Overcoming Stereotypes Project - Laverne Cox - Cassiopeia
For my presentation I have chosen the well know actor and activist Laverne Cox. She is a 32 year woman born on May 29 in 1984 from Mobile, Alabama in the US. She and her twin brother were raised by their mother, Gloria, who was single and worked as a teacher. Though Cox was born biologically male, she had always felt herself to be female, not really seeing a difference between boys and girls. She was often taunted and harassed mercilessly for being feminine, being bullied all throughout elementary school. After months of pestering her mother, she was final put into dance in the third grade. This was her way of expressing herself in an artistic way and sparked her first true realization and attention of her gender identity.. Overtime she began to realise she wanted to be an actor. Her first acting job was playing in the short film, Betty Anderson as a supporting character in 2001. This lead to her …show more content…
All of them are discriminatory. The most common one is that all trans people are confused. Just because a person is different doesn't mean they are uncertain about how they are. Another stereotype is trans people are mentally disturbed. While it is true that some transgender people suffer from mental illnesses but this is not from their identity alone. This is most likely because in our patriarchal society, being gender variant causes a lot of distress. So much distress, in fact, that it can be described by the diagnosis of a mental disorder, this is diagnosed as Gender Dysphoria. This diagnosis is helpful because it tells us that this person is suffering and something needs to be done to help them and their situation. One more stereotype is that transgender people hate their body. This is not true in all cases. Yes identifying as a female with a male body and vice versa may be awkward but some do not hate it, others embrace
For my presentation I have chosen the well know actor and activist Laverne Cox. She is a 32 year woman born on May 29 in 1984 from Mobile, Alabama in the US. She and her twin brother were raised by their mother, Gloria, who was single and worked as a teacher. Though Cox was born biologically male, she had always felt herself to be female, not really seeing a difference between boys and girls. She was often taunted and harassed mercilessly for being feminine, being bullied all throughout elementary school. After months of pestering her mother, she was final put into dance in the third grade. This was her way of expressing herself in an artistic way and sparked her first true realization and attention of her gender identity.. Overtime she began to realise she wanted to be an actor. Her first acting job was playing in the short film, Betty Anderson as a supporting character in 2001. This lead to her …show more content…
All of them are discriminatory. The most common one is that all trans people are confused. Just because a person is different doesn't mean they are uncertain about how they are. Another stereotype is trans people are mentally disturbed. While it is true that some transgender people suffer from mental illnesses but this is not from their identity alone. This is most likely because in our patriarchal society, being gender variant causes a lot of distress. So much distress, in fact, that it can be described by the diagnosis of a mental disorder, this is diagnosed as Gender Dysphoria. This diagnosis is helpful because it tells us that this person is suffering and something needs to be done to help them and their situation. One more stereotype is that transgender people hate their body. This is not true in all cases. Yes identifying as a female with a male body and vice versa may be awkward but some do not hate it, others embrace