Trailblazing actress and LGBTQ+ advocate Laverne Cox reflects on the remarkable strides made in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights.
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00:00If you really look at what's happening around you in the world with policies being formed,
00:03not only just for trans, LGBTQ, but Black people, women, the right to choose whether or not they
00:09want to have an abortion, why are people not angry in this country about the attacks that
00:13we see very clearly online every day? I mean, I just recently said this on Jamila Jamil's
00:19podcast, that this is all a distraction. At the end of the day, what they call culture
00:26war issues, which are really civil rights issues and human rights issues, become a distraction
00:32and that come from mostly Republicans, right? There are democratically identified people who
00:36are anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+, but I think for the Republican Party specifically, who is,
00:42who are pushing public policies on the state level that are banning gender affirming care,
00:46banning trans people from sports, et cetera, it's a distraction because the Republican Party
00:52does not have any kind of economic message for poor and working people. We have a homeless crisis
00:58here in Los Angeles and all over the country. There's no plan for that. The environment is
01:03being decimated and corporations basically want to be able to be unregulated so they can destroy
01:09our environment and without any kind of regulation or recourse. And so we can have all this
01:15distraction around, there's a trans person on television, or there was a performance that was
01:20satanic at the Grammys or whatever as a way to distract people from the reality that their lives
01:27are actually not being made better right now because corporations who are bribing politicians
01:33are screwing everybody over. Okay, where did this journey of becoming so articulate on the issues,
01:42educated on the issues start? Did it start back in Alabama when you first identified that
01:47you were born in a body that you may not have felt was completely who you were? Or when did
01:54that start? It started with my mom. It started with my mother being a teacher and emphasizing
02:00education and critical thinking. My mother was raised in the segregated South and so very early
02:06on my mother made it very clear to me what it was like during segregation and what her situation was
02:13before schools were segregated and what it's like afterwards. And that there was a care
02:18that black teachers have for the black kids that they were educating that the white teachers
02:23didn't have. And so because of my mother, I had this historical perspective already. And because
02:31education was something that she so deeply valued, it became something that I valued. And so
02:37I continue to educate myself. I continue to... I love reading. I love history. I love
02:42thinking critically. And I actually think it's so important right now when Ron DeSantis in-
02:47Florida.
02:49Florida wants to ban AP African American history.
02:52For those of you that don't know who that is, that's the governor that's trying to just...
02:56Is he the governor or senator?
02:57He's the governor. He's the governor of Florida. He's doing the most. He's doing the most. But
03:03the deep thing to me about... They're banning books all over the country and it's the Republican
03:08party. They're banning books and they're authors that I love who they want to ban.
03:12And when I think about that, I think it's important, particularly for black folks to remember-
03:18Slaves.
03:18Exactly. When we were enslaved, they did not want us to be able to read. They did not want us to
03:23get an education because the enslavers, the colonizers understood that education was a
03:30pathway to freedom. And so for us as black folks, for us as Americans, even if they try
03:37to take a ban books and keep us from reading this and this, it is paramount that we educate
03:43ourselves and that the education never stops. And that education is about thinking critically
03:49because there's so much media coming at us, so much misinformation online. And our critical
03:54thinking skills are paramount to this fight that we're engaged in right now for really our human
04:01rights. Because I think when... It's so important for us to understand that yes, they're coming for
04:08trans people, but Ron DeSantis, who's come really hard for trans people, for LGBTQ plus people,
04:13is coming hard for black folks. And AP, African American, they're coming for all of us. That we're
04:19really in this together. I was on MSNBC a few weeks ago and I made this... It's always very
04:25tricky to make correlations or comparisons to the Holocaust, but the reality, the truth is
04:34that the Nazis, that Hitler burned books at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Human Sexuality,
04:41Magnus Hirschfeld was this German dude who started an Institute for Human Sexuality in
04:481920, 1919, 1920. And they studied trans folks, they studied LGBTQ plus folks. Lily Elbey,
04:55I don't know if you know that movie Danish Girl, she had her first gender affirming procedure at
05:01Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic. And this is one of the first things the Nazis did, were burn all the
05:07research materials at Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic. When we see the famous photo of books being burned
05:13by the Nazis, it was Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic and his papers that were being burned there.
05:18That's just because they felt that you'd be a threat if you're educated.
05:22Educated, but they were anti-trans, they were anti-LGBTQ plus. They were gay folks, trans folks
05:28in concentration camps with pink triangles stamped on our bodies. We were made aware of this when the
05:34pink triangle became a symbol of AIDS activism in the late 80s and early 90s. It was a reminder
05:40that LGBTQ plus folks were in concentration camps. So as we fight anti-Semitism and white
05:48supremacy and racism, we have to understand if we have an historical perspective that
05:54liberation for LGBTQ plus folks, all of our liberation is tied together.
05:59Let me ask you this, because I still want to go back to your childhood because-
06:02Well, this got way more serious than I thought it would. I thought we'd be kiki-
06:05Oh, the kikis are coming.
06:06The kikis are coming.
06:08The reason why it's important is because one, you're a huge advocate for the trans community.
06:13I know my audience and my audience needs to be exposed to the knowledge, the education-
06:17Partly why I'm here.
06:17And the fight that you do for the trans community. I even feel within the LGBTQ community,
06:25there's a necessary emphasis needed to be placed on the advocacy for trans,
06:29even within that community. Have you noticed that? I mean, I'm sure you've-
06:32Absolutely. There's a long history. I mean-
06:35Why is that? Why are we fighting within our own alphabet? Not enough time.
06:42So there's a few different ways we can look at it. When we think about Stonewall,
06:47the Stonewall Rebellion that kick-started the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement that
06:52happened in 1969, there were anti-cross-dressing laws. They're trying to ban cross-dressing now.
06:57In fact, with all the anti-drag legislation that's happening, it's basically
07:02a anti-cross-dressing laws 2.0.
07:05Did Trump just push the reset button on everything to just bring it all back?
07:09Well, he just had a speech about it, but it's happening on the state level.
07:12So really what's happening in the state legislatures, we have to be paying more
07:15attention to because it's happening. No, I mean, him being president,
07:18did that set the tone for the resurgence of all this to just come up all over the place?
07:21I think so. I think in part, absolutely. People feel way more emboldened to just say it. Before
07:27they were dog whistles. Now it's a bullhorn with the racism, with the transphobia, with all of it.
07:33So it was trans folks. It was really non-conventional folks who started the
07:39Stonewall Rebellion. But then by the early 1970s, gay folks were like, well, we need to be taken
07:44seriously. We need to be respectable. And these trans people and drag queens, well, that's not
07:49a good look. And so they were pushed to the margins of a movement that they helped to start.
07:54There are, I can go through countless examples throughout history where we've seen us being
07:59pushed to the side because we weren't seen as respectable enough because folks were trying
08:03to have a respectability narrative. And so I think within, and the truth is for a lot of gay,
08:10lesbian, bisexual folks, they're like, well, this is about my sexuality. This trans thing is about
08:15gender. They are different, but historically they are different things and in a way we shouldn't
08:21be lumped together. But historically in the imagination of the oppressor, it's all the same.
08:26So it's almost like saying white supremacists looking at black as light skin is different
08:32than black, dark skin. It's just, it's black. It's people of color. We're racist. We don't
08:36like none that ain't pure white. To the white supremacists, we're all black.
08:40We're all black. And so I think that like, yes, we are different. Yes,
08:43our experiences are different. And there's different issues.
08:46And there are different issues. But when it comes to the oppressor,
08:48they're coming for all of us. And we see it now. I mean, we're seeing it very clearly. And I think
08:54it's like we within our community, just as like black folks, and I wish we don't, I don't think
08:58we talk enough in the black community about internalized racism. And only we talk in the
09:02LGBTQ plus community about internalized transphobia and internalized homophobia.
09:06We are all raised in a culture that is anti-black. We all are. I grew up internalizing anti-black
09:14things, anti-classist things, transphobic things as a black person, as a gender nonconforming now
09:19trans person. I internalized the same values that teach taught me that I was less than because I'm
09:24black, less than because I'm trans. We all internalize that. So our work is to unlearn
09:29that to come to critical consciousness around that. And so just because you're a gay man,
09:34doesn't mean that you haven't internalized homophobia and transphobia. And so it's work
09:38that we constantly have to do on ourselves. Because I really believe when we have issues
09:44with somebody else existing, that's an issue with me. And there was a moment in my life,
09:50I worked at a restaurant called Lucky Chang's in New York for many years. And it was a drag
09:55queen themed restaurant, not a drag queen. There's a difference between drag queens and trans women.
10:00Some trans women do work in the context of drag though. And I did to make a living at the time.
10:04And there would be this one brilliant woman named Veronica. She had a school called Miss Vera School
10:11for boys who want to be girls. And most of her clients were straight married men who loved to
10:19cross dress. It was kind of fetishistic for them. You know, there's going to be so many little parts
10:25of this interview where people are going to have to pause and rewind to understand that because I
10:28don't think people can wrap their minds around that there are people who identify as straight
10:32who have fetishes or who have- Oh girl.
10:35I know. Girl, that's a girl. They're there.
10:38And if you're a trans woman on any dating app, they're messaging you, girl. They're messaging
10:43you. And if you're on OnlyFans,
10:45they are in there asking for requests for sure. I mean, I don't know about the OnlyFans, but
10:51I believe you. But so Miss Vera, so after a while, so it was a charm school. So they would
10:56let these straight men would learn how to sit like a woman, whatever that means. But they would give
11:02feminizing lessons. And then their big sort of graduation was that they would get dressed up
11:07in drag and they were cross-dressed and they would go out on the town. And so they would often
11:11come to Lucky Chang's for a night. And the girls who worked at Chang's were so vicious to these
11:17lovely cross-dressing folks from Miss Vera's school. And I found myself participating once
11:24and being really shady to these cross-dressers who came in.
11:28Why were you being shady? Why were you being shady?
11:30Thank you. I caught myself and was like, Laverne, what are you doing? This is the same thing that
11:36they do to us. And what that moment was about for me when I analyzed it, it was like, I don't want,
11:42they were very obviously men in drag, men cross-dressing. There was nothing really very
11:51feminine about them. They were like men in wigs. And I didn't want the world to see me that way.
11:59So I needed to distance myself from that. So I distanced myself from that by making fun of them.
12:04And at the end of the day, there are people who are going to be watching this who are going to say,
12:08I'm a man in a wig, who are going to say the same things about me that I was saying about them.
12:13So that was a reflection of my own internalized transphobia that I had to interrogate and let go
12:19of. And it was a me issue. It wasn't an issue with them. It was, I needed to work on myself
12:24and my own internalized transphobia. And I think that's the work we have to do.