wWhen Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her favorite game, a prop used while dancing in imaginary music videos or recreating scenes from Gone with the Wind in which she presented herself as Scarlett O’Hara. She recalls in her memoir, “Whenever that fan was in my hand, I lit up, became animated.”
But when Cox, who was raised as a boy, started fanning herself with it at school, her teacher, Mrs. Ridgeway, pulled her out of class, paraded her and her new accessory in front of other teachers, and then called her mother, Gloria. When Gloria came home that evening, she was furious. He said that Mrs. Ridgeway had told him that she too had a son who was an effeminate child who now lived on the streets of New Orleans and wore a dress. “You want to live in a Dress On the streets of New Orleans?” screamed Gloria, who habitually called Cox a “sissy” and other anti-gay slurs. She then signed up for conversion therapy, which duly failed. However, it reinforced the message that there was something very wrong with Cox and that she was ultimately unlovable. Three years later, he tried to kill himself.
Transcendent is an intense, eloquent, and often harrowing account of the actor, presenter, and LGBTQ+ campaigner’s growing struggle with gender nonconformity in the Deep South. It also tells about his long and obstacle-filled road to success. Before landing the role of Sophia Burset, an inmate in the prison drama Orange Is the New Black, Cox spent more than 20 years in New York taking acting classes and attending endless auditions. Finding acceptance in an industry that habitually discriminates against women, non-binary, and black people involved dogged persistence and many dark nights of the soul.
But the biggest battle in Transcendent occurs between Cox and his mother, whose cruel warnings about being out in a costume in New Orleans echoed in his ears well into adulthood. Gloria never stopped telling Cox and his twin brother Lamar how disappointing they were, that she couldn’t afford them and that they couldn’t do anything right. One day, at the end of her bond after Lamar and his friends threw rocks at a neighbor’s window, she unknowingly took her children to the house of their father, whom they had never met, and dumped them in his kitchen along with two suitcases. While inspecting his children, Cox Sr. declared them “fucking freaks”. The next day, he had his wife deposit them at a police station, from where they were transferred to an orphanage. They stay there for a month before Gloria gives up and comes to get them.
All of this is conveyed by Cox in a tone that feels less about trying to keep up with her mother and more about a genuine attempt to understand and process her atrocities. We learn how Gloria faced severe financial hardship and grew up in an abusive home herself. The author also credits her for agreeing to send both of her children to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where Cox majored in dance and her brother majored in visual arts, and helping both advance in their respective career paths.
Most impressive is Cox’s searing description of the loneliness and loss of independence and confidence that comes with being ostracized, ridiculed, and physically attacked for being different. She describes the exhausting burden of being out and about as a gender-conforming person, her senses permanently on high alert, scanning strangers for signs of hostility. She recalls, “If something seemed strange I would start running. I didn’t need to figure out what was happening. I knew my life was in danger.” Back in the safety of his apartment, that stress would soon turn to frustration.
Somehow, through all of this, Laverne nurtures an inner defiance that leads her to embrace outdoor fashion, start strutting instead of walking fast down the street, and ultimately living a life as a trans woman that raises awareness for others walking the same path. Hers is a story of resilience and rebellion – and the story of an artist whose ultimate revenge for decades of abuse and rejection is success.
