Laverne Cox is as Creepy as He is Fake.
Laverne Cox's latest role suggests one of the greatest grifts of the trans lobby has reached the end of the road. If only he'd taken the advice of his twin gay brother who criticised womanface.
Laverne Cox has a new role and it’s perfect for him. In the Netflix sci fi series Uglies he plays a creepy doctor who enforces regressive beauty stereotypes with surgery. Talk about typecasting. He’s also a robot. Cox tries his best to reach the emotional depth required for that.
Look, I’m not saying Cox can’t act but he may be the only famous person whose waxwork is more lifelike than they are.
Ten years ago Time magazine signalled the arrival of the Transgender Tipping Point when it put the trans actor on its cover.
It was a pivotal moment.
Since then Cox has relentlessly used his stardom to promote the trans agenda with the result that if we want to analyse the success of the trans lobby, in the United States in particular, his career is an almost perfect diagnostic tool. It’s also why the new role as an emotionally barren, non-human is so welcome. It may finally represent the realisation by the companies and lobbyists who promoted Cox he was always inauthentic. A complete fake. More of that later.
Most of us were probably happy to ignore Cox’s rise to prominence at the time. I know I was. Back in 2013 when he starred in the Netflix hit series Orange is the New Black I rolled my eyes and crossed my fingers, hoping he and the movement for which he was the poster-boy would soon be found out for the fakes they were. That’s why back then I didn’t bother to look closely at Cox or his backstory.
It’s only now I am finally doing that I realise some important things were staring me in the face. Take his hair, for example. Such a notable feature of his image. Weirdly, at the time I didn’t register, or not properly, he was always wearing long wigs of straight hair, often blonde. Like …..a white woman’s hair.
Yet this was a bloke who never stopped banging on about being a proud person of colour and how that meant inevitably he was on the receiving end of the unalloyed bigotry meted out to all black people in Amerika…never mind to ….(cue violins) ….a trans person of colour.
Their hair is often a locus of intense interest for black women, of the real variety, yet here was a dude who said he was a woman who seemed to be immune from the kind of critique even someone as iconic as Beyoncé faced. She was plagued by endless online speculation about her use of wigs. How much was her own hair? How much was extension? Etcetera. Etcetera.
Last year when her hairdresser posted a photo of Beyoncé having her hair washed it instantly went viral. Oh my …god….the star really did have her own long curly hair which she chose to straighten.
The reason this mattered so much is many Black women who wear long wigs are often criticised for reinforcing “white stereotypes” of beauty. If she was only straightening her own long hair and adding extensions…. then this was considered fashion and not Beyoncé being a hair traitor. Phew.
I only mention this shampoo spat because it was in sharp contrast to the experience of you know who. Mr Waxwork. Where were the questions for Laverne Cox….symbol of transgender liberation who was never seen without long stereotypically white women’s hair? How did the silence about this square with Cox’s status as an emblem of black empowerment?
There were other signs the normal rules didn’t apply to Cox. After Daniel Day Lewis played a character with cerebral palsy in the 1989 movie My Left Foot disability activists began to demand disabled characters be played by those who are disabled.
I don’t care either way to be honest. There was however not a peep of criticism when Cox played a wheel-chair bound resident of a rehabilitation unit in Musical Chairs released in late 2013. Then again that was not the most absurd feature of Cox’s portrayal. When his character Chantelle falls in love with an able-bodied relative of one of the other residents the legendary movie critic Roger Ebert observed,
“The man allegedly has no idea Chantelle has a little something extra, although it is the least-kept secret in the hospital. Chantelle never gets around to telling him and oops! They truly fall in love, although he’s not exactly her type, even if she wasn’t in a chair. Love conquers all.”
I don’t suppose a film critic would get away with that today. Or not in the US at least. Either way, in the film Cox is always perfectly made up. As those going through painful rehabilitation famously are. And always adorned with a distinctly non African-American wig.
This is the trailer by the way. Trust me everyone in it leaves Cox far behind in the acting department. Including his wig. And his wheelchair. But we’ll come back to his utter inability to do the job for which he is paid in a moment.
We’ll also come back to the issue of Cox’s use of blonde wigs and how they were a clue to his fakery our mainstream media chose studiously to ignore. The biggest fake of all about Cox though was his claim he had to battle against discrimination.
This cwas rolled out in 2014 when Cox graced Time’s cover. The accompanying article declared trans rights “America’s next civil rights frontier”; implying trans identified people faced rampant prejudice.
“ Transgender people….are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society,” the magazine intoned.
Yet the success of Cox himself tells a rather different story. His fame is actually the result of determined attempts by media giants to satisfy an assertive LGBTQ+ lobby which argued for greater representation for a minority almost vanishingly small.
This deliberate spotlighting of one of the few available trans actors would ensure the almost effortless rise to prominence of Cox who, in return, would repay the debt by using his platform to advance the most extreme elements of the trans agenda, including the right of violent male convicts to be housed in women’s prisons. His starring role in the prison drama Orange is the New Black being used shamelessly to try to lend credence to his views.
Normally, it would be difficult to track how easily or not an actor’s ascent had been. Luckily for us though the universe has run the nearest thing to a controlled experiment which, I will argue, reveals Cox was handed fame and fortune on a plate.
For thirty years the life of Laverne Cox, a black homosexual man with little or no observable talent, marched in lock-step with that of his identical twin who was also homosexual. He now goes by the name M Lamar.
Lamar is also a performer. He too bangs on about race and gender, spouting the same word salad as his brother, “Laverne”. The point is that once Laverne Cox decided to transition at the age of thirty the career paths of the two brothers diverged markedly.
Cox’s sudden success would prove a sharp contrast to that of the man he has often called his intellectual mentor and moral compass, his self-described queer “devil-worshipping” twin.
Lamar continues to profoundly influence his actor brother but he has never come close to emulating Cox’s success. His refusal to don womanface meant he would remain an also-ran.
Our cultural elites had no desperate need for another opinionated, black gay man.
They did however hunger for one in high heels ….and a long blonde wig.
Laverne Cox would be showered with attention, acclaim and awards. It hardly mattered he was one of the worst actors on the planet. He was trans and that was all that mattered.
Or it did. Until finally audiences refused to take any more.