Laverne Cox, star of the show Orange Is The New Black, is the current talk of the media! Not that she got famous overnight or anything, its just that people were shocked that she actually lives the life of a Transgender women as she does in Orange Is The New Black, in which the plays the ground-breaking role of Sophia Burset, an incarcerated African American Transgender women.
So why do people like her/ hate her? The article "The Transgender Issue" by Susan Stryker explains it perfectly in saying that "There have clearly been some sweeping changes occurring in professional and popular attitudes towards Transgender phenomena. Cultural representations of cross-dressed, transexual, gender-ambiguious, or otherwise gender-queer figures have become so ubiquitous that it seems pointless to enumerate them. They are readily available not only through such subcultural venues as drag-king shows, gay and lesbian film festivals, or she-male pornography but in television sitcoms, major motion pictures, billboard advertising, and a wide variety of mass-media print sources."
Stryker speaks of a time (1990s) when society treated people who identified as Transgender horribly in the sense that they were thought of as despicable and grotesque people. The media reflected this through film, where they were in a negative light, giving Transgender people bad stereotypes.
Laverne Cox's presence in the media today is defying that stereotype in that Laverne Cox is seen as a positive. People see her as a leader for the Transgender community and say that "she is a positive breath of fresh air, she represents us all that have struggled to live this life."
The mere fact that Laverne Cox is famous right now doesn't just show that people like her/ hate her, its the fact that her presence is educating people all over the world on what EXACTLY Transgender means.
Stryker, Susan. "The Transgender Issue." GLQ: A Journal Of Lesbian & Gay Studies 4.2 (1998): 145. LGBT Life with Full Text. Web. 31 July 2014.