Miss Benny

It’s been a banner year for Miss Benny. The influencer, singer, and actor launched into TV sets around the world as the star of Netflix’s Glamorous , in which she portrayed the assistant to a beauty mogul played by Kim Cattrall. Previously, she made history in 2018 by portraying Casey, the first queer character on Fuller House .

Beyond bringing LGBTQ + representation to the television landscape in 2023, Miss Benny also came out as a transgender woman. It is “a huge relief to finally be who I am,” Miss Benny says of the milestone. She had been “privately transitioning for a couple years, and the thing that I can now report is it’s just been better and better than I could have ever hoped for.”

Miss Benny acknowledges she still has “a lot of seeds buried into my brain” from a Texas upbringing “about how I should be or how I should act. But I find that with every year of my life, things get better. And I try to remember that when things are particularly hard.”

Today, she’s proud to be part of the entertainment industry, which offered her escapism in her youth and a living as an adult. “I’m working on a lot of music right now,” she says. “This year has been sort of the launching point for all of my different creative endeavors, and now I’m ready to soar and fly and break free like Troy and Gabriella in High School Musical .”

In the fight for equality, she also wants to stress shared humanity. “I think about how my day-to-day life is not nearly at all different from the way that my mom lives every day,” she reflects. “I mean we wake up, we make our coffee, we watch our little shows…and so [I’m] just trying to make people see that queer equality is just literally a respect for each other.” @missbenny