Barbie Laverne Cox doll makes historical past

WASHINGTON — Mattel is celebrating Emmy-winner Laverne Cox together with her personal Barbie doll. 

The actress and LGBTQ activist is the primary transgender individual to have a Barbie doll designed in her likeness. 

The Laverne Cox doll is a part of Barbie’s “Tribute Assortment,” which has additionally honored Lucille Ball and designer Vera Wang. Queen Elizabeth II additionally lately received her personal Barbie, to rejoice the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. 

“As a four-time Emmy-nominated actress, Emmy-winning producer, and the primary transgender girl of coloration to have a number one function on a scripted TV present, Laverne Cox makes use of her voice to amplify the message of shifting past societal expectations to stay extra authentically,” the product description on Mattel’s web site explains. 

Cox’s performing breakthrough got here on the hit Netflix collection “Orange is the New Black.” 

In an interview launched by Mattel, Cox described how she wasn’t allowed to have a Barbie when she was a baby so to have one designed in her likeness now’s “extremely significant.” 

“I hope that children of all gender identities can have a look at this Barbie and dream, as a result of I feel that, like, the house of dreaming and manifesting is – if you lose that, it’s so deeply painful, she mentioned. “What I have been so grateful for all through my life is that I nonetheless dream. There is a child that’s nonetheless residing inside me who’s very alive and effectively who nonetheless goals and who goals huge, who imagines a world that’s totally different and higher.” 

She advised PEOPLE that in a time the place lots of of items of anti-trans laws have been launched in state legislatures throughout the U.S., that this honor might be “a celebration of transness” and a reminder for transgender children that “there’s hope and risk for them to be themselves.”

The doll was launched on Wednesday, forward of Cox’s fiftieth birthday on Sunday, Could 29.