Laverne Cox Wants to “Rehumanize Everybody”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyEven early on in the actress and model Laverne Cox’s career, she knew that she wanted to balance her professional ambitions with improving the lives of other trans people. Her breakout role, as Sophia Burset on “Orange Is the New Black,” which premièred in 2013, led to both greater opportunities and heightened scrutiny. Like the trans pioneer Christine Jorgensen before her, Cox began touring universities (her go-to lecture was titled, naturally, “Ain’t I a Woman,” a playful riff on a declaration often attributed to Sojourner Truth) and working the talk-show circuit; her rise to fame was itself treated as a major media event.

In 2014, she appeared on the cover of Time magazine, becoming the first trans woman to do so. The accompanying article, which proclaimed the arrival of “The Transgender Tipping Point,” argued that increased visibility had brought about unprecedented acceptance. Twelve years later, it’s impossible not to look back at that more hopeful time with a sense of grim irony.

At first, it seemed the optimists might be vindicated. In 2017, Cox became the first trans woman to be a series regular on broadcast television, when she played the crusading defense attorney Cameron in the CBS legal drama “Doubt.” She went on to appear in such projects as “Disclosure,” an acclaimed documentary about trans representation onscreen; Shonda Rhimes’s hit Netflix series “Inventing Anna”; and “Clean Slate,” an Amazon Prime sitcom produced by Norman Lear and inspired by Cox’s own life.

She’s won an Emmy and showed up in a Taylor Swift music video. But she has not received the same kinds of Oscar-bait roles as her cis counterparts. Both “Doubt” and “Clean Slate” were cancelled after only one season.

And even as the offers have dried up amid a growing anti-trans backlash, Cox’s personal life and family history remain tabloid fodder. In her new memoir, “Transcendent,” she reflects on her career thus far and the long-standing effects of her painful childhood on her love life. We discussed her experience coming up as a club kid in nineties New York, her friendship with bell hooks, and her hopes and fears for the trans community today.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.I saw you speak many, many years ago when you came to Indiana University. It was right after I’d gone through conversion therapy.

So I’m curious about your own experience with that.You had a conversion-therapy experience! I mean, mine was in 1980.

They were therapeutic sessions, and after the third session, they wanted to inject me with testosterone. Luckily, my mother didn’t allow that to happen. Around 1999 or 2000, I was in a support group at the Center here in New York and met a trans woman in a support group who had been pumped with testosterone when she was twelve years old, and it made her transition so much harder.

So you only went three times?When they proposed the testosterone injections, my mother thought that was crazy. I was, like, eight, nine years old.

She just took me out, thank God. So that was that. But with that whole incident, that was a shift for me, from being free to policing myself and watching and monitoring myself so that I wouldn’t be too femme.

I mean, I didn’t do a very good job, but it became a turning point for a new level of self-hatred, a new level of feeling misunderstood; of feeling like a burden to my mother. I always felt like a burden to her. She was working four jobs and trying to make ends meet.

I felt horrible. I didn’t want to be a problem to my mother. I just wanted her to love me.

I didn’t even realize that fully until I started writing the book. I was talking to my co-writer about the incident and she was asking me questions, and the phrase “I didn't know how to tell my mother I was a girl” came to me, and I just started crying. I didn’t know how to tell her I was a girl because I knew she wouldn’t believe me.

It seems like one of the things that got you through that time was your attention to glamour and fashion.I didn’t start dressing myself till middle school, and it wasn’t glamour. I was living at home, so it wasn’t gender nonconformity.

It wasn’t until I got to high school and I was at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and away from my mother that I started wearing girls’ and women’s clothes for the first time. Glamour to me, though, was Iman. I didn’t know who she was on the cover of Jet magazine—and this beautiful elegance.

Glamour was Scarlett O’Hara. Glamour was Diahann Carroll as Dominique Devereaux on “Dynasty.” I was obsessed with Madonna.

I had posters of her everywhere. So Madonna began to embody a certain kind of glamour for me. I loved her Old Hollywood references.

Janet Jackson was glamour for me.My relationship to glamour now is that I get to live these fantasies of being in couture pieces, and I collect vintage. It’s beauty.

It’s art. I love a good fashion exhibit. I love fashion history—and, for me, glamour is where