- Actress, model, and activist Carmen Carrera spoke to Insider for an exclusive interview in honor of
Pride month. - Carrera said she wants the industry to start writing
trans people in roles that focus on their joy and success rather than their pain. - She said more trans people in writer's rooms and directing will expand the kinds of roles offered to
trans actors .
In 2014, actress and activist
She was a "W" magazine cover girl, and there was a growing campaign by fans to make her the first trans Victoria's Secret angel.
During an interview with Insider to honor Pride month, Carrera told Insider she was ecstatic to sit down with Katie Couric in 2014 to discuss the biggest moments in her budding career. But she said she was devastated when the topics mirrored all of the typical ones aimed at trans people at the time: genitals, gender-affirming surgeries, and her body.
"When I sat down and you know, I started to engage in the interview, I realized that this was more about that, a typical conversation about body parts and surgery," Carrera said. "I was really scared because I didn't think that that was what the conversation was going to be."
Carrera, who got her first big break on Season 3 of "RuPaul's Drag Race" in 2011, told Insider movie roles and modeling jobs were few and far between for trans people when she was first starting out in the industry.
Interviews were key to getting publicity and jobs, but so many conversations unfolded like Carrera's interview with Couric.
Since 2014, mainstream visibility and media representation for trans people in the industry has drastically changed and Couric has even apologized for the blunders she made during the interview. Carrera has been trying to shift the landscape of trans representation in media for nearly two decades.
"I know a lot of the times when I do interviews we do bring up the community a lot, which is important," Carrera told Insider. "But you know, I'm still sort of waiting for a period of time where people are just honored and respected for their contributions to the arts because we're artists too."
Carrera wants more shows that depict trans joy rather than trans pain and struggle
While trans visibility has increased with shows like "Orange Is the New Black," "The L Word: Generation Q," and "Pose" including trans characters, Carrera said she can't wait for the industry to take it a step further.
Carrera wants media to focus less on trans people's bodies and instead focus on their life stories.
"Ideally, I'd love to see a storyline of a trans woman that has already made it past the transition and has transitioned socially and with her family," Carrera said. "Now, she's taking on the world just as a woman where the trans thing is not a thing. It's love, it's finances, it's business, things that we all eventually have to go through."
Carrera said in order to break the tropes trans people typically have to play on screen, there need to be more trans people in the writer's room and in the director's seat.
"There's not enough of us in the writer's room to be able to offer that insight and to be able to offer that soul so that people can feel it and put it in writing," Carrera said. "I think that's really what we need, is more of us in the writer's room."