Transcendent by Laverne Cox review – triumph against the odds | Autobiography and memoir

WWhen Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved her pocket money and bought herself a model decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her favorite prop, used to dance in fantasy music videos or reenact scenes from Gone With the Wind in which she impersonated Scarlett O’Hara. “I was lit up, inspired, every time the fan was in my hand,” she recalls in her story.

But when Cox, who was raised as a boy, started exercising at school, his teacher, Mrs. Ridgeway, angrily kicked him out of class, showed him and his new addition in front of the other teachers, and then called his mother, Gloria. When Gloria got home that evening, she was furious. He said that Mrs. Ridgeway told him that she also had a son who was a prostitute who now lived on the streets of New Orleans and wore a dress. “You want to be in a to wear in the streets of New Orleans?” shouted Gloria, who habitually called Cox a “feminist” and other homophobic slurs. He was then enrolled in rehabilitation therapy, which failed. However, it reinforced the message that Cox had a serious problem and that he did not like her. Three years later, he tried to kill himself.

Transcendent is an insightful, eloquent and harrowing account of LGBTQ+ actors, presenters and campaigners growing up on gender nonconformities in the South. It also describes his long and bumpy 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 living in New York on a limb while taking acting classes and attending endless auditions. Finding acceptance in an industry that often discriminates against women, non-binary and black people involves perseverance and many dark nights of life.

But the biggest battle in Transcendent plays out between Cox and her mother, whose harsh warnings about being down and out in New Orleans in a dress rang in her ears until she grew up. Gloria kept telling Cox and her twin brother Lamar how disappointed she was, how she couldn’t make it and couldn’t do anything right. One day, at the end of his confinement after Lamar and his friends threw a rock through his neighbor’s window, he took his children to the house of their father, whom he had never met, and dumped them in his kitchen with two suitcases. Looking at his children, Cox Sr declared it “absurd”. The next day, he told his wife to take them to the police station where they were transferred to an orphanage. They stayed there for a month before Gloria agreed and came to get them.

All of this is delivered by Cox in a voice that feels less about avenging her mother than trying to understand and correct her abuse. We learn how Gloria endured severe financial hardship and grew up in an abusive family. The author also credits her for agreeing to send both of her children to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where Cox excelled in dance and her brother in visual arts, which helped set both on the path to their careers.

Most impressive is Cox’s vivid portrayal of the loneliness and loss of freedom and confidence that comes from being ostracized, scorned and beaten for being different. He describes the exhausting burden of living outside and being a gender non-conformist, his energy on constant alert, chasing away strangers if they show signs of hostility. He said: “It would have been strange, I would start running, so I didn’t need to know why I knew my life was in danger. Once he was safely back in his house, this argument would turn into despair.”

In a way, through all of this, Laverne develops an internal conflict that makes her adapt to external fashion, start walking instead of running down the street and, in the end, live as a passing woman who informs others who are walking the same path. His is a story of courage and rebellion – and of an actor whose final revenge for decades of abuse and rejection is success.