Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This week on Sources and Methods, we unpack the Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Trump, which he says will pave the way for a formal peace deal with Iran. But if this really is the beginning of an end to the war, who won and who lost? Listen to Sources and Methods as we talk it through with NPR reporters in Beirut, Tel Aviv, and Cairo.
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Laverne Cox. Chances are, you met her the way most of the world did, a transgender woman in prison, doing hair and fighting for her right to gender-affirming care in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black.
Listen, Doc, I need my dosage. I've given five years $80,000 and my freedom for this. I'm finally who I'm supposed to be. Do you understand? I can't go back.
Look, I'd like to help you. Unfortunately, you have elevated levels of AST and ALT, which could mean liver damage.
That's bulls**t. That could mean anything.
We're going to take you off your hormones entirely. Until we can schedule an ultrasound, get a clean read.
But that could take months.
I can offer you an antidepressant.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Laverne Cox face during her childhood?
Laverne Cox, welcome to Fresh Air. It's such an honor to have you.
Thank you so much for having me. I have not heard. It's rare that I just hear the clip from Orange, and it's been so long. And I, gosh, it brings back memories. And it's really, what's interesting is even for actors out there, often when I watch a scene that I've done, it's hard for me to have distance. I immediately am in the character again, and I'm in the emotion again. of the scene.
And so I'm immediately like feeling what I was feeling when we shot this. This is 2012 that we shot it. So it was funny. I was just like.
Yeah, did you laugh? Why did it make you laugh?
No, at the end when, I mean, the writing is so fantastic. Maybe I can offer you an antidepressant. It's hilarious.
Well, Orange is the New Black was revolutionary for the time. And your character, I was very surprised to learn from the book that you weren't a regular reoccurring character. You were a guest star.
Yes. And I mean, that's really a contractual thing. So I was in, I think... I don't remember how many episodes I was in the first season, but I remember it was a day-to-day thing. I didn't have, like, a contract the first season. I was literally a day player, guest star, day player. But I was kind of making day player rates. I wasn't making, like, guest star rates.
The second season, my salary was, like, a guest star rate, and I had, like, I think a seven-episode guarantee, and they ended up using me for nine episodes. Yeah. I was there a lot and they wrote generously for me. I think because that my backstory episode came, it was the third episode of the show that people thought.
Felt like you were a cast member.
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Chapter 3: How did Laverne's experience with bullying shape her identity?
I mean, I think that was like the physical violence of the other children that was persistent throughout my childhood. And then... My mother finding out and instead of having an impulse to protect me or care for me or ask if I was okay, she made it my fault. And it just, in a way, it sort of epitomizes that kind of feeling of not feeling protected, not feeling safe.
It sort of encapsulates a lot of... A lot of the childhood. I'm, you know, reading that again, I have to say, it's still difficult to read. It's still difficult to...
You grew up inside of people's reactions to you. Yeah. An effeminate child, a gender nonconforming teenager, a trans woman, and everything that you received, it was like race, gender, and class converging into one person. What really struck me from that very first story throughout the entire book is – The shame and hatred that people carried, they took it out on you.
And it even happened in your home.
Mm-hmm. Yes. I'm just trying to gather my resilience. And like, I guess I'm like having, there's like reading that I'm just like, I'm emotional. I'm angry. It's like, it's hard to read that. Obviously I lived it, but it's hard to read about it again. I guess and understand as an adult, like I'm angry at the boys. I'm angry at my mother. I want to protect them.
That little child, I'm just so, I'm so angry. And I think like, yeah, I don't know if I can be able to read excerpts from this book again. We'll see.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Laverne provide about her memoir 'Transcendent'?
I'm just, I'm so pissed. I'm so angry and I'm so hurt and I'm so...
What are the words – the anger comes from you having to experience it.
And it's – there's also, like, the anger of all the kids that I've met who are trans or queer who are still experiencing this. And the anger of knowing that – in states that have passed anti-trans laws, that the percentage of bullying has skyrocketed in those states. You hear a lot of stories. A lot of stories, but those are statistics.
Those are the anecdotes, but those are the stats from the Trevor Project. Because to manufacture the consent to pass anti-trans laws that would ban gender-affirming care for kids and And the menace of trans girls in sports, all like two of them. There's the rhetorical piece that happens in the media that is dehumanizing and stigmatizing trans people.
And it creates a permission structure if like your, you know, governor and your state legislators are doing, if your, you know, your teachers and, you know, pundits on TV are doing it, then like, of course, kids are emboldened to do it. and that makes me so angry.
And, you know, it's like the sadness is like, you know, it's just the loneliness, and I couldn't process it fully as a child, and I don't know. It just really sucked. This was so... It was torture to write this, and the reason I wrote it is to... To tell the truth, I just don't think it makes any sense to write a book and to clean stuff up and to not be honest and not be raw.
But it's just like, wow.
What made you decide to write it now? Especially because I know you probably had folks coming to you wanting you to write books at the time when you were... on Orange is the New Black, or you're on the cover of Time magazine, when magazines are fighting to have you on the cover, what made you decide to do it now?
Yeah, I don't know. I have an impulse to want to apologize, but I'm not going to do that for my emotion right now. The opportunity came along, and when it did, I thought that I... that I had done enough therapy that I could get through it. I thought that the memories that were buried would stay buried.
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Chapter 5: What impact did 'Orange Is the New Black' have on Laverne's career?
Tell me about Mobile, Alabama and that home that you grew up in. How would you describe it?
Mobile, it's interesting. I go back now and I find it quaint and way too hot in the summer. But like the azaleas, there's lots of beautiful things about it. And there are all these antebellum homes that still exist on like Government Street. And there's something quaint about parts of it.
And there's just a lot of trauma, though, literally on the streets, particularly in the old neighborhood where my mom still lives. There's trauma on those streets for me.
Is that a part of town? What part of town is that?
We would call it down the bay. Down the bay. And it's where most of the black people in Mobile live. And yeah, and it's downtown. It's downtown Mobile, which I think is fantastic. But because Bienville Square and like the Mardi Gras parades, Mardi Gras started in Mobile in this country, not in New Orleans, as some people might think. And so the Mardi Gras parades happen downtown. And I love it.
And you grew up with your mother and your twin brother.
And my twin brother, yes. Yeah, Mobile, though, when I was growing up there, I was just, I needed to get out. It was awful. It felt repressive, and I just knew I needed to be, the second I discovered there was a New York, I knew I had to be there.
And so most of my childhood, I was in Mobile, but I was, in my imagination, I was in New York, or I was on a TV screen, or I was on a movie screen, or I was on a Broadway stage. Um...
Yeah, it's interesting. The book is called Transcendent. And in a way, it sounds like disassociating was your way to transcend as a child. What were some of the ways that you would try to transcend?
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Chapter 6: How did Laverne transition from dance to acting?
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.
Our guest today is actor and transgender activist Laverne Cox. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
Cyber scams cost Americans more than $20 billion last year. But who are the people doing the scamming?
I never knew the job that I was going to be doing.
on the Sunday Story, an exclusive two-part series on the global scam industry from the point of view of the scammers themselves. Listen now to the Sunday Story from Up First on the NPR app.
This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we ask comedy legend Robert Smigel about the moment he first knew he was funny.
When I was like four or five, I could draw really well. So I could draw Fred Flintstone and Snoopy. And then probably a couple of years later, I started drawing them having sex. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Your favorite toys are back in Toy Story 5, and they're facing some new competition, the dreaded tablet.
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Chapter 7: What role does Laverne see for herself in the current cultural landscape?
So it was presented as something that was the absolute opposite of like the straight A student that I was, the human being that I was who was determined to be successful. So I didn't wear skirts and dresses until college because I was just like, well, I can't, you know, I internalized I can't wear a dress or skirt. In high school.
But I did start wearing girls' clothes that I would purchase from the thrift stores in Mobile and in Birmingham. And it was such a fun, wonderful exploration. And it felt like an extension of, I think it was in high school, I had read about Oscar Wilde. Oh.
You talked about creating yourself as a work of art, and I loved that as a concept, you know, and I think it was... Was this also around the time when, I mean, androgynous musical artists were pretty big? Was this like the 80s? It was certainly the 80s. It was post, like, the heyday of Culture Club.
Culture Club's first album came out in 1983, so I would have been 11 years old, and that was like... Boy George was pivotal for me in my childhood and Annie Lennox and just the whole British New Wave that was filled with androgyny and gender bending and of all sorts. Even looking back at old episodes of Soul Train, there was some real gay stuff going on.
The 80s, like stuff that would never fly right now, got through in the 80s. Even Jermaine Stewart, who is a wonderful artist, we don't have to take our clothes off to have a good time.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know if he was openly gay. He unfortunately passed away in the late 80s or early 90s. He had HIV AIDS. And then his song was sampled later by LM AFO, I think. But his hair was pressed out and it was laid. The hair was laid. He had been a member of Shalimar.
Always wonder what Cherry Wine was, though. Never could figure out.
Girl, okay, so you are my generation. You know Cherry Wine. That's a deep cut, girl. Yes. Yeah, I don't know what Cherry Wine is either. But he was a queen on Soul Train. These were the people you were watching. But the 80s was so wonderful in that way.
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