Laverne Cox Memoir Reveals 90% Income Loss
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- Laverne Cox released her first memoir, "Transcendent," recounting growing up in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1970s alongside her twin brother, the composer and countertenor M Lamar, raised by their single mother Gloria Cox
- Cox attempted suicide before age 12, and describes writing the book as "vomiting up the pain of that time" and "like physical pain in my body"
- Orange Is the New Black began airing in 2013 when Cox was 41; she says the show "made streaming seem like a real thing" and "put Netflix on the map," and her character Sophia is the longest-running side character in the series
- Cox has lost 90% of her income over the past two years as hosting contracts and corporate speaking engagements dried up, and she blames the Trump administration and Project 2025 for threatening to defund institutions promoting "gender ideology" and DEI
- Cox voices Snowball in a new, controversial animated Animal Farm adaptation, and warns that "if we don't wake up and don't understand, trans people will be exterminated"
- Cox subscribes to Dr Joy DeGruy's "post-traumatic slave syndrome" theory to contextualize her mother's verbal and physical cruelty, tracing it to her grandfather's upbringing on a plantation
Why it matters: A four-time Emmy nominee and two-time SAG Award winner losing 90% of her income quantifies the financial cost of anti-DEI rollbacks on even highly privileged trans public figures — and Cox explicitly uses that privilege to ask what happens to less famous trans Americans facing the same discrimination. The memoir also lands a quiet claim: that Orange Is the New Black's 2013 debut, not House of Cards, is what made streaming culturally viable.
