Laverne Cox was born in Mobile, Alabama, and was raised by a single mother and grandmother within the AME Zion church. She has an identical twin brother, M Lamar, who portrayed the pre-transitioning Sophia (as Marcus) in Orange is the New Black. Cox stated she attempted suicide at the age of 11, when she noticed that she had developed feelings for her male classmates and had been bullied for several years for not acting "the way someone assigned male at birth was supposed to act."
She is a graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, where she studied creative writing before switching to dance.She then studied for two years at Indiana University Bloomingtonbefore transferring to Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she switched from dancing (specifically classical ballet) to acting. During her first season on Orange is the New Black, she was still appearing at a restaurant on the Lower East Side as a drag queen (where she had applied initially to work as a waitress).
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