(1972-)
Who Is Laverne Cox?
Laverne Cox is a transgender actress who studied dance for years before doing TV work that included Law & Order episodes and the reality show TRANSform Me. She stepped into the limelight in a major way with her role on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, eventually becoming the first openly transgender person in history to be nominated for an Emmy. Cox has continued to be an advocate for trans and LGBT rights while appearing in additional screen projects such as The Mindy Project, Doubt and Grandma.
Laverne Cox as a Child, Twin Brother
Laverne Cox was born on May 29, 1972, in Mobile, Alabama. She and her twin brother were raised by their mother, Gloria, who was single and worked as a teacher. Though Cox was born biologically male, she had always felt herself to be female, not really seeing a difference between boys and girls. She was often taunted and harassed mercilessly for being feminine, though she was able to hold onto her love for the arts.
"I begged my mother to put me into dance classes and finally, in third grade, she did,” Cox said years later in a Times magazine interview. “Tap and jazz but not ballet. She thought ballet was too gay … Throughout all of that, I was very feminine and I was really bullied, majorly bullied. There was this side of me that was this over-achiever that loved learning.”
She attended high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts before going on to study at Indiana University in Bloomington and Marymount Manhattan College, from which she graduated with a BFA in dance and where her twin pursued studies in visual art.
Movies and TV Shows
In 2008 Cox appeared on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit before becoming one of the contestants on the reality series I Want to Work for Diddy. Other roles followed in TV and indie films, as well as on another reality program, TRANSform Me (2010), before Cox landed her breakthrough role on Orange Is the New Black.
'Orange Is the New Black'
Premiering in 2012, the highly successful Netflix drama followed the inhabitants of a women’s prison in upstate New York over the course of seven seasons. Cox was tapped for the part of Sophia Burset, an imprisoned trans woman who fights for appropriate hormone treatments and has a highly strained relationship with her son while also receiving love and acceptance from her wife. The show, co-starring Taylor Schilling, Uzo Aduba, Laura Prepon and Kate Mulgrew, among many others, received raves for its diverse characters, edgy plotlines and honest depictions of sexuality and gender expression.
'Grandma' to 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' Reboot
Cox has continued to explore other roles, guest-starring on The Mindy Project and co-starring in 2017 in the CBS pilot Doubt as a transgender attorney (the show was canceled shortly after premiering). She has also appeared in the comedy Grandma — a film starring Lily Tomlin — which was part of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, and in the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival entry Freak Show. Additionally, Cox played Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a 2016 reboot of cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again.
Trans-Rights Icon & Recent Work
Cox is a trailblazer, becoming the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy (doing so in 2014 for the category of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series) and to appear on the cover of Time magazine. She also works as a trans-rights advocate, hosting her own column on The Huffington Post where, among other write-ups, she’s penned an eloquent essay on gender expression and oppression. Cox is also the executive producer behind the documentary The T Word (2014), which follows the lives of several trans youth, and Free CeCe (2016), which tells the plight of an imprisoned trans woman. For The T Word, Cox won an Emmy, making her the first transgender woman to win for an executive producer role.
For the February 2018 South African edition of Cosmopolitan, Cox became the first openly transgender cover girl in the magazine's history.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Laverne Cox
BORN: May 29, 1972
BIRTHPLACE: Mobile, Alabama
- What I’ve always believed is that if you get to know someone as a human being that everything—all the preconceptions and stereotypes you might have had about them—will fade away.
- I was told many times that I wouldn’t be able to have a mainstream career as an actor because I’m trans, because I’m Black, and here I am. And it feels really good.
- There are lessons in everything. The bad, the good. Our job is to listen, and to continue to learn, so that maybe we get better at this. Maybe get better at life.
- I’m trying to put less pressure on myself and just be myself and trust that I’m enough. And also remember that I do represent a community that isn’t represented much in mainstream media, but also I’m just representing myself and I have to allow myself to be imperfect. I have to allow myself to go outside today with no makeup and that’s okay.
- There’s not just one trans story. There’s not just one trans experience. And I think what they need to understand is that not everybody who is born feels that their gender identity is in alignment with what they’re assigned at birth, based of their genitalia. If someone needs to express their gender in a way that is different, that is okay...
- We have this internal compass of the truth inside of us. And that is our job, really, to quiet all this noise around us and listen to that.
- I absolutely have a lot of work that I have to do around shame, lingering shame from childhood, and childhood trauma. It’s a struggle every day, to stay present, not to become that, you know, 8-year-old who was bullied and chased home from school... But luckily I have tools. I have amazing therapy. And I have support now. I can reach out and talk to people.
- I think the reality is that most of us are insecure about our gender. They think, ‘Okay, if there’s this trans person over here, then what does that make me?’ We want to just coast along in a belief system that makes us feel secure, because we are a culture, as Brene Brown would say, that is intolerant to vulnerability.
- I think a lot of times people assume that because I’m on a TV show or that I’m an actor that I don’t have to deal with the realities of what it means to be a trans person of color in a public space on a daily basis. So for me I was excited to tell the reality of that story [on Orange Is the New Black].
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