Trailblazing actress and LGBTQ+ advocate Laverne Cox reflects on the remarkable strides made in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights.
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00:00 If you really look at what's happening around you in the world with policies being formed,
00:03 not only just for trans, LGBTQ, but Black people, women, the right to choose whether or not they
00:09 want to have an abortion, why are people not angry in this country about the attacks that we see very
00:14 clearly online every day? I mean, I just recently said this on Jamila Jamil's podcast, that what,
00:21 this is all a distraction. At the end of the day, what they call culture war issues,
00:28 which are really civil rights issues and human rights issues, become a distraction and that
00:32 come from mostly Republicans, right? There are democratically identified people who are anti-trans
00:37 and anti-LGBTQ+, but I think for the Republican Party specifically, who are pushing public
00:43 policies on the state level that are banning gender-affirming care, banning trans people from
00:48 sports, et cetera, it's a distraction because the Republican Party does not have any kind of
00:54 economic message for poor and working people. We have a homeless crisis here in Los Angeles and
00:59 all over the country. There's no plan for that. The environment is being decimated and corporations
01:05 basically want to be able to be unregulated so they can destroy our environment and without any
01:11 kind of regulation or recourse. And so we can have all this distraction around, there's a trans person
01:17 on television or there was a performance that was satanic at the Grammys or whatever as a way to
01:22 distract people from the reality that their lives are actually not being made better right now
01:29 because corporations who are bribing politicians are screwing everybody over. Okay, where did this
01:38 journey of becoming so articulate on the issues, educated on the issues start? Did it start back
01:44 in Alabama when you first identified that you were born in a body that you may not have felt
01:51 was completely who you were or when did that start? It started with my mom. It started with
01:57 my mother being a teacher and emphasizing education and critical thinking. My mother was raised in the
02:04 segregated South and so very early on my mother made it very clear to me what it was like during
02:10 segregation and what her situation was before schools were segregated and what it's like
02:16 afterwards and that there was a care that Black teachers have for the Black kids that they were
02:21 educating that the white teachers didn't have. And so because of my mother I had this historical
02:27 perspective already and because education was something that she so deeply valued it became
02:34 something that I valued and so I continue to educate myself. I continue to, I love reading,
02:40 I love history, I love thinking critically and I actually think it's so important right now when
02:46 Ron DeSantis in Florida wants to ban AP African American history. For those of you that don't
02:53 know who that is, that's the governor that's trying to just, is he the governor or senator?
02:57 He's the governor. He's the governor of Florida. He's doing the most. He's doing the most. But
03:02 the deep thing to me about, I mean they're banning books all over the country and it's
03:07 the Republican party. They're banning books and they're authors that I love who they want to ban
03:12 and I think when I think about that I think it's important particularly for Black folks to remember
03:18 Slaves.
03:18 That exactly. When we were enslaved they did not want us to be able to read. They did not want us
03:23 to get an education because the enslavers, the colonizers understood that education was a pathway
03:31 to freedom and so for us as Black folks, for us as Americans, even if they try to take a ban books
03:38 and keep us from reading this and this, it is paramount that we educate ourselves and that the
03:44 education never stops and that education is about thinking critically because there's so much media
03:50 coming at us, so much misinformation online and our critical thinking skills are paramount to
03:57 this fight that we're engaged in right now for really our human rights because I think when
04:03 it's so important for us to understand that yes they're coming for trans people but Ron DeSantis
04:10 who's come really hard for trans people, for LGBTQ+ people is coming hard for Black folks and AP,
04:15 African American, they're coming for all of us. That we're really in this together. I was on MSNBC
04:22 a few weeks ago and I made this, it's always very tricky to make correlations or comparisons to the
04:31 Holocaust but the reality, the truth is that the Nazis, that Hitler burned books at Magnus Hirschfeld's
04:39 Institute for Human Sexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld was this German dude who started
04:46 an institute for human sexuality in like 1920, 1919, 1920 and they studied trans folks, they
04:53 studied LGBTQ+ folks, Lily Elbey, I don't know if you know that movie Danish Girl, she had her first
04:59 gender affirming procedure at Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic and this is one of the first things the
05:05 Nazis did, were burn all the research materials at Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic. When we see those,
05:11 the famous photo of books being burned by the Nazis, it was Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic and
05:16 his papers that were being burned there. That's just because they thought that you'd be a threat
05:20 if you're educated. Educated but they didn't, they were anti-trans, they were anti-LGBTQ+,
05:26 they were gay folks, trans folks in concentration camps with pink triangles stamped on our bodies.
05:33 We were made aware of this when the pink triangle became a symbol of AIDS activism in the late 80s
05:37 and early 90s. It was a reminder that LGBTQ+ folks were in concentration camps. So as we fight
05:46 anti-Semitism and white supremacy and racism, we have to understand if we have an historical
05:53 perspective that liberation for LGBTQ+ folks is tied, all of our liberation is tied together.
05:59 Let me ask you this, because I still want to go back to your childhood because-
06:02 This got way more serious than I thought it would. I thought we'd be kiki-ing.
06:05 Oh, the kikis are coming. The reason why it's important is because one,
06:10 you're a huge advocate for the trans community and I know my audience, and my audience needs
06:15 to be exposed to the knowledge, the education, and the fight that you do for the trans community.
06:20 I even feel within the LGBTQ community, there's a necessary emphasis needed to be placed on the
06:28 advocacy for trans, even within that community. Have you noticed that? I mean, I'm sure you've-
06:32 Absolutely. There's a long history. I mean, again-
06:35 Why is that? Why are we fighting within our own alphabet?
06:37 Not enough time.
06:41 So there's a few different ways we can look at it. When we think about Stonewall,
06:47 the Stonewall Rebellion that kick-started the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement that
06:52 happened in 1969, there were anti-cross-dressing laws. They're trying to ban cross-dressing now.
06:57 In fact, with all the anti-drag law legislation that's happening, it's basically
07:03 anti-cross-dressing laws 2.0.
07:05 Did Trump just push the reset button on everything to just bring it all back?
07:08 Well, he just had a speech about it, but it's happening on the state level.
07:12 So really what's happening in the state legislatures, we have to be paying more
07:15 attention to because it's happening. No, I mean, him being president,
07:18 did that set the tone for the resurgence of all this to just come up all over the place?
07:21 I think so. I think in part. I think in part, absolutely. People feel way more emboldened to
07:26 just say it. Before, when they were dog whistles, now it's a bullhorn with the racism, with the
07:31 transphobia, with all of it. So it was trans folks. It was really non-conventional folks who started
07:38 the Stonewall Rebellion. But then by the early 1970s, gay folks were like, "Well, we need to
07:44 be taken seriously. We need to be respectable. And these trans people and drag queens, well,
07:48 that's not a good look." And so they were pushed to the margins of a movement that they helped to
07:54 start. There are, I can go through countless examples throughout history where we've seen
07:58 us being pushed to the side because we weren't seen as respectable enough because folks were
08:03 trying to have a respectability narrative. And so I think within... And the truth is,
08:09 for a lot of gay, lesbian, bisexual folks, they're like, "Well, this is about my sexuality. This trans
08:14 thing is about gender." They are different, but historically, they are different things and in a
08:21 way we shouldn't be lumped together. But historically, in the imagination of the oppressor,
08:25 it's all the same. So it's almost like saying,
08:28 "White supremacists looking at black as light skin is different than black, dark skin. It's just,
08:33 it's black. It's people of color. We're racist. We don't like none that ain't pure white."
08:37 To the white supremacists, we're all black. We're all black. And so I think that yes,
08:42 we are different. Yes, our experiences are different.
08:44 And there's different issues.
08:45 And there are different issues. But when it comes to the oppressor,
08:48 they're coming for all of us. And we see it now. We're seeing it very clearly. And I think it's
08:54 we within our community, just as like black folks. And I wish, I don't think we talk enough in the
08:59 black community about internalized racism. And only we talk in the LGBTQ+ community about
09:03 internalized transphobia and internalized homophobia. We are all raised in a culture
09:08 that is anti-black. We all are. I grew up internalizing anti-black things, anti-classist
09:16 things, transphobic things as a black person, as a gender nonconforming now trans person.
09:20 I internalized the same values that teach taught me that I was less than because I'm black,
09:24 less than because I'm trans. We all internalize that. So our work is to unlearn that, to come to
09:30 critical consciousness around that. And so just because you're a gay man doesn't mean that you
09:34 have an internalized homophobia and transphobia. And so it's work that we constantly have to do on
09:39 ourselves. Because I really believe when we have issues with somebody else existing, that's an
09:48 issue with me. And there was a moment in my life, I went to the restaurant called Lucky Chang's in
09:53 New York for many years. And it was a drag queen themed restaurant, not a drag queen. There's a
09:58 difference between drag queens and trans women. Some trans women do work in the context of drag
10:02 though. And I did to make a living at the time. And there would be this one brilliant woman named
10:07 Veronica. She had a school called Miss Vera School for boys who want to be girls. And most of her
10:14 clients were straight married men who loved to cross dress. It was kind of fetishistic for them.
10:22 Is that right? You know, there's going to be so many little parts of this interview where people
10:26 are going to have to pause and rewind to understand that because I don't think people can wrap their
10:29 minds around that there are people who identify as straight who have fetishes or who have-
10:34 Oh girl.
10:35 I know.
10:36 Girl, that's a whole... Girl, they're there. And if you're a trans woman on any dating app,
10:41 they're messaging you, Geronimo. They're messaging you.
10:44 And if you're on OnlyFans, they are in there asking for requests for sure.
10:48 I mean, I don't know about the OnlyFans, but I believe you. But so Miss Vera, so after a while,
10:55 so it was a charm school. So they would let these straight men would learn how to sit like a woman,
11:00 whatever that means. But they would give feminizing lessons. And then their big graduation was that
11:06 they would get dressed up in drag and they would cross dress and they would go out on the town.
11:10 And so they would often come to Lucky Chang's for a night. And the girls who worked at Chang's
11:15 were so vicious to these lovely cross-dressing folks from Miss Vera's school. And I found
11:22 myself participating once in being really shady to these cross-dressers who came in and then I-
11:28 Where we've been shady. Where we've been shady.
11:30 Thank you. I caught myself and was like, "Laverne, what are you doing? This is the same thing that
11:36 they do to us." And what that moment was about for me when I analyzed it, it was like, "I don't want-"
11:42 They were very obviously men in drag, men cross-dressing. There was nothing really very
11:51 feminine about them. They were like men in wigs. And I didn't want the world to see me that way.
11:59 So I needed to distance myself from that. So I distanced myself from that by making fun of them.
12:04 And at the end of the day, there are people who are going to be watching this who are going to say,
12:08 "I'm a man in a wig," who are going to say the same things about me that I was saying about them.
12:13 So that was a reflection of my own internalized transphobia that I had to interrogate and let go
12:19 of. And it was a me issue. It wasn't an issue with them. It was I needed to work on myself
12:24 and my own internalized transphobia. And I think that's the work we have to do.