Janet Mock's memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, came out this month. As for Mock, she came out as a transgender woman in 2011 in the pages of Marie Claire, in an article titled, "I Was Born a Boy." That, however, might show some mainstream "cis" -- identifying as the gender one is assigned at birth -- bias, with the counterpoint being that Mock was actually born a girl, but with physical traits that did not reflect that reality. Regardless, Mock says it was violence against transgender people, as well as a relative absence of their voices from the national discourse, that moved her to come out. Working as an editor at People.com, with a long-term boyfriend, Aaron, living the New York City life she'd long dreamed of, Mock might have stayed in her comfortable closet. She chose otherwise.
In her memoir, Mock goes quite a bit further than stepping out of her closet, as she did in Marie Claire. She writes about the necessity of sex work as a teenager in Hawaii, working by night to pay for hormones and fund "genital reconstruction surgery" in Thailand. She writes of sexual abuse and poverty, and elaborates on her first female identity, "Keisha," a brief childhood persona extinguished in a barber's chair.
Janet Mock
(Photo by Aaron Tredwell)
With her media background, Mock also has the wherewithal to usher her story out to the largest possible audience.
"That's the blessing," says Mock. "I've worked in it. I understand what people want from me. There is a sense of performance with this, being a media-facing person. But how can I use the access points that I have to hopefully critique the conversation and push it forward and enlighten people? And inspire. Like young trans girls, how do I inspire them to feel like they have agency over their lives? That they can dare to dream bigger and that they don't have to think of life as a tragedy?"
One way she's doing just that is with her social-media hashtag platform, "#GirlsLikeUs."
"Every day there are new entries," she says of that particular branding. "It's been on Tumblr, on Instagram. Now Facebook has hashtags and people are using it there. It has its own life. It's this living organism of our lives as trans women. It was kind of like a solidarity project, a visibility project. It started during a very interesting time, March 2012. There was the Miss Universe thing [with Jenna Talackova disqualified for being transgender], [transgender woman] CeCe McDonald's sentencing [for fatally stabbing a man who attacked her and her friends], and there was a rash of murders of trans women of color. It was a point at which I thought we needed a space to have these hard conversations with one another, to share resources, a space for us to stake a claim. That's what #GirlsLikeUs has been."
With the release of Redefining Realness, Mock -- who also sits on the Arcus Foundation board, and helped create programming for trans youth at New York's Hetrick-Martin Institute -- is creating a new space for those conversations, though not just with the book. She's also launching a RedefiningRealness.com site to allow others to tell their stories.
"It's a space for readers to share their stories of authenticity, to declare their truth, to state their identity," she explains. "It's a space where people can tell their stories. In the storytelling process, people want to tell me stuff, but I'd rather them take it to a space where they can share it with a collective of people who can share stories together."
Meanwhile, Mock continues sharing her own story, whether in the pages of Metro Weekly, or later this month when she comes to Washington for a public appearance. There's just so much more to share.
METRO WEEKLY: Was it difficult to get your story published, or was it an easy sell?
JANET MOCK: It was all about strategy. There was a plan in place. I knew when Marie Claire was coming out that agents would be interested in figuring out if there was a wider story. So, having worked in magazine publishing and online publishing, I was prepared. I knew there would be interest. And I'd always wanted to write a book. I didn't necessarily know it would be about my life, but I felt there was more, that I was so limited by that Marie Claire story.
We got a deal within a year, like eight months. Book publishing is very slow. It took them a while to come around. I think they realized, "This young woman is becoming a voice in this movement and we should probably figure out a way to publish her." I'm glad that Laverne [Cox] has gotten a book deal, too, that there's going to be more out there.
MW: From the way you tell your story in Redefining Realness, I would think you'd be very proud of your strength, your determination, your grit. But you seem more comfortable emphasizing humility. Is that a fair interpretation?
MOCK: For so long, I was steeped in silence, and trauma brought on by silence. It took me a long time to get to the point of celebration. I just got finished copies of the book, and it wasn't until then I started crying. It was the realization of this dream of mine as a young person who wanted to be, one, myself, fighting hard to be myself; two, move to New York City; and, three, be a writer. And there's nothing that solidifies your sense of "writer" identity more than a book. It's all very new.
The pride, I think, is coming. I guess I'm proud. [Laughs.] But the pride is like, "Oh, I can be present and say that this book is a symbol of this childhood dream of mine being fulfilled." So, yes, I'm coming around to pride! [Laughs.] But I come from Hawaii, where humility is huge. It's in the culture to be humble. It's hard to, you know, say, "I'm so proud of myself! It's amazing what I've done!"
Janet Mock
(Photo by Aaron Tredwell)
MW: There's also this sense of privilege you express through your story. I was expecting to read that you came from some wealthy family. But that's not the case at all. You were writing about privilege, and I was reading about dysfunction and a broken home.
MOCK: When we talk about privilege, a lot of people get scared of that. They get defensive. But we all have slices of privilege. The more cognizant we are of that, the easier it is to understand and relate to other people who may have bigger stacks against them, bigger hurdles.
The one thing I often get dismissed about is the way that I look. Everyone just loves to obsess a little bit about the way that I look and how that has granted me access to things, made my life so much easier. To a certain extent, I understand that. I understand I have a sense of privilege, that most people who see me accept me as a woman -- until I disclose I'm trans, and then they kind of change a little bit. But it was an exercise for me to say, yes, there were some privileges in my life that have helped me.
It may be the interaction of having friends who got kicked out. When they were on the streets, they weren't just earning money for hormones and a surgery fund. They were earning money for rent and food. I didn't necessarily have to think about that too much. Yes, we got to homelessness, we dealt with poverty, but my mom was able to get a job eventually and get us set back up.
I was always cognizant that someone might have it -- not "worse," because I don't want to play "Oppression Olympics" [Laughs.] -- but there is a sense of understanding that we have different experiences of access and exile. The access I had was a school environment. I thrived in school. My educational privilege was just being naturally "gifted," in a sense. The media machine of "Janet Mock" says, "Oh, look, this trans woman of color can make it through, so it's super possible for everyone to do that!" I wanted to break it down a little bit and say this is the real story of my life. And it is possible, but it takes a lot of little
bitty steps to champion this child through, because there are huge hurdles. Huge hurdles.
MW: Like, for some, being kicked out of their homes, as you mentioned, though you were not.
MOCK: That's a big one. My parents were messy. My family was messy. I think a lot us grow up in messy homes. [Laughs.] And then we're told to clean it up once you get a little big of class privilege, clean it up a little bit and present respectably and move on with your life. I wanted to open those things up so people could see it wasn't as ideal as people like to make it seem sometimes.
MW: But even when you're writing about what you had to go through, the sex work, the illicit photo shoot, as a reader it comes off as impressive. I didn't read privilege or seediness, just strength.
MOCK: When I can separate that girl in the book from my 30-year-old self who had to armor-up, suck it up and say, "This is what you need to do to get to the next step," I understand that force that's propelling her through. But I can talk about her as a character. It's like, "Oh, yeah, that girl was brave. I can appreciate that girl and what she had to do to get to the next step for herself, to achieve her sense of freedom within herself and her body." So, yes, there is pride there. I can see it in the sense of the character, but when I see it as me it makes me feel kind of icky.
MW: Have you had any second thoughts about how forthcoming you are in sharing your story?
MOCK: I went through all that in the writing process. This book was three years in the making.
At first, it was hard just telling myself the truth when I started writing the book at 27. That was already a lot. Then, okay, how do I make it understandable to a literary agent? And then sharing it with him. Then choosing an editor and a publisher, then going through the process of shaping what this book is going to look like. Then sharing it with my first readers, my inner circle, my friends and all that. And then going to famous people to get blurbs, then reviewers, then going to the media and then going to the public. I had many different chances at disclosing and sharing these truths -- these hard truths. It may seem like, "Oh, my God, it's all just out there!" But I've had years to get comfortable with that. I'm still getting comfortable with that.
MW: I've read stories of other transgender people, but getting the perspective of a teenaged transgender girl in the 1990s was new to me.
MOCK: That era, the sense of time and place, is important. I was able to navigate a system that had already been built by other trans women who were around and had done this. The medical field was there and it was available in such a way that poor trans women could access it. I could access a doctor in Honolulu who would give us medicine without prescription or without health care, without insurance. So I got incredibly lucky in that the system was built decades before me.
I also think that intersection of youth is important. Many of the stories tend to be of older trans people. Navigating school systems, navigating so many different systems that push queer kids and trans kids out, it's hard. I don't know exactly what my resolve was in the sense of saying, "I'm going to stay in school, do well in school, and then also transition and pick a scholarship and go to college."
In my reflection on all that, I think it was other people's stories that propelled me through, to think that was possible -- and also this sense that I get to determine who I am. No one gets to do that for me. That's my right to self-define and realize myself. It's mine. No one gets to tell me that I can't do that. That was something that was very much ingrained in my mind as a very young person. I think a lot of that had to do with interactions with my parents, watching them as a young person who had no agency. As a child, people can pick you up and put you somewhere and you have no voice, no say in the matter. For me, there was a point where I just couldn't.
Janet Mock
(Photo by Aaron Tredwell)
MW: Some of what you shared from high school was particularly chilling, in that it would seem an age where adults would begin to respect your choices, educators especially.
MOCK: It was so hard for me, because I had this life in school and then I had this life outside of school. It felt like a dual existence, especially in high school. I had this nighttime life with these trans women who I just observed -- like we say, "gagged over." I gagged over their beauty and their resilience and their wits and determination and sexuality. Everything was like, "Oh, my God, I want to be like them, have a life like them" -- without knowing their lives were so limited.
Then, in school, I had never gotten in trouble except for when I was being myself. When I decided to be myself, then the friction came in. All of a sudden, my identity was making people uncomfortable, which was being vocalized to me as a 14- and 15-year-old. Their internalized anti-trans bias, their internalized homophobia, their internalized misogyny -- all of that -- the idea of femininity being expressed in a body that's not supposed to express it that way was so overpowering that they forgot that I was even a child. What does it mean that you're telling me -- right here in your office -- that I am wrong? That I shouldn't be here, that I shouldn't do that? Instead of supporting me, instead of saying that what's being said to me in class is traumatic and no child should have to go through that?
It's still happening. Think about [15-year-old student fatally shot at school] Larry King and that documentary, Valentine Road. You saw one of the teachers who was like, "Yeah, I understand why that happened to Larry." Are you oblivious to this being a 15-year-old child who was shot in class because of their femininity? Because of their audacity to be seen and heard as who they are? That's what got me riled up. That's what led me to share my story, then to share my story in its totality in this book.
MW: That's what led you to come out? You didn't have to.
MOCK: I felt like no one was talking about the violence that was happening to trans women. Also, Larry King and the verdict. So much was happening around that same time. The Larry King story I was watching so closely -- also not being very vocal about why it was so resonant for me, why it felt like a state of emergency for me, why I knew that kid was trans. Because I was that kid. I remember acting that exact same way in class. And I wasn't hearing those conversations really being had in the mainstream.
Even within the trans community, if you can "pass," you ought to be silent and get on with your life and get what you can get. And I did that from 18 to 27, when I made the decision to step forth. When I made that decision, I was so frustrated that I didn't feel the media had a story that reflected my life and the lives of the girls that I knew and grew up with. Instead of constantly complaining about that frustration, I thought, "Why don't I step in and try to fill the void." Then I realized there was just a hunger, and that I had these skills as a writer, as a journalist, that I could probably help create something. It's just been astounding that I've been able to do the things I thought I would never be able to do.
I always quote Alice Walker here saying she writes the things that she should've been able to read growing up. I live by that motto, that mantra, writing the things I should've been able to read as a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old, finding myself, to know that I wasn't alone and that nothing was bizarre about me and my experience. That's the common thread within this coming-out process. Or, as my friend Darnell Moore says, the "inviting-in process," choosing to invite people into your life, to know you more. That's what I've been steadily doing. The book is now the biggest part of my invitation to the world to know about me and hopefully know more about this very marginalized group of women.
MW: With the perspective you might get through your involvement with the Hetrick-Martin Institute, do you find the behavior of those adults in your youth even less acceptable? Does it give you perspective to forgive them?
MOCK: It does, in a sense. I understand that they're limited by what they don't know. There's a part of me that has compassion because I understand how limited they may be.
At the same time, I don't know how you can just "other," how you can dehumanize children who don't align with your ideals or what you thought a child or a human being is supposed to be or grow up into. So, part of me feels a slight bit of compassion, but it's mostly anger. It's anger and frustration, because I know how a good teacher, a teacher who supports and affirms you, how much of a difference that makes.
Although I had a few traumatic experiences with adults in school, I do have those pivotal little bursts of light. Those people who represented refuge for me at a time when I needed someone to talk to, who treated me as Janet, who called me "she" and "her," who gave me space to let me know I could be a leader, that I could be a peer mediator, that I could help run a student-support group, who pushed me to sign up for the scholarship. There are also those great people, too, who made my existence so much easier.
I think of places like Hetrick-Martin giving spaces to queer and trans youth, letting them know, "At home, in school, I know you can't dress up or you can't wear your wigs because it's not safe for you, but here, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., you can be yourself. It's safe for you to do that, and do it around other young people like you, and just kind of kiki and be silly and be a kid." That's so vital to being a kid. Those hours can override all the other negativity in their lives. A little spot of sunshine.
Janet Mock
(Photo by Aaron Tredwell)
MW: Do you think about becoming a mother yourself?
MOCK: I remember when I was a teenager talking with my mother and my doctor, and he was talking about the risks of all these things I wanted to do with my body. He brought up infertility and I thought, "I don't really want [children]."
My brother Chad is having a baby in a couple weeks. He's having a baby, and I realize my book is my baby. That is just as valuable. What we produce out of our art is just as valuable as what we produce out of our bodies.
I don't know. I'm 30. I don't know yet if that's what I want, so [my dog] Cleo is fulfilling that for me. But I do have a family. Aaron and me alone is a family, and that's just as viable as people who have children too. For me, that's enough right now.
MW: In high school, when you began to better express yourself, you chose the name Janet. I figured you would've used "Keisha," that name you gave yourself when you were much younger and briefly presenting as a little girl with your curls.
MOCK: That's funny. [Laughs.] Keisha just popped up in my mind on the phone. That was like my first storytelling, as Keisha. That's when I thought, "Oh, I guess I'm a pretty good storyteller." I'd be on the phone just making up tall tales about what my day was like at the mall with my girlfriends. I let Keisha go because the haircut was so traumatic. It literally cut Keisha out of me. It was a sharp ender. The Keisha chapter of my life was over. She was someone who died with that haircut.
Then, in my adolescence, when I really started discovering who I was, Janet was something that other trans women started calling me. "Oh, my God, Baby Janet." They'd talk about my smile and my cheekbones and how I looked like Janet Jackson. And I was obsessed with Velvet Rope at the time, so it fit.
MW: Was Janet Jackson a hero in the way you wrote that Beyoncé was a hero?
MOCK: It shows the intersection of how pop culture for me was so vivid and vital to my understanding of self. At the time, she was so open and raw. She was talking about her sexual fluidity. She was talking about access and elitism with the velvet rope, who gets to come in, who doesn't. She was talking about domestic violence. All of these things within this album. I think I was in the 10th grade when it came out, and my mind was blown. I couldn't believe someone was talking about all of these issues that were paralleling my own life. I think the Beyoncé album came out a year and a half after that. So, luckily, I did not name myself Beyoncé. [Laughs.]
MW: While you made the choice to come out as a transgender woman, you're also straight. What sort of kinship do you feel with the L, G and B?
MOCK: There are so many similarities. I've always put it together as the idea of "gender expectation." If you're assigned "male" at birth, you're supposed to love women. If you're assigned "female" at birth, you're supposed to love men. We're all navigating this very rigid gender system. That's why I always see the commonality between it. It's also just the right to determine what your life is going to be for yourself.
That's what I always talk about: the gender expectation that we all have. And, at the same time, the right to realize what we want our lives to be and to define it for ourselves. It is a kinship for me. Also, when I was 13 I didn't know what "trans" was, but I knew what "gay" was. That definition may have been limiting, but it also gave me a sense of identity. I can understand where people get confused, the conflating of sexuality and gender identity. That's where I think "LGBT," the brand, becomes a little confusing. But there's so much relationship there. There's not a need for me to separate it at all. But even though we have this united acronym, we also need to be cognizant that we're not a monolith, that there are different experiences within that.
MW: What about transgender men? Is that a different sort of familiarity?
Janet Mock
(Photo by Aaron Tredwell)
MOCK: In all of my work I've been pretty unapologetic about the fact that my story very much intersects with trans women. If we break it down even more, it's poor-raised trans women, or trans women of color. I take this cue from women who were writing in the '70s -- the queer women, the women of color, the Third World women. They were very unapologetic about bringing the margin to center, rooting their work in marginalized womanhood. That's kind of where I'm at.
I still think there are many trans men who are prominent in academia and in various other fields who have been talking about their lives, and have also been talking about trans women of color, for a long time. I think it's a major moment to have a trans woman of color talking about trans women of color, or poor-raised trans women's experiences. I don't make any apologies for not necessarily talking about trans men's lives, because I've never lived as a trans man. I know that they have very unique issues and they should be the ones to talk about it, to stake their claim on their struggles and triumphs.
MW: Another variation on that acronym is I see no shortage of transphobia in the gay and lesbian community.
MOCK: I don't believe transphobia alone exists. I believe it's very layered. Misogyny and sexism within the LGBT community needs to be checked as well. I think we tend to devalue the voices and experiences of women, period.
Because women feel as if they're not heard, that they've been gender-policed even more, they say, "It's a boy's club." At the same time, when trans women are given voice, "They're not really real women." It's this internalized misogyny and sexism, and, yeah, anti-trans bias is very much in that as well. I think a lot of cis gay folks feel that they haven't gotten all of their rights yet, so why are we trying to bring this other stuff on that's going to make us look like an even crazier bunch of people? I think that goes back to the culture of respectability and politics: In order for minorities to be heard and seen and progress in our culture, we need to then make sure they're the most perfect model minority that there is in order for us to change "hearts and minds" of "middle, moveable America."
I tend to not really believe in that system, but I understand that I've been able to be seen and heard because I'm the "right kind" of trans woman. I look cis, I'm perceived to be a cis woman. I'm "attractive," "media-facing..." [Laughs.] articulate, educated -- all of these different things that allow me to be seen and heard on such a major level. I hope to use those access points to actually push people to think differently, to muddy up their thinking around this entire system we've built, even within our movement.
The No. 1 question I get asked by cis gay and lesbian people is, "I don't understand why trans people are within this." Then I have to back it up and say, "Because we were in this together from the very beginning." When this became a movement, we were together in this. Trans women, street youth of color, sex workers.... Everyone was there fighting back that night at Stonewall. Even at the Compton's Cafeteria riot. This was people who were visibly different, people whose gender identity was being policed in the law. If you wore a certain kind of clothing, if you didn't have the "right" kind of clothing, you were going to get jailed. I feel we've taken on a lot of that policing of gender within our own movement.
It has to be dismantled and disrupted. I hope just being vocal about my own life story and contextualizing those personal experiences helps to start conversations and move other ones forward.
MW: Aside from being an author, in a bigger sense you're a spokeswoman. You must feel vulnerable.
MOCK: You're absolutely right. [Laughs.] Representation is very scary. But I also know many people -- because this book will be so visible, all over the place, with not a little publisher but Simon & Schuster -- will have access points with this book, people who may not know anything about these issues at all. Most likely, I will be the first trans person or trans woman that people know, even if it's just an interaction with the book. There's a lot of education that has to go on with that.
I like to see myself as a bridge right now. My work is a bridge between cis womanhood and trans womanhood, between LGB people and trans people, between trans women and trans women of color -- knowing that there are all these barriers that push us apart.
Even though I highlight some of the shared experiences of trans women, I know that there's no one universal woman's experience, that this is just one story out of untold thousands. My story is not everyone's story, and I understand the privilege that is part of being able to tell my story. But I also know that it's work, and it's pressure, and it's a lot. One of my friends told me, "You need to let go of perfect. You can't be America's perfect trans girl. [Laughs.] That's not what your job is. Your job is to write the truth." That's my job: to write the truth.
Janet Mock appears Thursday, Feb. 13, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW, for discussion with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and reading and signing of Redefining Realness. For more information, visit janetmock.com.
...more