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

by Janet Mock

Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing “the most,” meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick, and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction.

Though I am unapologetic about the way I look—an amalgamation of my parents’ features and early access to medication that halted the effects of testosterone—my appearance has granted me an advantage in life. I have been able to navigate this world mostly unchecked, seen as my true self without being clocked or spooked, as the girls would say colloquially.

When I was younger, I remember taking pride in people’s well-meaning remarks: “You’re so lucky that no one would ever know!” or “You don’t even look like a guy!” or “Wow! You’re prettier than most ‘natural’ women!” They were all backhanded compliments, acknowledging my beauty while also invalidating my identity as a woman.

To this day, I’m told in subtle and obvious ways that I am not “real,” meaning that I am not, nor will I ever be, a...

“passing,” a term based on an assumption that trans people are passing as something that we are not.

She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.

As my body began evolving, the world treated me differently, and I learned firsthand that society privileges physical beauty.

Being beautiful is a personal and a social experience, one that has an effect on how you’re treated in addition to how you feel about yourself.

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

My body and appearance had been policed my entire life, so I began policing other girls.

“Just because you look good doesn’t make you better than anybody. Trust!” I vividly remember the sting of the bitter truth, echoing the concept of beauty as currency and the hierarchy it creates: If she’s prettier than I am, then she is more valuable, and thus has access to having it all.

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.

When disclosure occurs for a trans woman, whether by choice or by another person, she is often accused of deception because, as the widely accepted misconception goes, trans women are not “real” women

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

In the presence of the mothers and sisters who walked the path before and alongside me on those streets in downtown Honolulu,

It didn’t take much debate to convince me to open the door and enter into premature adulthood, because somewhere within I knew I had been groomed to do it.

I had been isolated as a child, raised by absent parents, sexually abused, trained to pleasure men over myself, led to feel a sense of detachment from my body, and haunted by a reality of economic powerlessness.

That night I had discovered that my body was worth money, and as long as I had a body, I would never be poor.

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,

There’s a level of ownership when a man sponsors you, as the girls called it. I always wanted to say that I did this for me, that this was and is and will always be mine. “Girl,

“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.”

sex work is work, and it’s often the only work available to marginalized women.

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.

Yet it’s the bodies of women with penises who are made to feel that their bodies are less valuable, shameful, and should be kept secret.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “I didn’t come to stay.”

I wanted to confess to her about what I was doing. I wanted to cry into her chest and tell her that I rented out my mouth and sometimes my ass to men to make money for the things she couldn’t afford to get me. I wanted to tell her I was tired and I needed help. I needed her.

No one on Merchant Street had a pimp to blame. I operated under the illusion that I was out there on my own free will. I had no villain, no one person to blame for my circumstance, so for years I blamed myself.

Without money of my own, I had no doctors, no hormones, no surgeries. Without money of my own, I had no independence, no control over my life and my body. No one person forced me or my friends into the sex trade; we were groomed by an entire system that failed us and a society that refused to see us. No one cared about or accounted for us. We were disposable, and we knew that. So we used the resources we had—our bodies—to navigate this failed state, doing dirty, dangerous work that increased our risk of HIV/AIDS, criminalization, and violence.

There’s a level of competence and mastery involved in being good at hustling, and the constant attention from dates falsely boosts your self-esteem. The tragedy is when girls believe all they are good at is being some man’s plaything.

Limited resources, being backed into a corner, being told that you can do anything when nothing is really given to you, all breed desperation.

“I want to thank you for trusting me to help you in this next step of your life. It’s a blessing that I get to make people like you more happy.”

Once I’d made the gradual decision to reveal myself, I began alienating myself from those I loved, a decision that made it easier for me not to be accountable to anyone.

This lack of social capital instilled an “I have nothing to lose” blind determination that made it easier for me to be true to myself at an early age. I was unabashedly brave, taking risks because I had no experience. Genie, on the other hand, had so much to lose. She had lived most of her life being perceived and awarded as a heterosexual white man—the epitome of power in our white patriarchal society—but when she announced that she was trans, she paid many costs. She had access to funds, though, that allowed her to seek medical intervention swiftly, whereas my lack of resources led me to risky sex work.

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. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others. We must recognize that we all have different experiences of oppression and privilege, and I recognize that my ability to blend as cis is one conditional privilege that does not negate the fact that I experience the world as a trans woman (with my own fears, insecurities, and body-image issues) no matter how attractive people may think I am.

had an overwhelming sense of lightness, as if I had let go of a burden so heavy, a burden that I had wished and prayed would just go away, and finally that burden was gone.

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

I had come to blackness through Clair Huxtable’s swift didactic monologues in reruns of The Cosby Show ; through the anger I felt when I was prettily invisible in clubs in New York’s Meatpacking District, where guys looked through me in search of white girls; through the uh-oh dance in Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”; through the sounds of bottle-popping douches who called me “exotic” and said “You’re really pretty for a black girl!” and “I’m usually not attracted to black women”; through the revolutionary words of Audre Lorde; through the vision of Michelle Obama’s fist bump; through the consensus of the black-girl interns who said I was different because “You’re the right amount of black,” the kind white woman editors aren’t intimidated to work with; through the raw brilliance of This Bridge Called My Back ; through the beauty of Marsha P. Johnson’s flowers, smile, and S.T.A.R.

Living by other people’s definitions and perceptions shrinks us to shells of ourselves, rather than complex people embodying multiple identities.

When I think of identity, I think of our bodies and souls and the influences of family, culture, and community—the ingredients that make us. James Baldwin describes identity as “the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self.”

“It took me a while to process all of it, but immediately I wanted you to know that there was nothing wrong with you and that I valued what you shared with me.”

question those assumptions I made about people every day.”

These spaces and the conversations were dominated by men, specifically upper-middle-class white cis gay men. Women, people of color, trans folks, and especially folks who carried multiple identities were all but absent. I was grateful for the invitation but unfilled by the company. This was my political awakening.

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.