CBS' Bold And The Beautiful Soap Reveals A Trans Feminine Character

African-American trans characters on TV shows are a rare phenomenon. 

The last time a CBS broadcast television series had a serious African-American trans feminine character that wasn't a stereotype, you have to go all the way back to 1977 and Edith Stokes on The Jeffersons 'Just A Friend' episode to find her.

Now that Orange Is the New Black and Transparent have proven it's okay to put trans characters on TV and surprise surprise, if you do them right get ratings and Emmy nominations for the actors that portray them, it seems as though the networks are finally coming to the trans character party late as usual.

Seems as though CBS has decided to continue to break ground when it comes to creating African-American trans characters.   Laverne Cox will debut as the lead character in a legal drama slated to air this fall called Doubt, and now comes word that yesterday the CBS soap opera The Bold and The Beautiful shocked its viewers with an unexpected cliff hanger that involves a trans character.

Actress Karla Mosley has played model Maya Avant on the soap for the last two year.s   Yesterday the bomb was dropped by Nicole Avant (played by Reign Edwards) that Maya was once her brother with the dead name Myron.

“You’re not my sister, Maya. You’re not Maya at all,” said Nicole (Reign Edwards) during an emotional argument. “You’re Myron, my brother.”




That bombshell lit up the Twitterverse as a trending topic for several hours, and now has me scrambling to catch up on some back Bold and The Beautiful episodes, since I've been on a soap hiatus ever since ABC took my beloved All My Children off the air.

“My first reaction was surprise, because 10 or 20 years ago, this is not a story we would be telling, and not in a way that’s truthful and not sensational,” said Mosley in a USA Today interview about her trans feminine character. “My second reaction was, ‘Thank you.’ It’s a gift. It’s a privilege,” she told the newspaper. “It’s a real opportunity to educate our viewers here and all over the world.”

“It is about people respecting other people’s differences and their uniqueness,” said Bradley Bell, executive producer and head writer for B&B in a statement obtained by USA Today. “In the end, we all want to be loved, and in order to love someone else you first have to love yourself,” Bell added. “If you are transgender, gay, straight, it doesn’t matter. It’s about finding love in life. This is a love story.”

And this is going to be a long term B&B storyline according to Mosley that unfolds over a long period of time, and the characters on the show will gradually find out about Maya's past.

"Everyone has a different reaction," she said. "So even if the audience can't necessarily be on board with Maya, or if they have [certain] feelings about Maya's experience now, hopefully they'll be able to see themselves in the reactions of the people around her and we can all sort of process it together."

Until yesterday, Bold and the Beautiful wasn't in my soap opera watching rotation.  Now it is Must See TV as I watch this historic television storyline unfold.