From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16293/laverne_cox_transforming_hollywood
The trailblazing Orange is the New Black star has become a powerful voice for trans people, including CeCe McDonald.
BY Yasmin Nair
February 18, 2014
As Sophia Burset, the only trans character in Orange is the New Black—the hit Netflix show about a women’s prison—Laverne Cox is breaking new ground as a transgender actor in a field where trans women are still rare. But Cox is also gaining fame for her powerful off-screen politics as she advocates for transgender rights.
Most recently, Cox has lent both her star power and her organizing power to the case of CeCe McDonald, an African-American trans woman sentenced to 41 months in prison for a killing she says occurred in self-defense. In 2011, a group of white people taunted McDonald and her friends with racist and transphobic epithets outside a bar in Minneapolis. In the ensuing altercation, McDonald defended herself with scissors from her purse. She was wounded and a white man, Dean Schmitz, was killed. McDonald was convicted of second-degree murder.
McDonald’s case became a flash point for trans activists because of several perceived injustices in her trial and sentencing. First, the judge barred expert testimony about the everyday violence faced by trans people, which would have been used to support the case for self-defense. Then McDonald was sent to a men’s prison—where trans women face not only a high risk of violence, but also the trauma of being stripped of their gender.
When McDonald was released early on parole this January, Cox was among those waiting to greet her. Cox is working with director Jacqueline Gares on Free CeCe, a film documenting McDonald’s first year out of prison.
Cox spoke with In These Times about why McDonald’s case moved her, the future of trans acting and activism, and what’s next for Orange is the New Black.
What inspired you to make a documentary about CeCe McDonald?
I became aware of CeCe’s case a few weeks after it happened. Her case spoke so much to me because I could very easily have been her. CeCe was just walking down the street with a group of her friends when she was attacked. Often, I’ve been just walking down the street and heard anti-trans and racist slurs, and I was even kicked on the street once. So many trans women don’t survive these kinds of attacks. In 2012, 53 percent of homicides in the LGBTQ community were trans women, and 73 percent [of all homicides] are people of color. So the film is also about the culture of violence against trans women as an epidemic.
Advocating for her case wasn’t hard for me because this woman is a survivor. She did not want to die that day. I asked CeCe, during my interview with her, “Do you think if you had not pulled those scissors out, that he would have killed you?” And she said, “Yes.” He was charging and lunging at her with hate in his eyes and—not to retry the case—but this is a white supremacist with a swastika tattooed on his chest, and she feared for her life.
Yet the initial media coverage was sympathetic to Schmitz and not McDonald. Why do you think that is?
The coverage was transphobic and transmisogynistic and racist. What Billy Navarro, one of her major advocates, said to me when I interviewed him was, “The media was so upset with CeCe because she had the audacity to survive.”
I think the media is really comfortable reading about trans women of color as victims after they die, but if we have the audacity to survive, we are immediately criminalized; that is what the system does. The intersecting transphobia, transmisogyny, racism and classism in the criminal justice system—all of that converged in her story. CeCe was arrested on the spot that night; no one else was arrested. It took them [nearly] a year to arrest the person who smashed a glass into CeCe’s face. Because I’m on a show that looks at the injustice of the criminal justice system, it’s a no-brainer for me to be involved in this project.
Continue reading at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16293/laverne_cox_transforming_hollywood
