Black History Month - Black Trans Women - February 13th

Since it's Friday the 13th I want today's black trans woman to be Angelica Ross, who made history inside a major modern horror franchise. Angelica Ross appeared in multiple seasons of American Horror Story, including 1984 and later Red Tide, becoming one of the first Black trans women to hold a recurring acting role within a mainstream horror anthology series. Horror has a long history of using gender variance as a twist, a disguise, or a source of fear, but Ross’s characters were written as actual people within the story rather than metaphors about transness. She existed in the genre as a character first, not a reveal. What makes this significant is how different it is from earlier horror eras. For decades, trans identity in horror was something written by outsiders and attached to villains or shock endings. Ross’s presence marked a shift where a Black trans woman was not the horror device, but a participant in the narrative world itself. Her work helped move horror from depicting transness as something frightening toward allowing trans people to occupy space in the genre as performers, creators, and storytellers.