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 absolutely unOrwellian, childish tone, complete with 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 emphatically 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 one way or another since she was a child. Physically bullied for being effeminate when she was a kid, verbally abused by her mother throughout her childhood, petrified of puberty, sexually abused as a teen, vividly confronted by the silent exclusions of poverty when she went on a scholarship to Alabama School of Fine Arts, and then, in the 90s, transitioning and living as a black trans woman, with all the street harassment that entailed, she has survived the worst of kinder times. No way is she going to keep quiet now.
Transcendent is her first book, a memoir. She was raised, along with her twin, the composer, countertenor and artist M Lamar, by a single mother. Gloria Cox was a member of the conservative African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, with plenty of her own demons to fight, including a violent father. Yet you can’t wave away her maternal cruelty, verbal and physical; a lot of casual, splenetic homophobia; a lot of domestic harshness. At one point in the book, when Lamar accidentally puts a stone through a patio door, Gloria sets off a train of melodramatic abandonment that ends with the twins in a children’s home. But the smaller details are just as hard to read, as every time Cox shows any vulnerability or enthusiasm 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, who were remarkable in a lot of ways, 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 also 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. “It was all about not having your child sold away from you.”
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 decided to embrace flamboyance on a shoestring, slowly starting to dress the way she wanted, experimentally, femme-ly – all from charity shops. She calls this 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.”
I don’t really hold with talent as innate, and think of it more as a series of happy collisions, but it’s striking how gifted Cox and her twin were, in different, crisscrossing ways. They both, as teenagers, got a fees scholarship to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, “the Fame school, as I thought of it” – she for creative writing and dance, he for visual arts. This period was harder for Lamar, but that’s his story to tell. Cox went on to get a degree in dance from Marymount Manhattan College in New York, and “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 for it, she says, and “there were so many people who were much better than me”.
And besides, 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 in this world, partly because it was all ups and no downs. “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.
“A few guys that I dated thought they could pressure me, and I’m like: ‘Sweetie!’ I don’t know if I’m proud of it; I guess I am, sort of. But I don’t think drugs are bad – some people can do drugs and it’s cool. I don’t have a judgment about any of that.”
The club scene changed a couple of years later with the spread of “bottle service” – shorthand for some incredibly rich guy buying booze by the bottle at a 1,000% markup, because he can. 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.”
Cox started transitioning in 1998. She was doing a lot of off-Broadway theatre, making independent films, reality TV, wondering how she could monetise the condition of being cool, while using whatever platform she had to try 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 the true story of Piper Kerman, the Waspiest woman imaginable, who ended up in prison for money laundering, this was a bold, funny, bracing story about racial dynamics, gay sex, brutality and total institutional irrationality in the US women’s prison estate, in which Cox played Sophia, trans hairstylist to the lags. “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.” Cox’s is actually the longest running side-character in the series. In one memorable subplot, her pre-transition self is played by Lamar.
It began airing in 2013, when Cox was 41. It made streaming seem like a real thing, 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 during this period, and two Screen Actors Guild awards. Yet there just aren’t that many roles for a trans actor, and she always had other work – as a public speaker in colleges and for businesses, as a brand ambassador – which didn’t fly until 2018, when she started doing a lot of red carpet hosting for awards ceremonies and whatnot. Over the past two years, she has lost 90% of her income, however. Hosting contracts have ended and not been renewed. Corporate speaking engagements have 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 all some bizarre side-effect of addled Trumpism, Cox says. It was all explicit in Project 2025, the far-right blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation ahead of Maga’s victory: “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 has been working since the 60s, and 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 certainly in Orange Is the New Black that turned out to be true.
She is still approached by trans people whose parents have watched that show and reconciled with them. But her identity itself has become a challenge to the politics around her. Maybe you can have a fundamentalist Christian ethno-nationalist project without subjugating LGBTQI+ people. But 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.
