‘There is no difference’: Laverne Cox talks gender identity in Memorial Hall

“Orange is the New Black” actress Laverne Cox wheeled into Memorial Hall March 1. Cox discussed gender and her childhood in Mobile, Alabama. Photo by Jack Clendening

Actress Laverne Cox made an entrance in Memorial Hall March 1. But it wasn’t the one you might expect.

After gliding onto the stage in front of a nearly-full Memorial Hall audience on a black knee-scooter Cox, the University Program Board’s (UPB) spring speaker, settled down in an armchair center stage, and immediately regaled to the audience her Valentine’s Day, spent with her boyfriend in the emergency room after fracturing her foot.

“I suppose you could say it was romantic,” Cox said, drawing laughs and applause from the audience.

Though Cox’s hour-long talk centered around heavier topics, like the obstacles transgender individuals face, Cox brought a light-hearted energy to the room.

She discussed her personal experiences with shame, and took the audience through integral moments during her childhood and transition, something she approached with humor and a sense of growth.

Cox, who is transgender, made quips about her bold and performative demeanor as a child in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, while expressing the struggle of being gender-nonconforming in an unaccepting environment. For Cox, growing up in Mobile presented challenges that repressed her authentic self, she said.

Cox remembered entering a gift shop as a child at Six Flags and seeing a handheld fan decorated with a peacock design that she “had to have.”

The fan reminded her of Scarlett O’Hara, a character from “Gone With the Wind” who Cox was especially drawn to. After having purchased the fan with the spending money she had, Cox brought it to her third-grade class.

“I had this fan, sitting in third grade, and I was imagining I was Scarlett O’Hara being very ‘Gone with the Wind’ fabulous,” Cox said. “My teacher saw this and called my mom. They had a phone conversation, and I was put in therapy.”

Cox, a prominent LGBTQIA+ activist who plays the role of transgender inmate Sophia Burset in Netflix’s original series “Orange is the New Black,” also shared a series of stories about developing self-love, and dismantling internalized shame. How does Cox approach the world today? “With love,” she said.

“My behavior was seen as this thing that needed to be solved … I was taken to a few sessions of therapy and they asked me if I knew the difference between a boy and a girl, to which I said, ‘There is no difference,’” Cox said.

The therapist had a proposal for her mother: Cox should be injected with testosterone to make her more masculine. Though her mother decided not to proceed and the sessions were discontinued, “the damage was already done,” Cox said.

Conversion therapy has been made illegal in 15 states, most recently for New York in January, but that’s not enough for Cox.

“It should be outlawed throughout the whole country,” she said.

To bring Cox to campus, UPB combined its fall and spring speaker budgets, which are typically about $15,000 per speaker. UPB would not disclose how much they paid for Cox to speak.

During the Q&A portion of the evening, about nine students lined up to ask questions to Cox, who asked UPB to give extra time so she could respond to one.

The questions ranged from inquiring about the final season of “Orange is the New Black” to how accessible healthcare is in the transgender community.

One student asked Cox how she would answer the therapists question today about what Cox thinks the difference between a boy and a girl is.

“I would say today, if someone says that they are a boy or a girl, then that’s what they are,” she said. “It’s about the individuals own experience with gender.”