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

by Janet Mock

Derek took something away from me when I was only eight years old and left me with a lifetime of murkiness surrounding issues of intimacy, sex, pain, love, boundaries, and ownership of my body. By the time I was ten, when Derek grew tired of me, I found myself wanting to fill the void that his absence created. That was when I began acting on crushes. Junior

I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long as he wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.

Years later, Chad told me he had “some memory” of Derek “touching” me in “some strange way.” He said, “I wasn’t fully sure if he was molesting you or not. I was too young,” and apologized for not doing something about what he’d apparently witnessed. I was struck that he carried guilt about something he couldn’t have done anything about. How ridiculous does it sound for a seven-year-old kid to say he wished he’d done something about the abuse his eight-year-old sibling faced? “I wouldn’t say that was one of the big reasons why you ‘turned,’ ” he said. “I can’t think of another word, but you know what I mean. It was always in you, and I knew you weren’t happy with being who you were when we were younger. You wanted to be a girl.”

feared others would make the same link Chad made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans—as if my identity as a woman is linked

Simply put, our sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed with, while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed as. A trans person can be straight, gay, bisexual, etc.; a cis gay, lesbian, or heterosexual person can conform to expected gender norms or not; and a woman can have a penis and a man can have a vagina. There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence.

he would a glass cigarette, and lit it with his right. The glass became cloudy with the vapor that went into him. He exhaled and released the white from his plum lips. Chad and my eyes grew large. This was against everything we heard at school. We were products of D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), programmed

I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.

not for Janine, I don’t know how we would’ve survived those Oakland years. She was a single mother who took us on when we needed her most, when she had little to give herself or her own son. She was the one who gave us candy money, who mended our wounds when we fell

Despite the hardship, there were happy times, too, like the time Dad embraced me and told me he was proud of me after I got my ass kicked by the neighborhood bully in defense of Chad, or a vomit-laden car ride home from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

“Y’all are all I got, man,” Dad said. “Y’all give my life purpose. Wherever I go, y’all go with me.” He didn’t say it sentimentally; he said it as a fact. His love for us was undoubtedly a fact. I had a father who loved me. This was a gift I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I fell in love in my twenties.

On our way home later that afternoon, I threw up in the backseat of the car. I was scared I would get yelled at for being so greedy and eating too much. “Your eyes are always bigger than your stomach,” Dad often scolded me. He pulled over at a car wash and cleaned up my mess without saying anything mean. It’s still one of the top five moments of my life.

Dad scoffed at church and rarely attended. He said church was two hours too long and all arrogance, and that he didn’t need a minister serving as his medium to God; he could speak to God whenever he wanted. He apparently spoke to him every day, with a can of beer in one hand and a Newport in the other. It was one of the many things Grandma and Dad disagreed on, including suffering and hard work being the prerequisite of living a good life, as Grandma often said.

When she came in the room, Aunty Wee Wee said we could buy another cake and do it right this time. She offered the kind of coddling I craved. She let me be soft and never forced me to be anything other than who I was. My aunts and grandmother were the iridescent cellophane I needed, another layer of protection and care that complemented Dad’s shiny foil—the kind of protection that often cut.

I nodded, avoiding eye contact with her. I knew if I looked at her, she would say something sweet, something that I needed to hear, something that would allow me to let those tears drop from my stinging eyes. This would only upset Dad, whom I was acutely aware had a complex about my sensitivity. It would squash his sense of pride and accomplishment. Dad proved to his drinking buddies and our family that his son could take a hit like any good ole boy. All I had to do to assuage his insecurities about my femininity was to hurt myself. My femininity was heavily policed because it was seen as inferior to masculinity. My father, though he didn’t have the words, couldn’t understand why I would choose to be feminine when masculinity was privileged. What I had to negotiate at a young age was embracing who I was while rejecting whom others thought I should be.

“You’re not gay, are you?” he finally pleaded, defeated after his fifteen-minute diatribe. Dad’s face was glowing red, reflecting in the stoplight hovering before us. His voice was sweet as he asked the question, one he was sure I had the answer to. He hoped that my answer would assuage his concerns about me, his sissy boy, the one he gave his name to—the first of his children he held in his arms—as he said, “I saw you come out of your mother, man. I was there!” I didn’t know if gay was the right fit for me. The label hovered over me for years like the red glare settling over my father’s face. I’d been called gay and sissy and faggot ever since I stepped foot on playgrounds in my earliest youth. My father’s thoughts filled the car: My son is an effeminate boy pretending to be a girl in front

As a tween, I was living in the murkiness of sexuality and gender. I knew I was viewed as a boy. I knew I liked boys. I knew I felt like a girl. Like many young trans people, I hadn’t learned terms like trans, transgender, or transsexual—definitions that would have offered me clarity about my gender identity. For example, a trans girl who is assigned male at birth and attracted to boys may call herself gay for a short time—a transitional identity on her road to self-discovery. In actuality, though, since her gender identity is that of a girl, and she is attracted to boys, then her sexual orientation mirrors that of a heterosexual girl, not a gay man.

Though her phone calls and birthday cards halted after my eighth birthday, I held tight to the day that she’d rescue us. I extended blind optimism to Mom. I expected the best from her because my image of her, despite her actions, was untarnished. Instead of facing the reality of rejection, I made excuses for her: Mom was busy; she had a career; she just needed a little time to build a new life that would include me one day. My optimism won out in 1995 when Auntie Wee Wee’s phone rang as the news commentators discussed the latest from the courtroom. “Baby, it’s for you,” she said with the widest smile.

“Y’all gotta take care of each other, man,” he said. “And never forget that if you have no one, I mean no one in this world, that you feel loves you, remember that your dad will always love you.” He wrapped his arms around us, cradling us in his grasp. I kissed his ear and held on to him in a way I never had before, because I knew that this time, when I let go, I would run into the arms of my mother.

would mirror my ancestors on my own voyage, one guided through a system of whispers, to reveal the person I was meant to be. I will forever be indebted to Hawaii for being the home I needed. There is no me without Hawaii.

often looked through those jalousies as I ironed Mom’s work outfits, a chore I took pride in completing every week. We got into a routine where she’d lay the silk shirts and print jersey dresses and polyester skirt suits she’d want for the week on the ironing board, which I always kept unfolded, and I’d display the freshly starched garments on her bed. Mom’s room had wood paneling that gave off a stagnant, just-opened-for-the-season cabin-like smell, which was apt, as she spent most of her nights at her boyfriend’s house in Hawaii Kai, fifteen miles away on the eastern end of the island. This was a rude awakening to me. In my twelve-year-old brain, I thought that if I ironed her clothes, cut my hair, kissed a girl, threw a football, and made honor roll, then she’d come home more often. Cori, barely twenty, was our stand-in mother, babysitter, and ringleader.

She was the best sister you could ask for, always wanting us around. Even when Mom decided to spend a Saturday or Sunday night at home with us, Cori was still the woman of the house. Though neither will admit it, Mom’s longest-lasting, most functional relationship is the one she has with Cori.

Books were majestic to me—precious, even. I wanted shelves of them in my house when I grew up, just like Mom’s. Now I see her stacks of books, like our movie dates, as an escape.

Though we came from our native Hawaiian mother, Chad and I were perceived and therefore raised as black, which widely cast us as outsiders, nonlocals—and being seen as local in Hawaii was currency. When we first returned to Oahu, we spoke with a Texas twang that also got us teased.

On the road toward self-revelation, we make little compromises in an effort to appease those we love, those who are invested in us, those who have dreams for us. Those people tend to be our parents. I didn’t want to be without my mother. I wanted her to be happy, and I believed I could make her happy if I were the kid she’d always wanted, the one who stopped all the girlie stuff that had angered my father for years. Mom never asked me to butch up; I just did

At the time, mahu was limited by our Western interpretation, mostly used as a pejorative. What I later learned in my Hawaiian studies classes in college was that mahu defined a group of people who embodied the diversity of gender beyond the dictates of our Western binary system. Mahu were often assigned male at birth but took on feminine gender roles in Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) culture, which celebrated mahu as spiritual healers, cultural bearers and breeders, caretakers, and expert hula dancers and instructors (or Kumu s in Hawaiian). In the Western understanding and evolution of mahu, it translates to being transgender in its loosest understanding: to cross social boundaries of gender and/or sex.

To be mahu was to occupy a space between the poles of male and female in precolonial Hawaii, where it translated to “hermaphrodite,” used to refer to feminine boys or masculine girls. But as puritanical missionaries

Wendi and I grew inseparable through middle school, a bond that would link us for the rest of our lives. Through association, my classmates learned that I was like Wendi—who hadn’t yet adopted any labels to describe her shifting self.

As I look back, what impresses me about my family is their openness. They patiently let me

Instead of trying to change me, they gave me love, letting me know that I was accepted. I could stop pretending and drop the mask. My family fortified my self-esteem, which I counted on as I embarked on openly

Sitting at our kitchen table, I told Mom, with no extensive planning or thought, “I’m gay.” I was thirteen years old and didn’t know how to fully explain who I was, conflating gender identity and sexuality.

As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!” The lines continue to be blurred due to the umbrella term transgender, which bundles together diverse people (transsexual, intersex, genderqueer, drag performers, crossdressers, and gender-nonconforming folks) living with gender variance. Unfortunately, the data on the transgender population is scarce. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t ask about gender identity, how trans people self-identify varies, and many (if asked) may not disclose that they’re trans. The National Center for Transgender Equality has estimated that nearly 1 percent of the U.S. population is transgender, while the Williams Institute has stated that 0.3 percent of adults in the United States (nearly seven hundred thousand)

To Lani, my fishiness was something to boast about. To be called fish by these women meant that I was embodying the kind of femininity that could allow me access, safety, opportunity, and maybe happiness. To be fish meant I could “pass” as any other girl, specifically a cis woman, mirroring the concept of “realness,” which was a major theme in Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about New York City’s ballroom community, comprising gay men, drag queens, and trans women of color.

To embody “realness,” rather than performing and competing “realness,” enables trans women to enter spaces with a lower risk of being rebutted or questioned, policed or attacked. “Realness” is a pathway to survival, and the heaviness of these truths were a lot for a thirteen-year-old to carry, especially one still trying to figure out who she was.

became clear to me that when I was six, she had sent me away for a man. It became clear to me that she hadn’t spent time with us that whole first year back in Hawaii because she preferred being at her then boyfriend’s house. And it became clear to me that she had chosen this convict over me. It was difficult to face the reality of my mother, someone I had seen as my heroine, the one who would save me. In fact, Mom had done nothing to deserve this dream-girl role in my childhood imaginings.

Social transition is the process by which a trans person begins openly living as their true gender.

If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.

Objectification and sexism masked as desirability were a bittersweet part of my dream fulfilled.

Isolation made me feel safer, though the irony of separating from the pack, of separating myself from my trans sisters in an effort to be welcomed into larger society (into the gaze of a guy), is glaring to me now. I personally know many women who choose to leave behind their pasts—their family and friends, anyone who knows they’re trans—in an effort to blend in as cis.

Many cis people assume that trans women, whether we “pass” as cis or not, are pretending to be someone we are not, and often expect us to disclose that we are trans to all we meet. Disclosure should be an individual personal choice based on circumstances such as safety, access, and resources. Discussions around disclosure often get heated when we discuss trans women and their romantic relationships with heterosexual cis men.

When I am asked how I define womanhood, I often quote feminist author Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I’ve always been struck by her use of becomes. Becoming is the action that births our womanhood, rather than the passive act of being born (an act none of us has a choice in). This short, powerful statement assured me that I have the freedom, in spite of and because of my birth, body, race, gender expectations, and economic resources, to define myself for myself and for others.

We are more than our bodies; we all have different relationships to our bodies; our bodies are ours to do what we want with. I stood in awe as these women fought for their womanhood.

My experience with sex work is not that of the trafficked young girl or the fierce sex-positive woman who proudly chooses sex work as her occupation. My experience mirrors that of the vulnerable girl with few resources who was groomed from childhood, who was told that this was the only way, who wasn’t comfortable enough in her body to truly gain any kind of pleasure from it, who rented pieces of herself: mouth, ass, hands, breasts, penis. I knew, even at sixteen, that I did what I had to because no one was going to do it for me.

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

Most trans women engaged in survival sex work are not as lucky as Wendi. Poverty is the key factor that drives trans women of color into sex work. The sex industry is filled with women of color, and so are our prisons. Race, class, and gender are all factors that frame the harshness of sentences, and, more likely than not, a trans woman of color arrested on solicitation will be treated as a criminal with little regard to the systemic oppression that has led her there. Our society criminalizes underground economies like sex work, and deep moral biases and stigma make even

When a trans woman is arrested, she is charged with an act of prostitution, a non-violent offense committed by consensual adults, and placed in a cell with men, because prisons are segregated by genitals. A trans woman in a men’s prison or jail is vulnerable to sexual assault, contracting HIV, and being without hormones and trans-inclusive health care during her incarceration. Yes, this is cruel and unusual punishment.

Psychologists define compartmentalization as a defense mechanism or a coping strategy, one that enables a person to deal with opposing situations simultaneously.

later learned that sexual abuse is a common pathway for many women in sex trade and work, with an estimated 66 to 90 percent of teen and adult women reporting that they were sexually abused prior to engaging in sex work, according to anthropologist Dorothy H. Bracey, who spent years profiling youth and women engaged in sex work.

I later learned that trans women of color are disproportionately affected by hate violence. In 2012 alone, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) documented twenty-five homicides of people in the United States who were murdered because of their gender identity and/or sexual orientation.

My decisions are my decisions, my choices my choices, and I must stand by the bad ones as much as I applaud my good ones. Collectively, they’re an active archive of my strength and my vulnerability.

I’ve read articles by trans women who transitioned in their thirties and forties, who look at trans girls and women who can blend as cis with such longing, as if our ability to “pass” negates their experiences because they are more often perceived to be trans. The misconception of equating ease of life with “passing” must be dismantled in our culture. The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate.