Laverne Cox warns trans people face extermination amid rights rollback

Two days before she spoke, Laverne Cox had been at the premiere of a new animated Animal Farm, in which she voices Snowball. The film drew criticism for its tone and happy ending, but Cox had other concerns.

“If we don’t wake up and don’t understand, trans people will be exterminated,” she said 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.”

Cox, 54, grew up in Mobile, Alabama. She was physically bullied as a child for being effeminate, verbally abused by her mother, sexually abused as a teenager and confronted by the exclusions of poverty while on scholarship at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. After transitioning in the 1990s as a Black trans woman, she faced street harassment. She says she survived harsher times and will not stay silent now.

Her first book, Transcendent, is a memoir. She and her twin, the composer and artist M Lamar, were raised by a single mother, Gloria Cox, a member of the conservative African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. Cox describes her mother’s verbal and physical cruelty and domestic harshness, including an episode in which the twins were sent to a children’s home after Lamar broke a patio door. She links some of that behaviour to her grandfather’s upbringing on a plantation and to what she calls post-traumatic slave syndrome.

At 11, Cox prayed each night that she would wake up different. She attempted suicide before she was 12. Writing about that period, she said, was like “vomiting up the pain of that time.” She began dressing as she wanted, using clothes from charity shops, in what she calls her “Salvation Armani” period.

She does not see the book as a misery memoir. “It’s setting myself free from the shame that festers in secrecy,” she said. “There are certain things you should never tell people” was her mother’s rule, and Cox lived by it. She now rejects that approach.

Cox and her twin won scholarships to the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She later earned a dance degree from Marymount Manhattan College in New York. In 1993 she entered a New York club scene that welcomed drag queens and trans people. She made a vow as a child never to use drugs and kept it.

Cox began transitioning in 1998 while working in off-Broadway theatre and independent films. Orange Is the New Black, which began in 2013 when she was 41, gave her the role of Sophia, a trans hairstylist. The series earned her four Emmy nominations and two Screen Actors Guild awards. She also worked as a public speaker and brand ambassador.

Over the past two years she has lost 90 percent of her income as hosting contracts ended and corporate speaking dried up. She blames the current administration’s policies on gender ideology and diversity programs, and she points to Project 2025 as the explicit plan behind the changes.

She studied acting under Susan Batson, who taught that a character’s unfulfilled need should shape every beat. Cox hoped her work would challenge assumptions. Some trans people have told her their parents reconciled with them after watching Orange Is the New Black. She compares the present moment to Germany in 1933, when Magnus Hirschfeld’s research on trans and gay people was among the first books burned by the Nazis.

Transcendent: A Memoir is published by Merky Books on 25 June.