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by
Janet Mock
Read between
March 17 - March 17, 2020
The fact remains that the girl in that article didn’t resonate with me because it wasn’t really my story.
dehumanizing depictions of trans women that I saw in popular culture, from Venus Xtravaganza’s unsolved and underexplored murder in Paris Is Burning,
to numerous women exploited as modern-day freak shows on Jerry Springer and Maury.
According to the media, trans women were subject to pain and punch lines. Instead of proclaiming that I was not a plot device to be laughed at, I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes.
my silence would protect me, cradle me, enable me to have access, excel, and build a life for myself.
separate me from the stereotypes and stigma.
overwhelming majority of them vulnerable to the harshest treatment, exclusion, discrimination, and violence.
stood at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and personal economy on the margins of our society.
opportunity to share space
unapologetic
reclaiming the often erased legacy
Whether it was 1966’s Compton’s Cafeteria riots or the Stonewall uprisings of 1969 or the daily battles
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.
We need stories of hope and possibility, stories that reflect the reality of our lived experiences. When such stories exist, as writer and publisher Barbara Smith writes, “then each of us will not only know better how to live, but how to dream.”
Who am I, really? How does that answer contribute to the world? How do I tell my story authentically without discounting all the facets and identities that make me? Can I resolve my personal history with sexual abuse, body image, self-love and sex, as well as unpack my relationship with womanhood, beauty, objectification, and “passing”?
It’s through my personal decision to be visible that I finally see myself. There’s nothing more powerful than truly being and loving yourself.
His beauty—birthed out of my mental sketch of Mr. Hypothetical Husband—led me to commit to sleeping with him if the night led us to a bed.
I grew to be certain about who I was, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I was learning the world, unsure, unstable, wobbly, living somewhere between confusion, discovery, and conviction. The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it.
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.
stop being a sissy
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
these flawed and limited views of what was expected and encouraged of men and women shaped my understanding of what was possible.
Thankfully, the idea of womanhood that I reached for in adolescence and adulthood was one that came from a place of internal power and accountability to one’s own dreams as opposed to aiding a man in the pursuit of his dreams.
Self-consciousness and shame about being different blossomed, and I learned to be more careful, more practiced, more aware.
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.
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.
As a survivor of sexual abuse, I developed a belief system that shaped how I viewed myself: I can gain 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.
I didn’t take into account that because I was different, I was more likely to be at risk of sexual abuse. Being or feeling different, child sexual abuse research states, can result in social isolation and exclusion, which in turn leads to a child being more vulnerable to the instigation and continuation of abuse. Abusers often take advantage of a child’s uncertainties and insecurities about their identity and body.
gender expression and identity as a girl predated Derek, and my expression as a child made me vulnerable and isolated, an easier target for Derek.
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.
with the heroes of childhood, you realize they’re make-believe characters, and the qualities you so admired in them were magnified through your obstructed lens of adoration.
on one of those sunny days in California that a kid born in Hawaii and living in Oakland took for granted.
“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.
They elevated my possibilities of being someone more powerful. They were pleasure-seeking, resourceful, sexy, rhythmic, nurturing, fly, happy, stylish, rambunctious, gossipy, feeling, hurt, unapologetic women. They were the kind of women I wanted to be.
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.
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. Like that of Hawaii’s neighboring Polynesian
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empowering to come of age in a place that recognized that diversity existed not only in ethnicities but also in gender.
reclaimed mahu
mahuwahine
She simply identified as mahu and had no qualms about the vessel she was given and nor any desire to change
Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless and runaway American youth, as many as 40 percent are LGBTQ, according to a 2006 report by the Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless. A similar study by the Williams Institute cited family rejection as the leading cause of the disproportionate number of homeless LGBT youth.
Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women.
because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume.
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,
Simply, “realness” is the ability to be seen as heteronormative, to assimilate, to not be read as other or deviate from the norm. “Realness” means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative.
“When they can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight and onto the subway and get home and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies,” Corey says in the film, “those are the femme realness queens.”
“Mary! Life is uncomfortable,” Wendi said, rolling her eyes as she remained focused on the dark streets ahead of us. “You have to get used to it or you’re going to live your life trying to make people comfortable. I don’t care what people say about me because they don’t have to live as me. You gotta own who you are and keep it moving.”
journeys, and even social and medical transitions. Still, the fact remains that local trans-inclusive support and positive media reflections of trans people are rare outside of major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.
glowed under her focus and creative direction. She consistently made me feel good about myself; it was the kind of relationship I now know to be rare, in which the other person wants to see you at your best. Wendi has always wanted me to shine beside her, not behind her.
Expecting things from other people always led to heartache, I believed at the time, and I didn’t want to be disappointed, so I chose to go it alone for a while longer.
