Laverne Cox courageously delves into her past in her latest book.
In Transcendent, released on June 9, the Orange Is the New Black actress provides an account of her experiences as a transgender woman in the entertainment industry. The book addresses her childhood trauma, feelings of shame, gender identity, transition, body image struggles, quest for love, profound sense of unworthiness, and eventual healing, as outlined in the official synopsis.
Readers are invited to walk in Laverne’s footsteps, experiencing her journey from enduring childhood abuse to achieving her breakthrough in Hollywood, navigating industry challenges, grappling with loneliness, and ultimately discovering her voice amidst the chaos.
RadarOnline.com unveils the most striking revelations from the memoir.
In her book, Cox shares a haunting childhood encounter that left her feeling “locked in terror.”
“We were latchkey kids, left at home for long stretches of time while my mother was working, so after we fulfilled our Cinderella duties, my brother [M Lamar] went outside to play, and I was alone in the apartment,” she recounts.
Cox continues, “I opened my backpack and pulled out my homework, sitting at the little kitchen island. That’s where I was when my mother pounded through the front door. I could hear by her footsteps that she was in a mood, maybe from the stress of the day. But suddenly, the sound veered from what I was expecting – not to her bedroom as usual, but down the hallway to the kitchen. To me.”
The LGBTQ+ advocate remembers her teacher contacting her mother after noticing her “fanning” herself in class, warning that if not addressed, she would end up in New Orleans “wearing a dress.”
According to Cox, her mother’s angry reaction led her to fear physical punishment, reminiscent of a previous incident when she was disciplined for stealing.
“The question slapped me like a hand to my face. Repeatedly. Whiplashed me over and over so that the only two words in my mind were, ‘Oh God,'” she writes. “My body was numb, shut down. I couldn’t even cry. The idea didn’t even occur to me because I knew she would just yell harder, louder, meaner. I left my body, sitting there in silence, praying it would all be over soon.”
As her mother questioned if she truly wanted “to be in a dress on the streets in New Orleans,” Cox found herself “locked in terror,” unable to respond, except to say, “I don’t know.”
She describes in the memoir, “The screams carried on for so long, until, just like Charlie Brown, all I could hear was, ‘Wah wah wah wah.’ I heard her – her rage, her disappointment, her deep-seated embarrassment that I was her child, that my teacher had witnessed this and felt so urgently compelled to call about it – yet I was protected, albeit weakly, by this ‘Wah wah wah’ bubble muffling her words. But it could not protect me from these new, terrifying visions of myself on the streets of New Orleans.”
“Now I sensed I was more than the simple inconvenience I’d been made to feel like every day of my life. I was an embarrassment. A horror,” Cox concludes.
In Transcendent, the four-time Emmy-nominated actress reveals that she and her twin brother experienced abuse during their childhood.
Their mother reportedly abandoned Cox and her brother after he broke a neighbor’s window, leaving them at their father’s house. This was the first and only time Cox met her father, who allegedly refused to take them in.
According to Cox, her father brought them to a police station, resulting in their placement in an orphanage for a month until their mother returned for them.
Her time in the orphanage was a poignant memory that resurfaced when she later worked on the set of Orange Is the New Black.
“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,” she confesses in the book. “The shame of being discarded by my mother, who was supposed to love me and take care of me, absolutely crushed me.”
Meanwhile, Cox shares that her brother stopped communicating with their mother around two decades ago. The final disagreement occurred after their mother continued to misgender Cox and use her former name long after her transition, a situation that deeply upset her brother “on [her] behalf.”
