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

by Janet Mock

What I appreciate now is that my mother never projected such an image of the perfect child onto me. She never made me feel bad about being feminine, about ingesting hormones behind her back, about taking the steps I needed to reveal myself fully. She knew her limitations. She knew what she was and wasn’t able to give. In her quiet way, she stayed out of my way; she could give me that. She accepted me. She trusted me. She let me lead the way toward my own dreams of self. But my mother recently told me that she carries guilt about not having the means to pay for my surgery or at least to travel to Thailand with me. “I feel I failed you,” Mom said, “but out of all of my children, I never have to—and still don’t have to—worry about you. You always had a plan on how you would accomplish the things you have

“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction,” author J. K. Rowling said in a commencement address. “The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

I am still learning to accept that I don’t have to like him all the time, and he doesn’t have to like me, but we will always love each other. Our

“My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults.”

You are a composite of all the things you believe, and all the places you believe you can go. Your past does not define you. You can step out of your history and create a new day for yourself. Even if the entire culture is saying, “You can’t.” Even if every single possible bad thing that can happen to you does. You can keep going forward. —OPRAH WINFREY

Detachment allowed me to know people on my terms. I had been openly trans from the ages of fifteen to twenty-two, in the midst of finding who I was and revealing my findings to my loved ones and the community I grew up in.

James Baldwin describes identity as “the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self.” The garment should be worn “loose,” he says, so we can always feel our nakedness: “This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.” I’m still journeying toward that place where I’m comfortable in this nakedness, standing firmly in my interlocking identities.

I’ve found that Audre Lorde was indeed right when she wrote, “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

People often transpose the coming-out experience on me, asking how it felt to be in the closet, to have been stealth. These questions have always puzzled me. Unlike sexuality, gender is visible. I never hid my gender. Every day that I stepped out into the sunlight, unapologetically femme, I was a visible woman. People assume that I was in the closet because I didn’t disclose that I was assigned male at birth. What people are really asking is “Why didn’t you correct people when they perceived you as a real woman?” Frankly, I’m not responsible for other people’s perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people’s identities and project those assumptions onto their genders and bodies.