance,” Aquino said.
Following her critically acclaimed performance as trans teen Jules Vaughn in Euphoria, Hunter Schafer says she no longer wants to play transgender roles.
Speaking with GQ magazine, the 25-year-old actress, who is herself transgender, noted that she has turned down "tons of trans roles" because she doesn't want to be typecast and prefers her gender identity not define the rest of her career.
"I don’t want to be that, and I find it ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do," Schafer said. "I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on."
A Planet Fitness gym in Alaska banned an anti-LGBTQ woman who photographed a transgender member who was using the women's locker room.
Patricia Silva, a life coach from Fairbanks, Alaska, posted a public Facebook video on March 11, in which she claimed to have seen a "man shaving in the woman's bathroom" at the gym, reported the British tabloid Daily Mail.
"I realize he wants to be a woman, he gets to be a woman," Silva said in the video. "I love him in Christ. He's a spiritual being having a human experience. He doesn't like his gender, so he wants to be a woman, but I’m not comfortable with him shaving in my bathroom. All right. I just thought I'd say it out loud."
Two New York men have been charged with drug possession and distribution in connection with the death of Cecilia Gentili, a prominent New York-based transgender activist.
The arrest was announced in an April 1 news release from the office of Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
"Cecilia Gentili, a prominent activist and leader of the New York transgender community, was tragically poisoned in her Brooklyn home from fentanyl-laced heroin," Peace said in a statement. "Fentanyl is a public health crisis. Our Office will spare no effort in the pursuit of justice for the many New Yorkers who have lost loved ones due to this lethal drug."
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