As Laverne Cox walked onto the main stage of the University at Albany Performing Arts Center, the filled auditorium greeted her with applause and shouts.
“I stand before you this night a proud, African American transgender woman from a working class background raised by a single mother,” said Cox. “I stand before you an artist, and an actress, a sister and a daughter. I think it’s important to name the various components of my intersecting identities because I am not just one thing. And neither are you.”
Many people know Cox from her role as transgender inmate Sophia Burset on the Netflix hit show “Orange is the New Black.” But on Tuesday, Feb. 3, hundreds of students met Cox as a transgender rights activist. She began her talk, “Ain’t I a Woman,” embracing her various identities before delving into her story of coming to claim her identity.
Every seat in the Performing Arts Center was filled, and more people watched in overflow rooms at the Lecture Center and campus ballroom. University at Albany students had begun to line up at noon for tickets to Cox’s talk, which went on sale shortly before. The event, sponsored by the Middle Earth Peer Assistance program at the college, kicked off the 32nd annual Sexuality Week.
Lenny Marino, a member of Middle Earth, said that getting Cox to speak at the University at Albany had been in the works since last year’s Sexuality Week.
“She was not like any other speaker,” Marino said. “It was not what I was expecting. When you’re hearing stories and stuff, it turns out you’re just an observer. But she really inspired empathy. You were really trying to understand what she was saying.”
Cox grew up in Mobile, Ala., with her mother and twin brother. She said that the first identity she claimed was African American. She then said that throughout school, she was bullied by other kids for her feminity and constantly told by her mother and teachers how boys were meant to act.
One of the most defining moments in her childhood, Cox said, was her third grade teacher calling her mother and saying, “Your son is going to end up in New Orleans wearing a dress if we don’t get him into therapy right away.” Cox had been dramatically fanning herself with a hand-held fan in class, a souvenir from a church field trip to Six Flags.
“I was sitting in the therapist office, and the therapists asked me if I knew the difference between a boy and a girl. In my infinite wisdom as a third grader, I said, there is no difference….The way I reasoned in my mind at the time was that everyone was telling me that I was a boy, but I knew I was a girl. I knew in my spirit that I was really a girl, so I reasoned that there was really no difference,” said Cox.
The moment led to “gender policing” by her mother as her mother yelled at her for saying there was no difference. However, Cox said that her mother took her out of therapy once testosterone injections were suggested.
Much of Cox’s talk centered around the concept of being “policed” by others about her gender and shamed into the role of a boy. Gender policing stems from an overall education that most people are taught at a young age, which teaches what is and isn’t expected based on the birth-assigned gender.
These expectations, she said, have led to the culture where transgender people are not free and welcomed, and are denied womanhood or manhood.
Eventually, Cox said, she attempted suicide in sixth grade out of the fear of disappointing her grandmother, who had just passed away, with thoughts of liking boys, as well as her mother and teachers.
“Shame does kill,” Cox said. When she woke up ill but alive after swallowing a bottle of pills, she said she made a push to hide her gender and sexuality until going to high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and from there, the Marymount Manhattan College.
“My feminity could not help but bubble over the surface,” she explained. She began wearing and altering clothes from the women’s section of Salvation Army, coining the term “Salvation Armani.”
“New York City for me represented this place of ultimate possibility, not only in my career aspirations, but in my pursuit of becoming more myself. A huge part of my education happened in the night-club scene of New York,” said Cox.
There, she met other transgender women, who dispelled misconceptions Cox had gained from the media and her teachers about transgender people not being successful. Cox said without the club scene, where androgynous and transgender women were celebrated in the 1990s, she would not have begun her medical transition.
What Cox had hoped was that there would be a point when no one would know she was transgender, but she found that years down the line, people were still mis-gendering her as a man.
“What was I not doing right that they couldn’t look at me and see the woman that I know I am? It’s a crazy disconnect when people look at you and don’t see yourself,” said Cox. “It took me years to internalize that if someone can look at me and tell that I am transgender, that is beautiful. Because being transgender is beautiful. “
Her message was one that students took to heart. Students like Marino and Cassie Orlan said the talk was not like what they expected.
“She’s a really good speaker and it was really inspirational. It’s just an interesting story that I guess students don’t normally think about. It was really great. She was amazing,” said Orlan.
Cox said that in order for transgender rights to become more widespread, changes need to be made, specifically in education and creating a safe space. Justice was also needed, she said, as well as a change in how people view gender and sexuality.
Cox later shared with the audience that her mother now corrects people when they refer to her daughter with male pronouns.
“It is my belief that one of the biggest obstacles in the transgender community are points of view that disavow identities,” said Cox. “Points of view that suggest no matter what we do, we are just and only the gender we were assigned to at birth. Points of view that suggest, no matter what I do, I’ll never be a woman. And yet, ain’t I? Ain’t I a woman?”
