Transcendent by Laverne Cox review – success against the odds
The actor and activist tells the story of her brutal childhood in the deep south with eloquence and defiance When Laverne Cox was eight years
The actor and activist tells the story of her brutal childhood in the deep south with eloquence and defiance 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. Continue reading...
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