lgbtq

Champions’ Josie Totah Comes Out As Transgender

Josie Totah. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Josie Totah has come out as transgender in an essay for Time. Totah, who starred in NBC’s sitcom Champions and also appeared in Other People, Glee, and Spider-Man: Homecoming, explained she felt “like I let myself be shoved into a box: ‘J.J. Totah, gay boy’” in her acting roles, and in the discussions of herself in the press. That description did not match her actual identity and “has never been the way I think of myself,” she explained. “My pronouns are she, her and hers,” Totah writes. “I identify as female, specifically as a transgender female. And my name is Josie Totah.” Totah says she came to terms with her identity when she was 14, watching the show I Am Jazz about a transgender girl who is transitioning. Days later, she started meeting with specialists and taking a hormone blocker. Totah will start college this week, but she plans to continue acting. “I plan to play roles I haven’t had the opportunity to play. And I can only imagine how much more fun it’s going to be to play someone who shares my identity, rather than having to contort myself to play a boy,” she writes. “I’m going to gun for those roles, be it a transgender female or a cisgender female. Because it’s a clean slate — and a new world.”

Champions’ Josie Totah Comes Out As Transgender