When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her favourite plaything, a prop to be used while dancing in imaginary music videos or recreating scenes from Gone With the Wind in which she cast herself as Scarlett O’Hara. “I lit up, animated, whenever that fan was in my hand,” she recalls in her memoir.
But when Cox, who was raised as a boy, began fanning herself with it at school, her teacher, Mrs Ridgeway, yanked her furiously out of the classroom, paraded her and her new accessory in front of the other teachers, and then phoned her mother, Gloria. When Gloria came home that evening, she exploded with fury. She said Mrs Ridgeway had told her she too had a son who had been an effeminate child who was now living on the streets of New Orleans and wearing a dress. “You want to be in a dress on the streets in New Orleans?” shouted Gloria, who would habitually call Cox a “sissy” and other homophobic slurs. She then signed her up for conversion therapy, which duly failed. It did, however, reinforce the message that there was something deeply wrong with Cox and that she was ultimately unlovable. Three years later, she tried to kill herself.
Transcendent is an immersive, eloquent and often harrowing account of the actor, presenter and LGBTQ+ campaigner’s struggles growing up gender nonconforming in the deep south. It also tells of her long and obstacle-strewn path to success. Prior to landing the role of Sophia Burset, an inmate in the prison drama Orange Is the New Black, Cox had spent more than 20 years living hand to mouth in New York while taking acting classes and attending endless auditions. Finding acceptance in an industry that habitually discriminated against women, non-binary and black people entailed dogged perseverance and many dark nights of the soul.
But the biggest battle in Transcendent plays out between Cox and her mother, whose cruel warnings about being down-and-out in New Orleans in a dress rang in her ears long into adulthood. Gloria never stopped telling Cox and her twin brother Lamar how disappointing they were, how she couldn’t afford them and they couldn’t do anything right. One day, at the end of her tether after Lamar and his friends put a stone through a neighbour’s window, she wordlessly took her children to the home of their father, who they’d never met, and dumped them in his kitchen with two suitcases. Inspecting his children, Cox Sr declared them “fucking freaks”. The following day, he had his wife deposit them at a police station from where they were transferred to an orphanage. They would stay there for a month before Gloria gave in and came to collect them.
All of this is relayed by Cox in a tone that feels less about getting even with her mother than a genuine attempt to understand and process her tyranny. We learn how Gloria endured severe financial hardship and had herself grown up in an abusive household. The author also gives her credit for agreeing to send both her children to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where Cox specialised in dance and her brother in visual art, and which helped put both on the path to their respective careers.
Most striking of all is Cox’s sharp detailing of the loneliness and loss of freedom and trust that comes with being ostracised, mocked and physically attacked for being different. She describes the exhausting burden of being out and about as a gender non-conforming person, her senses permanently on high alert, scoping out strangers for signs of hostility. “If something felt weird,” she recalls, “I’d just start running. I didn’t need to find out what was up. I knew that my life was in danger.” Back in the safety of her apartment, that tension would quickly turn into despair.
Somehow, through all this, Laverne nurtures an inner defiance that leads her to embrace outre fashion, to begin strutting rather than scurrying down the street and, eventually, living life as a trans woman who raises awareness for others walking the same path. Hers is a story of resilience and rebellion – and that of a performer whose ultimate revenge for decades of abuse and rejection is success.
• Transcendent by Laverne Cox is published by Merky (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
