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

by Janet Mock

I remained silent because I was taught to believe that my silence would protect me, cradle me, enable me to have access, excel, and build a life for myself. My silence and my accomplishments would help me navigate the world without others’ judgments and would separate me from the stereotypes and stigma.

The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it.

Resisting and hiding my femininity would keep me from being laughed at by my sister, being hit by my grandmother, and being lectured at by my mother.

Our genders are as unique as we are.

Most cis people rarely question their gender identity because the gender binary system validates them, enabling them to operate without conflict or correction.

“Babies, that’s why your daddy ain’t got shit,” she said, serving Chad and me unfiltered truth about the ways of life.

Dad proved to his drinking buddies and our family that his son could take a hit like any good ole boy. All I had to do to assuage his insecurities about my femininity was to hurt myself.

For many trans people, the pretending can last months, years, even decades; no two people have the same journey, yet a common fear threads us: Being who I really am will lead to rejection.

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).

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.

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 cis woman; therefore, I am fake.

Being sexually available was how I validated myself in a world that told me daily that who I was would never be “real” or compare to the “real” thing.

As long as trans women are seen as less desirable, illegitimate, devalued women, then men will continue to frame their attraction to us as secret, shameful, and stigmatized, limiting their sexual interactions with trans women to pornography and prostitution.

My decisions are my decisions, my choices my choices, and I must stand by the bad ones as much as I applaud my good ones. Collectively, they’re an active archive of my strength and my vulnerability.