Laverne Cox processes childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and transphobia
NEW YORK – For award-winning actress Laverne Cox, writing a memoir was much darker than a walk down memory lane. It was closer to “an excavation, an exorcism,” she writes.
In “Transcendent” (out now from Gallery Books), the “Orange is the New Black” star, 54, gets vulnerable about traumas even her closest friends didn't know. She takes a shovel to previously buried childhood sexual abuse, adolescent suicidality and intense bullying in school. She processes her relationship with her mother and her reaction to her transition. She ruminates on age and why she spent so long lying about how old she was out of fear of failing in Hollywood.
When she started writing, Cox thought back to an old acting exercise: Her teacher told her to tell the room something she didn’t want them to know about her.
The exercise helps in “letting go of that shame and trauma, but also reminding me and the world that we are lovable, that we are worthy despite the things that may have happened to us that make us feel unworthy,” Cox tells USA TODAY.
Laverne Cox opens up about childhood sexual abuse in memoir
“Transcendent” opens in Mobile, Alabama during Cox’s childhood as a twin raised by a single mother working four jobs. Her father was nothing more than a “sperm donor,” she tells USA TODAY. Othered for her femininity and inclination toward the arts, Cox was physically and emotionally harassed by her peers for most of her schooling. Dance and performance were her escape. But when Cox was bullied by her peers for acting too feminine, her teachers and mother blamed the abuse on her.
She was also sexually abused. In the memoir, Cox writes that she was molested by a babysitter, the son of her mom’s friend. And in her early teen years, she was repeatedly assaulted by two teen boys in her church who forced themselves on her in the bathroom stall, she writes.
She’s never talked about the abuse before. For so long, Cox says she felt “disgusting, I felt just unlovable, just dirty.”
“Even saying that out loud … I feel, like, a turning in my stomach,” Cox says.
After she came out as trans while living in New York City, the abuse continued differently. Cox writes that she was regularly harassed on the streets, both verbally and physically. After one assault the day before her final interview for "I Wanna Work for Diddy," Cox resolved her acting work would be “about being service to my LBGTQ+ community.” It shaped her appearance on that show as well as her future activism.
When “Orange is the New Black” took off, Cox was stopped on the street instead for her portrayal of Sophia Burset, a trans inmate and hairstylist who befriends protagonist Piper Chapman. That shift was “jarring,” Cox says.
“I went from basically being an anonymous, visibly trans person, [a] tall Black woman who’s trans walking the streets of New York with insults being hurled at me and being harassed … always having that guard up, being in that survival place and then people yelling at me because they recognize me from a TV show,” Cox says. “The nervous system can experience something good as too much, too fast, too soon, as triggering or traumatizing.”
About 10 years ago, she started seeing a “trauma resilience therapist,” she says.
“I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been in survival mode most of my life. I’ve never felt like it was safe for me to come out of that fight, flight or freeze,” Cox says.
Laverne Cox reflects on being 'abandoned' as a child
Cox is hardly the first celebrity to come clean about toxic parent-child dynamics; just see Jennette McCurdy’s memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died” or the more recent “Devout” by David Archuleta.
As a child, her mother left the twins after her brother broke a neighbor’s window, Cox writes. She dropped them off at her father’s house, the first and only time Cox met him. Not wanting to take them in, he handed the kids off to the police station and an orphanage. They lived there for a month until her mom finally came to pick them up.
On her first day on the set of “Orange is the New Black,” decades later, the prison cell bunkbeds on set would remind her of that month in limbo, she writes.
“It was the not knowing if I’d ever see her again that tore at me every day, the uncertainty of not knowing what my life would be like a day, a week, a month, even a year from now. It haunted me,” Cox writes. “The shame of being discarded by my mother, who was supposed to love me and take care of me, absolutely crushed me.”
Though she eventually did come, some of that tension lingered into adulthood. Therapy, as well as acting, has helped her process that trauma. Cox says she realizes she “can’t be abandoned” now as an adult, and that gives her comfort.
But she also feels compassion for her mom now. She has “her own traumas and unprocessed trauma, unfortunately, that she’s still walking around with,” Cox says.
Her brother, however, stopped speaking to their mother about two decades ago, she writes. Their final argument erupted because their mother wouldn't consistently use Cox's name and pronouns a few years into her transition. He was "upset on my behalf," Cox writes.
Cox’s brother, the composer and performer M Lamar, was the only person whose “insight” Cox consulted for the memoir. The best part of having a twin, Cox says, is “having a witness.”
Sitting in USA TODAY’s Times Square studio, Cox takes a moment to reflect on intergenerational trauma: Her grandfather was born on a plantation, the son of a formerly enslaved person sold out of jail into indentured servitude. “Beaten by plantation owners,” her grandfather was abusive to his wife and his children, Cox’s mother. And despite not wanting kids, Cox is still focused on breaking that chain.
“One of the beautiful, amazing things I learned in therapy is it's never too late to have a happy childhood,” Cox says. “I was not responsible as a child. I couldn't consent as a child, but now I'm an adult and I'm responsible for my life. I'm responsible for how I respond to my childhood and the things that happened to me and I'm responsible for my healing.”
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, RAINN offers support through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800-656-HOPE & online.rainn.org).
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].