Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability. —AUDRE LORDE

As for terminology, I prefer to use trans over transgender or transsexual when identifying myself, although I don’t find either offensive. I do not use real or genetic or biological or natural to describe the sex, body, or gender of those who are not trans. Instead, I’ve used cis, a term applied to those who are not trans and therefore less likely to experience the misalignment of their gender identity and assigned sex at birth—a matter we do not control, yet one that continues to frame who is normalized or stigmatized. Finally, though I highlight some of the shared experiences of trans women and women of color throughout this book, it was not written with the intent of representation. There is no universal women’s experience.

It was a stranger’s story to me. It belonged to some brave girl who defied all odds, crossing sexes, leaving her past behind, making it to People magazine, and living to tell her story in a major women’s magazine. I found myself applauding this heroine for embodying the do-it-yourself bravado that Americans celebrate. Although the facts correlated with my life, the story belonged to Marie Claire through the reportage of Kierna.

When Kierna approached me back in 2010, only the people closest to me knew I was trans: my family, my friends, and my boyfriend. They were people I trusted, who nurtured me, with whom I was intimate. I took Kierna’s call because a friend to whom I had opened up told me I could trust Kierna. This friend was the same person who had disclosed to a well-known journalist what I’d shared with her in confidence. Regardless, I was not ready for the vulnerability that comes with public openness when I spoke to Kierna at age twenty-seven. During our conversations, I withheld parts of myself and details from my journey (partly because I was unpacking my own shame; partly because I needed to save those details for my own story). As a result, the girl in the piece seemed untouchable, unscathed, a bit of an anomaly. I was reluctant to open up to the world for the same reasons I had been afraid to reveal myself as Janet to my mother and siblings at thirteen, to wear a

I loved my truth: I didn’t want to be “othered,” reduced to just being trans. I struggled for years with my perception of what trans womanhood was, having internalized our culture’s skewed, biased views and pervasive misconceptions about trans women.

don’t want to be seen as one of them, I told myself a number of times as I grappled with making the decision to tell my story publicly. I remained silent because I was taught to believe that my silence would protect me, cradle me, enable me to have access, excel, and build a life for myself. My silence and my accomplishments would help me navigate the world without others’ judgments and would separate me from the stereotypes and stigma.

These girls and women were not given the same opportunities and concessions with which I’d been blessed. They were dismissed and dehumanized, which made an overwhelming majority of them vulnerable to the harshest

These women stood at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and personal economy on the margins of our society. Despite my attempt to remain separate and be the exception, the reality was that I was one of these women.

model. I know intimately what it feels like to crave representation and validation, to see your life reflected in someone who speaks deeply to whom you know yourself to be, echoes your reality, and instills you with possibility. That mirror wasn’t accessible to me growing up.

For years, exceptionalism was a bandage I proudly wore to make me feel worthy. I felt validated when people stated that I was exceptional or unique or that I was not the norm. Basking in these proclamations, I soon realized something was amiss: If I’m the exception, the so-called standard of success, then where does that leave the sisters I grew up with on the streets of Honolulu who didn’t “make it”? Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the “right” kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I “made it,” that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let’s be clear: It is not.

as writer and publisher Barbara Smith writes, “then each of us will not only know better how to live, but how to dream.” We must also deconstruct these stories and contextualize them and shed a light on the many barriers that face trans women, specifically those of color and those from low-income communities, who aim to reach the not-so-extraordinary

Having “made it” leaves me with survivor’s guilt. I often go home after delivering a keynote or appearing on television and pull the lashes from my face, pile my wild curls atop my head, and face myself. I’m bare and vulnerable, looking at myself exactly as I am, not how I hope to be perceived, and asking: Why me?

I listened as Aaron told me about his grandparents’ wheat farm in North Dakota, which served as the setting of his childhood, and how he moved to Maine with his mother, spending his adolescence on the basketball courts with visions of Michael Jordan leaping in his mind. He told me he was a dog trainer who longed to make films and to have horses of his own someday.

I told Aaron that I was from Hawaii and had moved to New York four years ago for graduate school. I told him I got paid to write about celebrities and that when I grew up I wanted to write stories that matter.

when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in Mrs. Chun’s English class. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that Janie’s “soul crawled out from its hiding place” when she met Tea Cake.

I’m afraid you won’t love me once you know me, I wanted to say. Instead I led with another truth: “I’m afraid of getting too close to anybody.”

The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers—to say nothing of one’s children—to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

I was certain the sun’s rays would filter through the legs of the table under which I slept and Grandma Pearl would wake me from my fold-up mattress with the scents of margarine-drenched toast and hot chocolate. I knew my sister Cheraine and her best friend Rene, a towering Samoan girl with waves flowing down her broad back like lava,

I carefully placed my slippers in the blue cubbyhole labeled Charles.

I was certain I was a boy, just as I was certain of the winding texture of my hair and the deep bronze of my skin. It was the first thing I’d learned about myself as I grew aware that I existed. There was evidence proving it: the pronouns, the penis, the Ninja Turtle pajamas, the pictures of hours-old me wrapped in a blue blanket with my eyes closed to the world. When they opened and I began learning the world, my desire to step across the chasm that separated me from the girls—the ones who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes labeled Kawehi, Darlene, and Sasha—rose inside of me. The

I’ve adapted to saying I always knew I was a girl as a defense against the louder world, which has told me—ever since I left Mom’s body in that pink hospital atop a hill in Honolulu—that my girlhood was imaginary, something made up that needed to be fixed. I wielded this ever-knowing, all-encompassing certainty to protect my identity. I’ve since sacrificed it in an effort to stand firmly in the murkiness of my shifting self-truths.

The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it. The first person I ever valued outside of my family was Marilyn, whom I met in kindergarten. She lived in the same two-story building as Grandma Pearl, in Ka’ahumanu Housing, the public subsidized complex in Kalihi that was the setting of all my early memories in Oahu.

Grandma Pearl was the first woman to make an impression on me, my first example of what a woman was supposed to be: strong, dutiful, and outspoken. Her voice was harsh from years of talking to her own six children and her children’s children.

The women in our family used Papa as a looming threat. I don’t remember him reprimanding any of us. Grandma was the one to be feared. Papa was the giver of money. He smelled of Drakkar Noir and watched Westerners from his La-Z-Boy and gave me a dollar every time he came home smelling of beer from the bar, his go-to spot after driving the street sweeper.

gender is based on your sex assigned at birth; no variation exists in sex or gender; you should not change your sex or gender; and you should act according to your assigned sex and its correlating gender-appropriate behaviors. My family subscribed to this rigid belief system. They were unaware of the reality that gender, like sexuality, exists on a spectrum. By punishing me, they were performing the socially sanctioned practice of hammering the girl out of me, replacing her with tenets of gender-appropriate behavior. Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.

Mom and Dad were still married at the time. Living with them were Cori and me and our brother, Chad, a year younger than I. Cheraine didn’t come with us when we moved to Long Beach, California, my father’s new naval duty station. She stayed with Grandma and Papa in Hawaii.

Children who behave in line with their prescribed gender roles are cisgender or cissexual (throughout, I will use the prefix cis, which means “on the same side of,” while trans means “across” or “on the opposite side of”), a term used for people who are not trans and more likely to identify with the gender that correlates with the sex they were assigned at birth. Most cis people rarely question their gender identity because the gender binary system validates them, enabling them to operate without conflict or correction. This makes it difficult for the majority of people—including parents

Mom wasn’t a disciplinarian; that role was reserved for Dad, a boiler technician in the Navy whose booming voice filled our house with reprimands about why his son was playing with earrings. He admits now that he took it upon himself to change what he believed to be my “soft ways.” “I didn’t want to see it, man,” he admitted. “I tried to be tougher on your ass. I thought I could fix you.” It would take decades for my father to realize that I didn’t need fixing, and he should have been more focused on his marriage, which was plagued by infidelity, failed expectations, and youth. Mom was twenty-two when she met Dad at a nightclub on the Pearl Harbor naval base. She was partying with a coworker and was actually into one of Dad’s Navy buddies.

Dad’s eyes were wet. He hovered over the bed with his right arm across his chest and his left hand over his mouth. The sight of him prompted me to tears. Seeing my father cry was a shelter-shifting moment: I felt unsafe and exposed. Cori was seated on the floor, just a few feet away from the bed, holding a hand towel to Mom’s wrists, which she had cut as a cry for help, an intervention of sorts to save her marriage after hearing about Dad’s affair.

When our parents split, Mom returned to Grandma’s house with me, Cori, and Chad. Dad protested that he wanted his boys back, and they agreed that Chad would live with him; I’d stay with Mom.

But Mom wasn’t all mine for long. She soon found another man, one she moved in with, leaving me at Grandma’s. Sitting on Grandma’s couch, I meditated on Mom’s belly, which carried my baby brother. I was excited to have another sibling and assumed that, with his birth, she would get a place big enough for all of us. When Jeffrey was born in August 1989, Mom and Dad made plans to send me to Oakland to be with Chad. “We never should’ve separated the two of you,” Mom later told me.

Sissy became one of the first epithets thrown at me with regularity. My father would say “Stop being a sissy” with the same ease as he’d say “I love you, baby!” Sissy ’s presence in my life helped numb me early on to harsher words that would soon be hurled at my body, from freak and faggot to nigger and tranny. When I was younger, I would protect myself by rebutting with the playground mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!”

Maya Angelou, who says that “words are things” and that “someday we’ll be able to measure the power of words.” Words have the power to encourage and inspire but also to demean and dehumanize. I know now that epithets are meant to shame us into not being ourselves, to encourage us to perform lies and to be silent about our truths. To my father, I was a sissy, and he tried his hardest to squash my femininity the only ways he knew how: intimidation and fear. He seemed to believe that if Chad enjoyed the bike ride, then I should also enjoy it. Chad was held as the standard of acceptable boy behavior; I grew aware of the fact that I negated that standard, and I internalized

Unfortunately, our downstairs neighbor caught me with the matchbook and told our father what we were up to, prompting Dad to give us our first whipping, which involved Chad and me stripping down to our underwear. Dad punctuated each of his words with a lashing of his belt: “What’d (SMACK) I (SMACK) tell (SMACK) y’all (SMACK) ’bout (SMACK) playing (SMACK) with (SMACK) fire (SMACK)?”

Our home belonged to Dad’s girlfriend, Janine, and her teenage son, Derek. Janine seemed to be built of bird bones that looked incapable of having once carried Derek. She was a slow-moving woman who slid her feet, spreading her coconut-oil scent throughout the house. She had large eyes, similar to Diana Ross’s, that were childlike, making her look all the more vulnerable. She lived with diabetes and underwent a strict dialysis routine that shuffled her in and out of doctors’ offices and clinics. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Janine to be away from the house for chunks of time and for Chad and me to be left with Derek as Dad slept with Janine in the hospital. When Janine’s health was stable, I clung to her as a stand-in mother figure who handled me with care, giving me the nurturing and feminine influence I craved in Mom’s absence. I sought solace in Janine’s gentleness and her demure smile and her hair routine.

I’d part her hair with a fishtail comb and lather her khaki-colored scalp with herb-infused conditioning oil. If Dad was around, he’d sit in judgment of my femininity with a clenched jaw as I greased Janine’s scalp to the comforting, sweet sounds of Anita Baker singing, “Don’t you ever go away, it’ll always be this way . . .” Derek’s father had left when he was just a baby. This house was the only home he’d ever had, and he’d shared it with his mother up until two years before, when Dad and Chad moved in. Derek and Dad seemed to stay out of each other’s way, having only Janine in common. You’d think something as intimate as living together would have bonded the five of us. Instead, I always felt like the yellow house was Derek and Janine’s home and that Dad, Chad, and I were temporary boarders, squatters. A sense of homelessness looms over my memories there. Dad had a home in his heart with Janine, and Chad, Derek, and I merely cohabitated because our parents had a bond, though we had independent relationships

Dad and Chad and I were family. Janine and Derek were family. Dad and Janine were romantic partners. Chad and Derek were Nintendo competitors. Janine and I were feminine comrades. Derek and I went unformed for months, but we found our way through the darkness.

took the name-calling with ease because 1) I was under the illusion that I deserved it because it was probably true; and 2) part of me felt guilty for not being a better big brother to Chad. He liked boy things, and I did not, but Derek and Rob

Homework became neutral territory for my father and me. We were allies there, in the same way that he and Chad seemed to be teammates. “You always gotta be a step ahead,” he would say to me with a wink after explaining long division when my class was just learning basic division. I believe Dad’s diligence with my homework was his means of bonding with me, and his coaching took me beyond the classroom’s agenda, helping me excel in school while instilling a sense of structure and discipline and confidence. With Dad teaching me to do the work every day, I felt that nothing in a classroom could conquer or deter me except my talkative manner and undying need to be told I was exceptional.

Despite liking the way the word secretary rolled off my tongue and the number of syllables it boasted, proving my intellectual prowess to my peers, I chose it as my grown-up job because I understood it to be a woman’s job. In nearly all the films or series I watched, I noticed that every man of importance had a secretary, an attractive, efficient keeper of his schedule. That’s so me, I thought, attracted to the elementary hyper-feminine, submissive depiction of womanhood—a sharp contrast to the masculine world where I lived with my father. In reflection, I roll my eyes at my youthful understanding of gender roles (the man in a position of power, the woman his servant), how limited my views were. Little did I know that I actually wanted to be Clair Huxtable.

“You want to be a secretary, is that right?” Dad said, tiredly unbuttoning the top of his starched shirt. I knew from his tone that the right answer was no. I didn’t want to lie, so I remained silent as he lectured me not in long division or vocabulary but about what boys do in the world versus what girls do, how boys

I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world. The expectations my father had of me had nothing to do with me and all to do with how he understood masculinity, what it meant to be a man, a strong black man. My father welcomed two sons into the world, and one was feminine and needed fixing.

I’ve come to realize that he simply loved me and wanted to protect me, even from myself. He was grappling with fears that involved my safety and how my outward femininity would make me a target of bullying, teasing, and other dangers that he felt lay ahead. My adult understanding of my childhood with my father doesn’t erase the effects of his policing. I felt his gaze always following me, making me feel isolated as I quietly grappled with my identity. The loneliness and self-consciousness from these exchanges made me vulnerable in a way I wasn’t able to recognize until decades later. This recognition cast a new light on one pivotal evening with Derek.

Then I felt him holding his breath; there was a stiffening, a tightness in his torso. He let my wrists free and placed all his weight on me. I felt his hips moving and a growth in what I simply called his “privates” at the time. His breathing grew heavier through his nose, and my thoughts raced faster than the beating of his heart on my back. I couldn’t see his face anymore. The TV screen flickered as he began digging his groin against my pajama-clad back.

of the living room and that I had asked for it because I didn’t play video games, because my wrists were perpetually limp, because his friend called me “The Fag One.” This is what happens to sissies, I thought. If Dad finds out, you’re going to get whipped for acting like a girl again.

The predator in my early life expertly blended good and bad qualities. Derek knew what attracted me and wielded that knowledge to target me. My inclinations made me all the more vulnerable to him, and my vulnerabilities made me easy prey.

Derek treated me like a girl, I thought, so I understood him to be my only ally, and my ally wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. It took me years to recognize, label, and acknowledge Derek’s actions as molestation. I made excuses for him, from blaming my femininity to blaming his age. He was young, so he didn’t know any better, I often thought. But blaming myself and making excuses for Derek didn’t allow me to uncover the facts about child sexual abuse.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Crimes Against Children Research Center, over a third of all sexual abuse against children is committed by a minor. These statistics show a commonality between my experience and that of others who know and trust their abuser, who may be another young person. Though I now have empathy for Derek and am aware of his emotional immaturity, that doesn’t negate the pain his actions inflicted on me over those two years in my childhood.

attention through sexual acts; my worth lies in how good I can make someone else feel, even if that means I’m void of feeling; what I do in bed is shameful and secret, therefore I will remain in the dark, a constant shameful secret.

was prime prey. He could smell the isolation on me, and I was lured into believing the illusion that he truly saw me. I was a child, dependent, learning, unknowing, trusting, and willing to do what was asked of me to gain approval and affection.