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Josie Totah, the 17-year-old star of Mindy Kaling’s Champions, came out as a transgender female in a personal essay published Monday by Time. “I realized over the past few years that hiding my true self is not healthy. I know now, more than ever, that I’m finally ready to take this step toward becoming myself. I’m ready to be free,” Totah wrote. “So, listen up y’all: You can jump on or jump off. Either way this is where I’m heading. My pronouns are she, her and hers. I identify as female, specifically as a transgender female. And my name is Josie Totah.” Totah, who also appeared on Glee and Back in the Game, noted that she has been misidentified as a gay boy for years, but felt “afraid” of revealing her true identity. “I almost felt like I owed it to everybody to be that gay boy,” she wrote. “But that has never been the way I think of myself.”
Totah added that while she always knew that she identified as female “on some level,” those feelings “crystallized” while watching TLC’s I Am Jazz, a docuseries about a transgender 14-year-old girl undergoing a medical transition. “As I learned more information about hormone replacement therapy,” Totah added, “I knew that this was what I had to do.” She concluded the essay by expressing her hope for the future: “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 wrote. “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.”