Two days before she spoke to me, Laverne Cox had been at the premiere of a new, animated Animal Farm, in which she voices Snowball. The film is wildly controversial for its un-Orwellian, childish tone and happy ending, but Cox had bigger things on her mind than film criticism.
“If we don’t wake up and don’t understand, trans people will be exterminated,” she said that day in April. “People’s rights are being taken away, people are losing their jobs, people are losing healthcare, people are being detransitioned in prison, gender-affirming care is being attacked, not just for children but also for adults. It’s never been about protecting women – it’s always been about creating a permission structure to scapegoat trans people, to dehumanise trans people, to take away our rights and to eliminate us from public life.”
This was not the language you’d expect on the red carpet from an actor, chatshow host and reality TV star whose breakthrough role was in the gritty but upbeat Orange Is the New Black. Cox, however, has no time for niceties. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, in the 70s (she’s 54), she has been at the sharp edge of violent and tacit prejudice since childhood. Physically bullied for being effeminate, verbally abused by her mother, petrified of puberty, sexually abused as a teen, and later living as a black trans woman amid street harassment, she has survived the worst of kinder times. No way is she going to keep quiet now.
Transcendent: A Memoir of Pain and Resilience
Transcendent is her first book, a memoir. She was raised, along with her twin, the composer M Lamar, by a single mother. Gloria Cox was a member of the conservative African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, with her own demons, including a violent father. Yet her maternal cruelty, verbal and physical, cannot be waved away. At one point, when Lamar accidentally breaks a patio door, Gloria sends the twins to a children’s home. Smaller details are just as hard to read, as every time Cox shows vulnerability or joy, it gets shot down.
“I suspect I’m not the only one who lived a childhood with a parent who maybe didn’t fully understand them around their transness or being an artist,” she tells me, carefully, on a video call from her home in New York. “But I love my mother,” Cox says, “and even my brother loves and respects her. She’s a remarkable woman; she raised two kids by herself. She put herself through graduate school, bought her own home, never with the help of a man. She’s an incredible woman, but there’s just a lot of trauma there.”
“Part of talking about my grandfather and his cruelty,” she explains, “is to think about how that cruelty came from the remnants of chattel slavery [he grew up on a plantation], just to try to contextualise my mother’s behaviour.” Cox subscribes to Dr Joy DeGruy’s theory of “post-traumatic slave syndrome, a set of behaviours that are passed down. The best example I can think of is when black parents say: ‘Oh my child is so lazy – they don’t work hard enough.’” That comes from the plantations, Cox says, where you would downplay your child’s achievements to avoid having them sold away.
A Childhood of Pain and Survival
In 1983, Cox was 11, “going to sleep every night praying I would wake up different”. She tried to kill herself before she was 12. “It was literal, physical pain in my body, writing this, trying to excavate it,” she says now. “It was excruciating. It was like vomiting up the pain of that time.” Having lived through that, she embraced flamboyance on a shoestring, slowly dressing femme-ly from charity shops, a period she calls her “Salvation Armani” period.
This isn’t a misery memoir: it doesn’t feel as if it has an unmasking or vengeful subtext. “It’s setting myself free from the shame that festers in secrecy. You think: ‘If people know this thing about me, I will not be lovable.’ ‘There are certain things you should never tell people’ is what my mother would always say. And I lived by that. But that doesn’t work.”
Cox and her twin were both gifted. As teenagers, they got scholarships to the Alabama School of Fine Arts – she for creative writing and dance, he for visual arts. Cox went on to get a degree in dance from Marymount Manhattan College. “When you study classical ballet, you understand how hard it is to be good at something, how much you have to train and study, how much discipline, how much dedication, how much sacrifice.” She never had the right body, she says, and “there were so many people who were much better than me”.
This was 1993. “Madonna was going to Sound Factory and found the people for her Vogue video there. Everyone partied together; there was a period in New York where you would want club kids and drag queens and transsexuals at your party, or it wouldn’t be a happy party.” Cox thrived, partly because she avoided drugs. “I made a vow to myself when I was a child that I would never do drugs. And I never did. And that’s good, because I would probably be dead. I don’t think working-class black people can do drugs and be successful.”
The club scene changed with the spread of “bottle service” – rich guys buying booze at a markup. Sex and the City had a very bottle-service vibe: “One of my favourite shows of all time, but I think it shifted the nature of New York. It was capitalism bringing in very conservative people. Everything got commercialised – there wasn’t the space for artists who are broke, who bring this fabulous energy. They can’t afford to live any more and they can’t get into the same clubs.”
Transition and Stardom
Cox started transitioning in 1998. She did off-Broadway theatre, independent films, reality TV, wondering how to monetise being cool while using her platform to “change the conversation about trans people”. Then Orange Is the New Black came along, “with a surprisingly good budget and these great scripts. The world was so alive.” Based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, the show was a bold, funny story about racial dynamics, gay sex, brutality and institutional irrationality in a US women’s prison, with Cox playing Sophia, a trans hairstylist. “What’s wild to me, particularly in Britain, is that all the conversation is about how trans women shouldn’t be in prisons with other women. Orange Is the New Black was based on a 90s memoir. She was incarcerated with a trans woman.”
It began airing in 2013, when Cox was 41. It made streaming seem real and put Netflix on the map. “I didn’t think anybody would go for it; my hope was that casting directors might see it and I could get more work. How can I parlay this into other opportunities? And then it ended up being successful. After a few months, it got crazy walking down the street, so my life changed a lot. When people ran up to me in the past, it was to assault me or call me things.”
Cox had four Emmy nominations and two Screen Actors Guild awards. Yet there aren’t many roles for a trans actor, so she worked as a public speaker and brand ambassador. Over the past two years, she has lost 90% of her income. Hosting contracts ended, corporate speaking dried up. She’s clear about who she blames. “This regime has threatened to defund any colleges and universities that promote gender ideology, DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion].” She doesn’t even get teaching work because “even though I’d be teaching a graduate acting class, it could be perceived as promoting trans ideology. These are the realities. I’m not complaining – I’m very blessed. I think the important thing to note is that if Laverne Cox’s income has gone down significantly, what about all the other trans people who are not as privileged and as blessed as I am? There are material consequences for this kind of discrimination and scapegoating.”
This isn’t some bizarre side-effect of addled Trumpism, Cox says. It was explicit in Project 2025, the far-right blueprint: “All these words had to be taken out of every piece of legislation, policy, government document: gender, gender ideology, gender identity, LGBTQ, DEI, abortion, contraception.”
Cox’s acting career was ignited by studying under Susan Batson, who told her: “Work is at its highest level when the character’s unfulfilled need is infused into every beat. If you can do that as an actor, it changes people.” That was Cox’s hope for acting, that it would challenge assumptions and deepen empathy. And in Orange Is the New Black, that turned out to be true. She is still approached by trans people whose parents watched the show and reconciled with them.
But her identity itself has become a challenge to the politics around her. Cox points out that when the Nazis began burning books in 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld’s research on trans and gay people was among the first to go up in flames. For her, “we’re in a very similar moment to Germany at that time”.
Transcendent: A Memoir is published by Merky Books (£20) on 25 June. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
