Trans star personifies gender equality’s rise
Netflix’s Laverne Cox brings compassionate advice to students
It’s time for the gender police to back off, Laverne Cox told a soldout audience of 800-plus at the Bronson Centre Wednesday night.
Cox, a prominent trans person, actor and LGBT advocate, was in town to deliver her rousing, autobiographically based talk Ain’t I a Woman? My Journey to Womanhood. She was hosted by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa as part of its United Against Racism Week.
Gender police is what Cox calls those who view sexual identity as binary: either you’re male or you’re female and you better act accordingly. It’s a cruel, destructive incursion on who one is, of course, and Cox, an icon in the gender identity wars, has been battling it for much of her 40-something years.
She’s winning, if her list of victories is any indication.
In 2014, she was the first transgendered person to make the cover of Time magazine. She’s the first trans woman of colour to have a leading role in a mainstream scripted television show, playing Sophia Burset, an inmate in the Netflix television series Orange Is the New Black. The list goes on and includes being recently signed to co-star in the new CBS legal drama Doubt.
And if her talk is any indication, she’s been waging the battle with remarkable good humour, compassion and sheer fortitude.
The Mobile, Ala. native drew frequently on anecdotes from her own life to illustrate the challenges of growing up in one gender when your true self is rooted in another.
Bullied as a boy for “acting like a girl,” she recalled being seen by a Grade 3 teacher cooling herself with a peacock-emblazoned fan in glamorous Scarlett O’Hara fashion. The teacher told Cox’s mother that, without therapy, “’your son is going to end up in New Orleans wearing a dress.’”
Alarmed, her mother trotted the young Cox off for help. When the therapist asked whether Cox knew the difference between a boy and a girl, Cox replied that there was no difference. “Everyone was telling me I was a boy, but I knew in my heart I was a girl so I reasoned there was no difference,” related Cox.
The fresh-faced Ottawa audience responded clamorously to such revelations.
When puberty hit, said Cox, she discovered she was attracted to boys. That sat ill with her church’s teachings and helped drive Cox to attempt suicide in Grade 6. According to Cox, 41 per cent of the transgender community in the U.S. reports having attempted suicide; she said the number in Canada is 43 per cent.
Cox, who’s popular on the university speaking circuit, also talked about her awakening to racism as a student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Her mother, a teacher who raised Cox and her brother single-handedly, had taught her children to stand up to racism, but in the ASFA dorms white affluence ruled, and Cox found herself ashamed of not just her gender identity but also her race and class.
However, Cox by this time was experimenting with makeup, shopping for women’s clothing at the “Salvation Armani” and studying ballet even though her mother said it was “gay.” She was fashioning her own strategy for dealing with life.
Hard to say just when the total strategy kicked in, but it now includes the brilliant smile, the sense of drama and the flair for connecting with her audience (she’s not an actor for nothing) that, coupled with good-natured self-deprecation, she brought to bear Wednesday night.
Cox eventually transitioned physically to a woman, with painful incidents the occasional result. She was, for example, kicked by a man in New York City for being trans, and was told by a woman on the subway, “’I think you should die.’”
While she clearly carries the scars of such treatment — she calls it PTSD — Cox somehow remains positive and compassionate, saying that the cruelty she’s experienced is evidence that “Hurt people hurt people.”
Cox’s message is ultimately about granting ourselves and others the freedom to express all forms of self-identity including gender. It seems a simple enough thing to ask.
Everyone was telling me I was a boy, but I knew in my heart I was a girl so I reasoned there was no difference.