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

by Janet Mock

ethnic look that one could take for Dominican or Brazilian or some kind of swirly black.

Corey defines “realness” for trans women not just in the context of the ballroom but outside of the ballroom. Unlike Pepper LaBeija, a drag legend who said undergoing genital reconstruction surgery (GRS) was “taking it a little too far” in the film, a trans woman or femme queen embodies “realness” and femininity beyond performance by existing in the daylight, where she’s juxtaposed with society’s norms, expectations, and ideals of cis womanhood.

The people harassing me often call me a trans person. Is this why they sexually assault me like they just did? As I read this line, they were using some technology to do something disgusting to my vagina from wherever they are.

It probably didn’t help that the beauty standards I held myself to were rigid and impractical. Like most teen girls (whether they’re trans or cis), I had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that MTV fed me. I wanted Halle Berry’s or Tyra Banks’s breasts, Britney Spears’s midsection, Beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and I prayed that I wouldn’t grow any taller so I didn’t tower over the petite Asian girls who were the barometer of beauty in the islands.

I don’t think I even really tried to be pretty until I lived in Los Angeles because most of the people I knew were white and I didn’t think those people where I grew up thought I was pretty. I wasn’t considered attractive to my own ethnicity because my features don’t fit how they define beauty, round face shape and cute as my mom explained to me. . I thought I was different but being different is part of who I was and who I am. But I got to Los Angeles in 2006 and now I get to love being different and being beautiful even though learning to love being beautiful took work. See my Facebook page, link in profile, and check out my album, My Life by Meena Menon, for how I learned to love being beautiful. The section beginning 2009 has a lot about that, but the sections before are interesting too.

I was eager to move up in the world and gladly sloughed Kalihi from my résumé during my time at Moanalua, where I basked in extracurriculars and the focus of teachers who’d kneel beside me and praise me for my essays. It

Privately, my honors English teachers said things to me about how talented and smart they thought I was but in class and during discussions I felt unacknowledged. It caused me a lot of pain.

vegging out in my room, listening to Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope on loop while reading heavy heroine novels like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, A Room

I didn’t do drill team in 8th grade for some reason but I still loved dancing at school dances and at home. I completely stopped listening to dance music by high school, 9th grade. There was a lot of dance music that I loved before that, though. I completely stopped dancing after 8th grade

But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments; they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity. My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose.

I stopped being really into femininity around my junior year of high school. After junior year, I started buying some more feminine clothes again sometimes. after I dropped out, I got into makeup and learned that for some reason, no hairdresser in my life of 18 years at that time ever told me to put product in my curly, thick hair or even just add more conditioner after showering if I couldn’t buy product. So I learned to love my hair also. But Los Angeles is where I really got back to my girly, feminine side. That was something I really enjoyed because of how much I was fighting against to be a strong, successful woman of color in a world that seemed at some times not to want strong women of color to be successful. My femininity has always been an extension of myself but I only got to enjoy that with my love of fashion in magazines and watching runway shows on fashion tv on the weekends for a while. It’s great to enjoy that as my life and in my being every day like I learned to here in L.A.

To wear a skirt, to be proud and unapologetically feminine, was a badge of honor for me initially, but it had transformed into another thing I was forced to hide.

I’m not a parent, so I can only imagine the guilt, judgment, and pressure my mother must’ve silently endured those years as she let me steer the way toward my future.

I can only echo Morrison’s character Sula: “I don’t want to make someone else.

The whole line I highlighted has another sentence: “i want to make myself.” It’s not showing up as highlighted now but it probably will at some point. I don’t know if this is why I thought for all those years that I didn’t want children, that there was so much damage I had to deal with in myself, but I feel so strong now that I hope one day to fall in love with someone so that one day after that I can discuss whether that person and I would want to have a child.

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing),

She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.

For many, it is an act of survival. Many choose not to lead with the fact that they are trans, in order to avoid the stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and safety concerns that come with being visibly trans. At twenty-two, I would choose to leave family and friends behind to live my life openly as a young woman in New York City.

When I left CT, I didn’t realize that I needed to leave to find freedom. I’m not a trans woman, but I’m a woman, and there are a lot of things in this book that I relate to.

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.

Self-definition has been a responsibility I’ve wholeheartedly taken on as mine.

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

My mother contributed to my sense of womanhood: She taught me tenacity, she taught me that I am my own person, she taught me that I had to do for myself.

My mom’s journey to “becoming” a woman: born and brought up in Malaysia until her father’s death when she was 16 when her family moved to India. When she moved to India, she felt othered because of having been raised in Malaysia and being extremely different than the people in Kerala who didn’t like her mini dresses and hadn’t heard a lot of the music that she knew. She was used to many different kinds of people, Chinese, Indian, British. She left India for Montreal at age 22 to marry a man she’d known for two weeks even though she hadn’t finished her undergraduate degree and was close because she just wanted to get away from India.

I stood in awe as these women fought for their womanhood. They taught me, from car to car and date after date, to take ownership of my life and my body.

The damage I suffered from doctors growing up taught me to take ownership of my body and my health: I always read and researched issues before and after those doctors would “treat” me. I got to CA and found a doctor that really helped me, then i was healthy.

“Honey, I’m getting married next spring,” she said, extending her knotty knuckled hand, which sparkled with an emerald-cut diamond.

I remember my mom and I discussing wedding rings. I hadn’t believed in marriage since I was a kid bc my parents yelled at each other a lot and I’d always thought they’d be happier if they got divorced. But I remember discussing what kind of wedding ring I’d want, Cartier gold, platinum and silver rings as one. That was the year, when that one came out. People would say things to my parents about getting me married and knowing people looking to find a good, Indian girl. My parents didnt like the idea of arranged marriage but they’d ask my brother and, usually my brother, when someone had some person to meet.

I found solace in the fact that nothing was wrong with me. Instead my audacity to be seen, to dare for greatness, moved those without that same courage toward defense. Feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks wrote, “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.”

As the interview was closing, one committee member gently inquired about what it meant for me to go through “the changes” I had gone through so publicly. I told her that I had transferred to Farrington to find the support that I needed, and though some students teased me, my experience had been mostly positive. Then she asked, in an unscripted moment of awe, “How do you do it all?” That was the first time an adult besides Alison looked at me with genuine wonder, as if I were something to be marveled at. I didn’t give myself a moment to think about how I was an honor student, a trans girl, a mall employee, a part-time sex worker, and a soon-to-be college student dreaming of a sex change. Like Beyoncé on my walls and Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt validated, reflected, understood. Her recognition of my struggle, my circumstance, and my tenacity overwhelmed me with emotion. I didn’t know if there was a right answer. I just knew I had to be honest.

I realized the journey it took for the four of us to be there together, for Jeff to be all grown up and married, for me to be there with the love of my life, for Chad to celebrate my mother, letting her know that she, despite her guilt, had been the best mother she could be. She was enough. We were all enough.

After years of being told that I was some unhealthy, sick person who might never be able to be strong and independent, I had been living in Los Angeles on my own for years. I took care of all the stuff I went through so well that my parents called me whenever something went wrong in their lives. Then when my brother started having issues, they’d talk to me about and ask me to talk to him. They were really happy until my brother started having some issues. They’re such good parents. They may never know. I tell them as much as I can but they argue with me.

She talked about the pear tree blossoms, about kissing Johnny Taylor over Nanny’s gate, about being forced to marry old Mr. Killicks, about running away with Jody and then Tea Cake, about experiencing and burying soul-crawling love. Like Janie, I didn’t want to meditate on the horizon; I wanted to conquer it, wrap it around me like a shawl. Like Janie, I wanted to be fully known, and I had finally told my story to someone I deeply felt for.

I’ve worked hard for a lot of things in my life. A lot of that is gone but I worked for those things. When I had a crush on the only person I have known that I could have fallen in love with, I was still fighting the ptsd, but I fought it and i accomplished more than I ever thought I could at that time and in the years after until after law school when I didn’t get a job and I’m still trying to stop the people stalking me so that I can get a job. But if I ever feel that way again,—I’m glad that ptsd won’t make me take time to deal with it like I chose to rather than pursue him and possibly make his life more complicated, or by then there won’t be stalkers, it won’t be insecurity about being so bipolar that no one would deal with me.

My past wasn’t something I thought of in my early twenties because I’d fought hard to be in the present I created.

I didn’t think much about my past in my 30s until I got back to Los Angeles in 2015 when I was 35. Then I thought that I remembered things wrong but I hadn’t remembered anything wrong.

Audre Lorde;

This Bridge Called My Back ;

My identity as a trans woman didn’t make him doubt his manhood or my womanhood. He said it actually made him feel closer to me and made him see the parallels in our journeys, specifically with the isolation of having grown up visibly different, the only black kid in rural North Dakota and Maine.

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.”

So I put my arms down and wrapped them around me. I began healing by embracing myself through the foreboding darkness until the sunrise shone on my face. Eventually, I emerged, and surrendered to the brilliance, discovering truth, beauty, and peace that was already mine.