Laverne Cox

And I was having a Scarlett O'Hara moment, fanning myself in the beginning of the day in third grade.

And my third grade teacher, Miss Ridgeway, says, you there, come here and bring that thing with you.

And she marches me down the hall to the

fourth grade teacher and tells me to show her what I was doing with my fan and so I proceed to fan myself the way I had in class and she tells me to stop and and I wait and she conferences with that teacher and then she marches me down the hall of the fifth grade teacher and tells me to do it again and I was like well maybe I didn't do it you know it's

Maybe I didn't fully commit, so I committed more and really dropped into Scarlet.

And then later that day, my mother comes in and tells me she had gotten a call from the school, from Miss Ridgway, and Miss Ridgway said that...

That I would end up in New Orleans wearing a dress if we didn't get me into therapy right away.

I understand now is what some people would refer to as conversion therapy.

I guess there's different kinds.

But at the time, after three sessions with a therapist, the solution or the, you know, the thing that they suggested what we do was to inject me with testosterone.

And that the idea was that that was supposed to make me more masculine and I would not

that there was a hormone issue.

This would have been 1980, yeah, 1980, 81.

And you were how old?

I was eight, nine years old.

Eight, nine years old.

I hadn't even started going through puberty yet.

So they were suggesting injecting an eight, nine-year-old with testosterone, which sounds insane to me.

My mother, thank God, said no to that.

And so it was, I just felt relief that that didn't happen to me.