Transgender on screen: the programmes and movies leading the charge

There is an increasingly rich transgender presence in TV and film, from Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black to Rebecca Root in Boy Meets Girl

• Read an extract from Juliet Jacques’s moving account of her transgender journey
  

One of the most prominent characters from the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black is Sophia Burset, a transgender character portrayed by Laverne Cox . The American actor and LGBT rights advocate appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2014, the first openly transgender person to have done so. Her 2014 MTV reality show, Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, documented the stories of seven transgender young people and won a Daytime Emmy award.