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

by Janet Mock

These women stood at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and personal economy on the margins of our society. Despite my attempt to remain separate and be the exception, the reality was that I was one of these women.

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.

There’s nothing more powerful than truly being and loving yourself.

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.

I felt that nothing in a classroom could conquer or deter me except my talkative manner and undying need to be told I was exceptional.

Little did I know that I actually wanted to be Clair Huxtable.

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

I had a family, people I came from, shared experiences with, and checked in on. But they could do nothing for me beyond the love and care and good wishes they sent my way.

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 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. Like that of Hawaii’s neighboring Polynesian islands, mahu is similar to the mahu vahine in Tahiti, fa’afafine in Samoa, and fakaleiti in Tonga, which comes from the Tongan word faka (meaning “to have the way of”) and leiti (meaning “lady”). Historically, Polynesian cultures carved an “other” category in gender, uplifting the diversity, span, and spectrum in human expression.

But as puritanical missionaries from the West influenced Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century, their Christian, homophobic, and gender binary systems pushed mahu from the center of culture to the margins. Mahu became a slur, one used to describe male-to-female transgender people and feminine men who were gay or perceived as gay due to their gender expression.

Reflecting on this pivotal time in my life, I think of the hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) youth who are flung from intolerant homes, from families who reject them when they reveal themselves. 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.