Laverne Cox’s new memoir details her struggles and triumphs.
The turning point of Laverne Cox’s childhood occurred in a third-grade classroom.
Cox observed the Black women in her church in Mobile, Alabama, cooling themselves with handheld fans in the Southern heat. Shortly afterwards, she bought a fan during a church trip to Six Flags Amusement Park.
She began fanning herself in class, much to the dismay of her teachers, who called her mother. The incident culminated in a stark warning: Get your son in therapy immediately, or he’ll end up in New Orleans wearing a dress.
The shame had an immediate, chilling effect.
“That was when I learned to start pushing down,” Cox recalls. “It wasn’t OK for you to do what feels very natural to you.”
Cox recently appeared at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival in Seattle, where she was a guest on the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast. Cox went on to become the first transgender woman to be nominated for a Prime Emmy Award for acting for her role as Sophia Burset on the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black. In 2015, she became the first transgender woman to win a Daytime Emmy as executive producer for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word.
After the fan incident, Cox’s mother packed up her and her twin brother and dropped them off at the home of a father they had never met. The next day, a woman at the house drove them to the police station and they spent the next month living in an orphanage.
Cox says she did what many traumatized children do: She disassociated.
“I just left my body,” Cox said, comparing to the experience to an episode of TV show Charmed, where souls hover over their physical forms. “I was this soul sort of hovering over myself, watching myself, monitoring myself, but I could not stand to actually be inside my body.”
Cox initiated her medical transition in 1998 at age 28 and, as she got older, found some relief from her childhood trauma in somatic therapy, an approach that emphasizes that stress and unresolved emotions are more than just mental states and are physically trapped within a person’s body.
Cox, who almost gave up acting before her break in Orange is the New Black, says more than 1,000 anti-trans bills have flooded the country at all levels of government. She calls it “dehumanizing.”
Today, at 54, Cox is working on a solo show, noting that her antidote to both political delegitimization and personal trauma remains rooted in the child who just wanted to always dance.
“There’s still a child inside me that needs nurturing, that needs care, that needs healing,” she says. “And I’m responsible for that.”
