Laverne Cox Gets Candid About Her Memoir, Love, and the Fight for Trans Rights

Laverne Cox didn’t initially want to write a memoir. It would unearth difficult trauma, possibly anger people in her life, and, it seems, wouldn’t accomplish what the majority of book publishers wanted from a transgender woman’s life story. “I was told then that the only trans memoirs that sell are the ones that go into detail about medical transition,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that. So maybe I’ll just wait until I’m 70 to write a book, and I can really spill all the tea.’”

Flash forward to now, when Cox, 54, released her memoir Transcendent on Tuesday. The book, which dives deep into Cox’s childhood, time trying to make it in the acting industry, and years on the screen, offers a deep and moving glimpse into her life. She covers topics of abuse, the concept of “making it,” and more, offering one of the most poignant memoirs of the year. Cox is also highly educated in queer and feminist theory, which she effortlessly weaves into the pages of her book.

Cox is perhaps best known for playing Sophia Burset on the hit series Orange Is the New Black. For her standout role, she received multiple Emmy nominations. Later, she nabbed a Daytime Emmy, the first transgender woman to win, in the Outstanding Special Class Special category as the executive producer of Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word. Cox is a noted speaker, advocate for transgender rights, and also appeared as Kacey Duke on the Netflix show Inventing Anna.

This past week at Hearst, Cox sat down for a wide-ranging panel discussion about her memoir, her highly publicized relationships, trans rights, and Orange Is the New Black. Keep reading for excerpts from the conversation.

I’ve had offers for years, and I had a deal in 2014 or something. I just wasn’t ready to say everything. I just was like, “I don’t want to write a book, and have it be bullshit, and have it be not transparent and raw and unflinching.” A lot of it was out of respect to my mother. I just had a breakout moment with Orange [Is the New Black], and I just wanted a little more mystery. It just wasn’t the right time.

But then, this just kind of happened. We were meeting with Gallery [Books, Transcendent’s publisher,] about something else, and of course she was like, “What about a memoir?” I thought about how I could [use] a writing approach with the disassociation that I did in childhood as a defense mechanism. That kind of got me intrigued just in terms of a literary device to sort of help tell the story, but also mitigate some of the re-traumatizing. I felt like with therapy, I’d done a good amount of work that I could go into that fire, but I thought that the memories that were suppressed would stay suppressed. But apparently, when you start writing a book, things come back, things that you’d rather not remember.

I mean, the childhood chapters I can’t say were therapeutic. They were me going back into what happened and how awful it was. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, but a lot of that early abandonment and abuse, I haven’t fully processed. I understand intellectually that I was a child and it wasn’t my fault, but I think there are still parts of me in my nervous system that haven’t fully processed it.

Some of the later chapters, well, the “Boys, Boys, Boys” chapter, the way that that one ends, there was a wonderful reclamation. I felt empowered. I always had a critical relationship to my relationship to men. I read bell hooks when I was a freshman in college. That was my critical awakening to patriarchy, white supremacy, et cetera. I have the critical relationship, but then I’m also like, “I want and need love and affection.” People need to be loved. To relive and write about feeling abandoned, unwanted, a burden, an accident that happened to your mother that is making her life a living hell as a single mother, and just feeling like a burden and that no one loves you and that you’re not worthy of love, it’s nasty work.

What a miracle it is that I don’t feel that way today; what a miracle it is that I, not just intellectually, but somatically in my core, know that I am worthy of love, and I know that I’m deeply lovable.

None of them have read it. My brother, before he approved things, because I didn’t change my brother’s name, he wanted to know every place he was mentioned in the book. Giuseppe, he’s gone in and out of being blocked. He knows the book exists. I did a teaser online [for a solo show] that I thought was very innocuous that went viral. I get a text from him from a number I didn’t recognize. He’s like, “This is Giuseppe, we need to talk.” He told me the therapist he saw said, “Well, you said if you got back together with Laverne, you’d tell all your friends about her. Why don’t you do that now, even though you’re not with her?” So he did. He apparently told 19 people in his life. After that went viral, his phone started blowing up. He knows there’s a book, but he hasn’t read it. I don’t think he will. He was like, “Be kind.” I was like, “I told the truth.”

There were some moments with my editor where certain language was encouraged. I was like, “Let’s not characterize it. Let’s just say that this is what happened, and this is how it made me feel.” The audience can make their assessments of the circumstances. I thought that was the most generous way to approach someone I cared about and loved deeply and will always probably have feelings for.

Under fire feels like an understatement. I was dragged for filth all up and through every corner of the internet. That happens when you’re a public figure and when you deign to say something personal about yourself. I think it made me think a lot about what people had projected onto me. I mean, the disappointment that a lot of people had. To be fair to me, when we matched on Tinder, he told me he was in commercial real estate and his politics weren’t clear when we met. Also, my screening was not a boyfriend screening. I was not looking for a boyfriend at the time. I was looking for a consistent friend with benefits in L.A. and a consistent friend with benefits in New York, because I was back and forth. It was a friend-with-benefits screening. That’s a different screening. It still requires respect, and I still need a certain kind of treatment. There’s always mandatory cuddling and all that.

Then we met and clicked. The feelings emerged. We met July 1, 2020, and then I think in November of that year, he was like, “I’ve been honest with you about everything except what I do for work.” He said, “I don’t feel safe telling people.” When we matched on Tinder, he didn’t know if we’d ever even meet. I understood. He had lied, though. I had a no-cop policy, and it wasn’t even political. The no-cop policy happened after I had a really bad experience with a cop.

There were so many lessons in just booking that job. I turned 40 in 2012 and had an existential crisis. I fell apart a little bit. I turned 40, and I hadn’t made it yet. I was in credit card debt. I had gotten an eviction notice earlier that year. I was on a payment plan to avoid eviction for my low-income housing, so I couldn’t even afford the low-income housing. I was waitressing, but I was working in a restaurant, but I was doing that so I could have time to go to acting class so I could commit to being an artist. I just committed and sacrificed to pursue this thing and it hadn’t come to what I wanted it to.

I was like, “I’m old and I need to have a savings. I need to get real.” I was like, “I’m Black and trans. Why did I think I could even do this anyway?” No Black trans person, no trans person, has had the kind of career that I dreamed of having, not in America. I just said, “God, maybe this is all you wanted from me, and thank you for that.”

I bought GRE study materials at a discount from a friend, started studying for the GRE, and started getting grad school applications in the mail. That was what I was going to do. I was studying and kind of over acting. And in August of that year, my now-manager, Paul Hilepo, said, “Oh, there’s an audition for you.” He sent me the the pilot script, and it was incredible. It’s rare you read a script like that. The part seemed really small. I was in one scene in the pilot. For the audition, I did the pilot scene and then I did a scene from what I later found out would be episode three. I booked it from that one audition, and I was just so happy to be working.

At the time, Netflix wasn’t what it is now. I remember being in acting class and I was like, “Oh, I’m doing this web series for Netflix,” and a colleague in acting school was like, “No, you’re doing a Netflix original series.” I was like, “Okay, girl.” I didn’t think it would even lead anywhere, which is also a wonderful blessing, because I think if I had booked something on CBS or ABC, I would’ve felt pressure.

There were a hundred women in the room, literally. And some of the women were in their 60s and 70s. Some of the women were in their 20s. There were Black women, white women, Asian women, and Latina women. There was another trans woman who was in the background. There were queer women. I had never seen anything like this on TV before. I was like, “This is so fucking beautiful. Nobody’s ever going to go for this.”

I’m so happy I was wrong. I was so wrong. The people really more than went for it.

I think the fashion industry is doing pretty well and I think theater is doing really well as far as trans representation. I mean, there were trans women on the Tony Awards stage. As far as film and TV, executives have gotten really squeamish and scared. This is what corporations do though. Ultimately, their fiduciary responsibility is to return a profit to their shareholders. If they were regulated by the government and maybe encouraged to have other goals or prevented from that being the only goal, maybe they would make different choices. Maybe we should have some regulations to invite corporations to behave otherwise. There’s a real anti-trans moment happening right now that has been brilliantly manufactured in a way to dehumanize us to such an extent where people are afraid to support us. Even people who lean left aren’t actually talking about trans people.

Then there’s also a question of do we dehumanize people who are incarcerated, too? I spent seven seasons playing an incarcerated trans woman on Orange is the New Black, and so much of the research that I did suggests that a lot of people have a problem thinking of people who are incarcerated as human beings. Dehumanization is a larger issue in our country. Rehumanization is the beginning. For example, men in girls’ sports, the image that this evokes is like a grown man. LeBron James playing girls’ sports. They’re evoking something that does not invite us to think of the humanity of the trans person when they talk about mutilating children. Gender-affirming care is not mutilation. This is dehumanizing language, and then calling that out and reminding people that trans people are human beings. We’re stigmatized. Our employment has gone down, our opportunities have gone down. They have for me personally and for many trans people I know and all across industries.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.