‘I’m setting myself free from shame’ — Laverne Cox on her childhood

Two days before our conversation, Laverne Cox attended the premiere of a new animated Animal Farm in which she voices Snowball. She used the red carpet to issue a stark warning: "If we don't wake up and don't understand, trans people will be exterminated. People's rights are being taken away, people are losing their jobs, people are losing healthcare, people are being detransitioned in prison, gender-affirming care is being attacked, not just for children but also for adults." Raised in Mobile, Alabama in the 1970s, Cox says she endured physical bullying for being effeminate, verbal abuse from her mother and sexual abuse as a teen, and felt the exclusions of poverty when she won a scholarship to the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Her first book, Transcendent, is a memoir of that childhood and of growing up with her twin, the composer and artist M Lamar, under a single mother, Gloria Cox, whose own trauma Cox seeks to contextualise in the remnants of chattel slavery and what she calls post-traumatic slave syndrome.

United States, Mobile, Alabama

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