Laverne Cox recalls Caitlyn Jenner’s rocky trans debut: “That first year out, it got dicey pretty quickly”

In January of 2015, a friend of mine reached out to me, and there had been rumors that Caitlyn was going to transition… And she was like, ‘She’s never met a trans person before. Can you talk to her?’

Caitlyn calls me the next day. We speak for like a few hours. She’d already had some feminizing procedures. She talked about her kids mostly. And I supported her, and a lot of us in the trans community supported her when she came out, and she had a show on E! with a lot of trans folks…

That first year out, it got dicey pretty quickly. She started saying some problematic things.

I remember the day she got Glamour’s Woman of the Year. In the article or a speech or something, she’s like, ‘The hardest thing about being a woman is trying to figure out what to wear.’ And, like, the backlash. It was so tone deaf!

…I think early transitioning trans people should not be in front of a camera for at least five to seven years. For Caitlyn to all the sudden be held up–it was a rollout of her transness and her transition–she has not lived a life as a trans person yet.

[At that point] she has lived the life of a person who is denying their transness, who is assumed as a straight cisgender male, with all the privileges that come with that, until she was 65 years old. She does not have the experiences of a trans woman yet.
Laverne Cox speaking to the podcast The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi about all the red flags she noticed when Caitlyn Jenner first came out publicly as trans.