Profiles of Transgender Courage: Laverne Cox

Laverne Cox is an American transwoman best known for her role in Netflix series Orange is the New Black. She is an actress and LGBT advocate and activist. She was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1984. She was raised by her single mother and grandmother along with her twin brother. When she was 11 years old, she made a suicide attempt because she was often bullied for not "behaving someone who was assigned male at birth was meant to behave." and for noticing that she was developing feelings for her male classmates. She graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts where she studied creative writing and dance. She also attended Indiana University Bloomington and transferred to Marymount Manhattan College in New York City from there where she studied acting. She has appeared in a variety of television shows and films and is one of the most successful transgender actresses in the industry.  She has also received a large array of awards both related and unrelated to her activism for LGBTQ+ issues.

Cox first appeared as a contestant on VH1's I Want to Work for Diddy and was approached by that network afterward for show ideas. From that, she produced and starred in TRANSform Me, a makeover television series. The show made her the first African-American transwoman to produce and star in their own television show.  Both shows were nominated for GLAAD Media Awards in 2009 and she accepted the award and gave a moving speech that was described as "poignant" by the San Francisco Sentinel. She has also appeared in a number of guest roles for shows like Law and Order: SVU, Bored to Death, The Mindy Project, Lip Sync Battle and also was a regular cast member of Doubt. In 2013 she began playing her recurring character, Sophia Burset, on Orange is the New Black. The character is a transwoman who is in prison. The role was an important milestone for trans people, as it was a transgender character being played by a transgender person. The character was well crafted and her story within the series is one that is easy to empathize with.


Katie Couric interviewed Cox and transgender model Carmen Carrera on her show Katie in 2014. In the interview, Couric asked both of them what surgeries they had gone through. Carrera ignored the question and when Couric turned the same question to Cox, she answered by stating that people are too occupied with the transition itself and not the issues that trans people face such as homelessness, unemployment rates within the community, and homicide and violence experienced by transgender people all over the world. Later that year she was the first openly transgender person to be on the cover of Time, was the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy, appeared in the music video for "You and I (Nobody in the World)" by John Legend, joined a campaign against a law in Arizona that allowed police to arrest anyone suspected of "manifesting prostitution", produced and narrated the documentary "The T Word" for MTV and LogoTV, and was featured in a variety of magazines including V, C☆NDY, and Essence.

In 2015, Laverne won a Daytime Emmy as a producer for "The T Word", making her the first transgender person to win as an Executive Producer and also making the documentary the first transgender documentary to win one. Recently she has partnered with the ACLU for a video about transgender history entitled "Time Marches on and So Do We" and is one of four people to be a face for clothing line Ivy Park.

Cox is known as a trailblazer in the LGBT community receiving many awards and honors as a result of her work. She is an outspoken activist who looks to spread awareness by speaking about the issues that greatly affect the transgender community that often gets overlooked and has helped grow the conversation about transgender issues in public spaces. She was also given an Honorary Doctorates Degree from The New School of New York for her continuous work for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.