Laverne Cox is an LGBT activist and actress from the United States. She rose to notoriety as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, where she became the first transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy Award in an acting category, and the first transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy Award since composer Angela Morley in 1990.
She became the first transgender woman to win a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word in 2015, As Cameron Wirth on CBS’s Doubt, she made history as the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on American broadcast television.
Cox co-produced and co-hosted the VH1 makeover television series TRANSform Me and was a competitor on the first season of VH1’s reality show I Want to Work for Diddy. Cox received the Stephen F. Kolzak Award from GLAAD in April 2014 for her efforts as a transgender rights advocate.
Cox made history as the first transgender person to grace the cover of Time magazine in June 2014. Cox is the first transgender person to be featured on the cover of a Cosmopolitan magazine, appearing on the South African version in February 2018. She is also the first openly transgender person to have a Madame Tussauds wax figure of herself.
Laverne Cox Parents
Gloria Cox is known worldwide as the mother of Laverne Cox. Little is known About her.
Laverne Cox was born in Mobile, Alabama, and was raised in the AME Zion church by a single mother and grandmother. M Lamar, her identical twin brother, played Sophia (as Marcus) in Orange Is the New Black before transitioning. Cox claims she attempted suicide when she was 11 years old, after she realized she had feelings for her male peers and had been ridiculed for several years for not acting “the way someone assigned male at birth was meant to act.”