Celebrity interviews

Her memoir follows the path from an abusive childhood to Hollywood stardom. But it’s being released amid a backlash over transgender rights that’s caught up to her, too.

Laverne Cox was recording the audio version of her new memoir, “Transcendent,” when she reached a wrenching moment: She and her twin brother, Lamar, both 8, were being handed over by their mother, Gloria, to the father they had never met. He didn’t want them, and after just one day, they were left, “utterly discarded and unwanted,” at a police station and then an orphanage.

Gloria retrieved her children a month later (with no explanation offered). Cox to this day retains “a deep and smoldering terror of being homeless.” Reading all this aloud, she had burst into a “big, ugly cry.”

“It broke me,” Cox said later, crying again as she recalled the experience.

As “Transcendent” sketches in unsparing detail, Cox’s childhood in Mobile, Ala., was scarred by bigotry, cruelty and insecurity. However, the young Cox also possessed inner defiance — a determination that whatever the slurs, punches and rejection, she would realize her dreams on her own terms.

And when stardom eventually came in Netflix’s “Orange Is The New Black,” she was ready to both embrace it and use it as a vehicle for transgender rights advocacy.

Two weeks after our first meeting, the real-time manifestation of Cox’s fame was vividly displayed on Avenue A in the East Village. The sight of the actress, in a chic black Alexander McQueen coat dress and glamorously disguised in a hood and sunglasses worthy of Grace Jones, stopped pedestrians in their tracks.

“We love you. We’re big fans of ‘Orange Is the New Black,’” a male-female couple called out, the woman adding a chef’s kiss.

Another woman exclaimed, without breaking stride: “I’m obsessed with you. You’re always the baddest bitch ever.”

Cox, in a merrily nostalgic mood and speaking — as she does — a mile a minute, was on a tour of old haunts. Gazing at the Starbucks on St. Marks Place and Avenue A, she sighed and whispered, “How depressing.”

When she moved to New York three decades ago, she secured her first waitressing job on this corner at what was then Stingy Lulu’s, a retro-styled luncheonette with a staff, Cox recalled, of “club kids and drag queens.”

Then 21, now 54, Cox had come to study classical ballet at Marymount Manhattan College, to find fame and eventually to live her life as a transgender woman. All this she achieved, determinedly forging her own path, and speaking up for others along the way.

Yet she has recently found herself at a new turning point. After a period of social acceptance and increasing cultural representation, young trans people have lately faced renewed challenges to gender-affirming care and access to women’s sports and spaces from the Trump administration, Republican states and some feminists.

“In a moment when trans people are being so dehumanized and stigmatized, when our rights are being taken away, we need to rehumanize trans people and rehumanize each other,” Cox said.

“I was scared,” she added of writing the memoir. “Like, ‘Is this too much?’ It was gut-wrenching, but it felt like the right time.”

‘I feel very protective of Laverne’

Laverne Cox’s life is a life of firsts.

She is the first trans person to be nominated for a prime time Emmy acting award (in 2014, for “Orange”); the first trans person to win a Daytime Emmy (in 2015, for “Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word”); and the first trans actor to play a trans series regular on a U.S. broadcast network (in the CBS drama “Doubt” in 2017). For two years, she ebulliently interviewed celebrities at award shows as the glamorous host of E!’s “Live From the Red Carpet.”

But the route to success was rocky: small parts, a lot of waitressing, a lot of struggle. She began her medical transition in 1998. In the book, she credits that, and the wisdom of her acting coach Susan Batson, for helping her find her bearings.

Batson, Cox said, helped her identify the “unfulfilled need” to be wanted, alongside a tendency to push people away and have relationships with men which mirrored those she had with childhood bullies.

At 40, depressed by her career’s lack of traction, Cox considered giving up acting. Then came her role as the hair stylist Sophia Burset, part of the ensemble of women in prison featured in “Orange.”

Jodie Foster, one of Cox’s heroes, directed a key episode in the first season, telling Sophia’s back story. Lamar, her brother, played Sophia pre-transition.

“It was the first time I had directed TV,” Foster said by telephone. “It was the beginning of an education for me. I had known a few trans people, but I’m just a dumb actor from the Hollywood Hills. Laverne taught me so much with love, curiosity and openness.”

“I feel very protective of Laverne, sisterly and also motherly,” Foster added. “It’s always difficult to be seen for who we are rather than what we represent. Laverne is a combination of being so strong, articulate and such a good leader, and also vulnerable and insecure. I want to put my arms around her and say: ‘It’s going to be fine. When you turn 60, it gets better.’”

One year after the “Orange” premiere, Cox’s fame and advocacy would lead her to grace the cover of Time magazine, under the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point.” She now has 6.7 million Instagram followers.

Drawing a firm line for acceptance

“Transcendent” is split into three sections — “What’s Wrong With Me?” “What’s Happened to Me?” and “What’s Right With Me?”— which sketch a familiar mixed trajectory for lesbian, gay and trans readers: early, keenly felt difference and fear, surmounted with wit, boldness and the will for self-preservation. Not to mention taking refuge in, and imbibing inspiration from, music, movies and TV.

For Cox, it was listening to Donna Summer, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George, and watching Vivien Leigh in “Gone With the Wind” and Diahann Carroll on “Dynasty.” (“Dominique Deveraux didn’t mow the lawn,” she writes of an early aversion to outdoor chores.)

She was sexually abused at 2; attempted suicide at 11; had her first sexual experience at 13, with two 17-year-old boys who had bullied her at church. An early experience of conversion therapy was short-lived.

Of growing up trans, Cox writes: “Everybody was telling me I was a boy, but I knew I was a girl.”

Much of the first half of the book details the relentless, even vicious criticism leveled by her mother, a woman she says she “loves dearly” but whose comments —“You look like a man in a blond wig with big hands” — have led Cox to allow herself “to use the word ‘bitch’ to refer to her for the first time.”

Cox cried again.

“It feels so disrespectful, I know,” she said. “I wasn’t raised to think of my mother that way and I love and respect her, but I needed to say it.”

Over time, Cox came to learn more about her grandfather, who grew up on a plantation and was abusive to his wife and his children, including Cox’s mother. Therapy and a deeper understanding of “intergenerational trauma” were instructive, Cox said, in learning to be more empathetic to her mother.

Still, she made clear to her mother that a continuing relationship depended on her gender being correctly identified.

Now, “she uses ‘her’ and says, ‘my daughter,’ ” Cox said. “My mom and I are in a much better place today.” (A representative for Cox said her mother wasn’t available for comment.)

Lamar Cox, who is gay, has not seen or spoken to their mother since 2005. Now known as M Lamar, a multimedia performance artist, he said in an interview that he both loves his sister (“it is unconditional, unending and deep”) and admires her “focus and determination” as an advocate, particularly for Black trans women.

In a famed 2014 episode of Katie Couric’s talk show, Cox took the host to task for asking about the trans actress Carmen Carrera’s anatomy and transition surgery, which, she said, “objectifies trans people.”

“I think the world of Laverne,” Couric said recently by phone. “I asked a really dumb question, and she schooled me with such love, compassion, poise, dignity and eloquence. It felt like such an important, for want of a better word, ‘teachable moment,’ even if it was at my expense — and it created a wonderful bond between us.”

A one-woman show

During our meandering East Village walk, Cox stepped into what was once the Pyramid, where she had performed over 30 years ago as part of the avant-garde Blacklips Performance Cult.

In daylight, the room and stage looked smaller to her than when she had sung “Ave Maria” there in a “big hoop skirt and bustier.” On the street more reminiscences tumbled forth, of nights at Crisco Disco and Limelight, of long-remembered bodegas, cafes and all-night diners.

At an intersection awaiting her car, memories of the past receded and Cox considered her future.

“Clean Slate,” an autobiographically inspired Prime Video sitcom Cox cocreated and starred in last year, was canceled after one season.

“Corporations are terrified,” she said. “I haven’t spoken at a university since 2019. Some streamers’ executives tell me they’re not doing anything L.G.B.T.Q.” (“Heated Rivalry” being a notable, ratings-rich exception.)

Cox is not staying still. She beamed as she recalled playing the title role in a one-night concert version of the musical “The Drowsy Chaperone.” And she relished being a recent judge at Broadway’s “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” delighted and moved by its diverse cast and portrayal of ballroom culture.

She is working on a one-woman stage show, and this summer will shoot “Black Is Blue,” a “trans erotic thriller” to be directed by Cheryl Dunye. She praised the (straight male) makers of the upcoming movie “Soapbox,” co-starring David Duchovny, who allowed her to help craft her trans character.

In her personal life — in the wake of a mostly “blissfully happy” relationship between 2020 and 2024 with a man named Giuseppe — Cox is single. “He was a cop and a Trump supporter, which made the relationship untenable,” she said.

Since their breakup, Cox said she hasn’t had sex or been on a date. “I’ve been on the apps, but I don’t have the patience or energy,” she said. “Marriage is a patriarchal, antiquated institution that I will never be interested in unless I meet a billionaire. Maybe then I’ll get married with a prenup,” she said, laughing.

At the end of “Transcendent,” Cox writes plainly: “I’m still struggling, I still don’t have it all figured out.”

Early in the 2000s, she writes, the suicidal feelings she had at 11 returned. Those feelings receded, though they occasionally recur. “I’m vigilant,” Cox said. “I know the feeling will pass, that just because I am thinking of something doesn’t mean I have to do it.”

Plus, as was clear on our walk, she is powered by both personal ambition and a sense of wider mission.

“I know my work and life have changed some L.G.B.T.Q. and trans people’s lives,” she said. “Supporting and speaking up for them, especially young trans people, is worth living for. If I have been of service, I am very happy to have stayed alive.”