Zoey Luna
Transgender Latina actress and activist Zoey Luna is not yet 21, but in the last decade, she has established herself as a rising star. In 2014, Luna and her mother were featured in the Laverne Cox documentary The T Word, which chronicled the lives of seven transgender young people. Soon after, Luna was cast in a documentary about her own life, Raising Zoey, which came to fruition after a local filmmaker saw Luna speak at Transgender Day of Remembrance in West Hollywood. Since then, Luna has made guest appearances on I Am Jazz and I Am Cait and has garnered acting roles on Pose, The Craft: Legacy, and the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. She is also currently working on a record and continues to be a vocal supporter of her community. “To be advocating for LGBTQ+ rights at a time in history when so many targets are placed on our backs feels scary,” says Luna. “But I’m grateful for those of us in the community who have the capacity to stand up and call direct attention to the injustice going on.”
Sameer Jha
At only 14, Sameer Jha took their experience of being bullied and founded the Empathy Alliance, an organization dedicated to making schools safer and more inclusive for LGBTQ+ youth. Since then, Jha has given a TED Talk on how adults can support LGBTQ+ youth and worked to make their school district a safer space for LGBTQ+ students. When Sameer was 16, they wrote Read This, Save Lives: A Teacher’s Guide to Creating Safer Classrooms for LGBTQ+ Students. Recently, Jha, who is now an undergraduate at Stanford University, was invited to the White House by President Joe Biden and helped advise the administration on the needs of trans youth in schools. “In this current moment, when queer and trans youth are under constant attack…it is more important than ever to make sure these youth have a safe and supportive place to grow and learn at school,” Jha says. “I do this work so that no kid will have to go through the kind of bullying and harassment I went through, and it means so much that I can be a source of representation for queer, nonbinary, and South Asian youth like me.”
