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.
"There's nothing calculated about the way that I operate," Julio Torres told Metro Weekly in 2019 to discuss Los Espookys, the HBO comedy series, which the former Saturday Night Live writer created with co-stars Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen. "I think we just do things the way that we know how and like to do them. And in my case, I feel like I don't know how to do it any other way."
Torres' singular comic voice and vision -- highly conceptual, sardonic yet heartfelt, and shaped by his experience as the queer Salvadoran immigrant son of an artist -- registers in all he does. The humorous threads connecting his signature SNL sketches, live standup, and Los Espookys are unmistakable in his new film Problemista, Torres' feature filmmaking debut.
A city council member for a U.S.-Mexico border town was overwhelmingly voted out of office in a recall election after she came out as transgender.
Calexico Council Member and former Mayor Raúl Ureña -- who uses all pronouns but prefers "she" -- was first elected to the city council in 2020, at age 23.
She was hailed in recent years as a progressive hero challenging the political status quo in the town of about 38,000, located in California, just across the border from Mexicali, Mexico.
In 2020, Ureña had succeeded former Council Member David Romero, who went to federal prison after being convicted in a bribery scandal.
Several Alabama Republicans have demanded the termination of a transgender employee at Space Camp, arguing that their presence poses a danger to participating students.
Space Camp, an educational program on the grounds of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center museum in Huntsville, Alabama, provides residential and educational programs for youth on topics such as space exploration, aviation, and robotics.
The center hosts approximately 26,000 youth annually, with specific programs for different age groups.
One of those programs, "Space Camp," primarily serves children aged 9 to 11. It seeks to balance educational, classroom-style learning with hands-on activities and entertainment offerings.
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