Top Quotes: “Redefining Realness” — Janet Mock
Background: Mock shares her gripping story of growing up in Hawaii with a strained family life, participating in sex work, and creating her own true identity. I appreciated that she tied so many of her own anecdotes to broader issues in the trans community — either offering her experience as an example of a trend or sharing stats that demonstrate how her situation was quite different than that of most trans women.
Childhood
“‘You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it has also served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability.’ — Audre Lorde.”
“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. The expectations my father had of me had nothing to do with me and all to do with how he understood masculinity, what it meant to be a man, a strong black man. My father welcomed two sons into the world, and one was feminine and needed fixing. Using my childlike lens, I felt Dad was against me, consistently monitoring me and policing my gender. I’ve come to realize that he simply loved me and wanted to protect me even from myself. He was grappling with fears that involved my safety and how my outward femininity would make me a target of bullying, teasing, and other dangers that he felt lay ahead. My adult understanding of my childhood with my father doesn’t erase the effects of his policing. I felt his gaze always following me, making me feel isolated as I quietly grappled with my identity.”
“I was apprehensive about writing about being molested because I feared others would make the same link [my brother] made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans — as if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance. What must be made clear is that my gender expression and identity as a girl predated [my sexually abusive stepbrother], and my expression as a child made my vulnerable and isolated, an easier target for [him].”
“Mom only existed in scant memories and dreams of her saving us from the dark cloud that hovered over us. These ideals of my mother contrasted with the reality of Dad, who as an anomaly, a single black father amid a gaggle of equally struggling single black moms. I was not able to recognize how unjust our circumstances were until I was well into adulthood and compared them with the experiences of friends who had relatively minimal exposure to trauma. My first sight of ‘normal’ parent-child relations didn’t come until I moved to New York in my early twenties. Both of my roommates had parents in town to set them up, to buy them underbed storage, and to assemble their Ikea desks. I came alone with a thousand dollars or so in savings, student loan checks on the way.”
“As a kid, I had no idea we were poor because our friends looked like us. We were all outside playing while our parents were inside smoking their pipes. We all had about three outfits, dingy shirts, high-water jeans, and matted hair. I didn’t have a subscription to Highlights, wasn’t able to order books from the Scholastic catalog, and never bought school photos. I don’t have a single image of myself from the second grade to the sixth, the years we lived with Dad.”
“Pidgin is the language of the islands, not to be confused with the Hawaiian language of the indigenous people. Mom rejected pidgin as ‘broken English,’ but it was hard to dismiss because it was the tongue of the people, created by the people. The sugar plantation laborers who were brought to the islands in the 19th century from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines slowly created a common language out of their varying tongues, a hodgepodge of Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, English, and Cantonese. It was a tool of resistance that allowed the plantation workers to communicate without the mediation of the English-speaking haole (a Hawaiian term for someone who is foreign, particularly white, and not of the islands) plantation owners.”
“I didn’t want to be without my mother. I wanted her to be happy, and I believed I could make her happy if I were the kid she’d always wanted, the one who stopped all the girlie stuff that had angered my father for years. Mom never asked me to butch up; I just did it, and the world reacted differently. I noticed a shift in how the other kids treated me. The teasing that I had endured in Oakland and Dallas stopped. The name-calling that I had grown desensitized to came to a halt. There was no longer a target on my back, and for once, it felt good to be invisible, even if I was masked by untruth.”
“Hiding myself for that brief period allowed me to operate under a guise of normality that made me feel temporarily secure. 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. Concealing who you are warps your sense of self and heightens feelings of hopelessness about ever being able to be your true self. A defeatist feeling loomed over me, telling me that no one would ever understand and accept me. I began believing that people, including my family and friends, would be disgusted by me, and these new belief systems anchored in the shame that I internalized from the world around me led to further isolation. It’s no surprise that trans people are more likely to struggle with depression, suicidal thoughts and actions, substance abuse, and a wide range of self-harming behaviors that make it that much more difficult to live healthy, thriving lives.”
“It was a balancing act to express my femininity in a world that is hostile toward it and frames femininity as artifice and fake, in opposition to masculinity, which often represents ‘realness.’”
“In the bathroom, I was forced to engage with my penis. It had to be cleaned and it wanted to be touched. The pleasure I’d give myself filled me with a combination of release and revulsion. I felt guilty for achieving gratification from a part that separated me from my personal vision of myself, and I felt despair because I didn’t have the means to change it.”
“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. I sometimes wonder in reflection how my life would’ve turned out if there had been a woman out there that night who told me I didn’t have to do this, that the money wasn’t worth it, that here were other ways to get the money I needed, that not all girls did this.”
“That night I had discovered that my body was worth money, and as long as I had a body, I would never be poor. I felt with Max’s money I could do more, be more, and so I craved more. Freebies with cute boys would no longer fly, not after getting paid to do much less. Sex was no longer something to do for fun; it was something to trade for the things I needed.”
“Max became my first and only regular for a long while. I saw him about twice a month for the same old chalky hand job. A whiff of baby powder still transports me back to Max’s bedroom, those random nights and late afternoons when I got my hands dirty for his pleasure and my profit. I learned to use my beauty as currency to get the things I needed. I no longer had to rely on Mom for the medicine. I became my sole provider of my hormones, my clothes, my makeup, and my hair appointments.”
“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, penis. I knew, even at 16, that I did what I had to because no one was going to do it for me.”
“No matter how much I loved myself, my growing self-confidence didn’t shield me from intolerance and ignorance. Some of my classmates refused to let Charles go. I’d hear my given name thrown at me in the hallways, at assemblies, at dances, or as I was walking home from school. It was a sure way of putting me in my place, of letting me know that no matter how much I evolved, they remembered and made sure no one forgot.”
“One day, when I was walking home from school, a group of kids from the KPT housing projects, where Cori lived, were trailing me. I was wearing heels, slightly wobbly and unsure on the unpaved path that led to the bridge over Kalihi Stream. As I neared the bridge, I heard the kind of obnoxious group cackle that’s meant to arouse fear in someone not part of the clique. A chant soon began: ‘Charrrlesss! Ohhh, Chaaaarles!’ Keeping my eyes on the rocky path, I carefully sped up and widened my stride. I had to be careful. If the thin wedge of my sandals met a rock at a bad angle, my ankle would buckle. I noticed one pebble, then another, and a few more hitting the ground around me, bouncing like Rice Krispies in milk. Then one hit the back of my head, and another my back. The rocks didn’t hurt, but they shook me, crumbling my pride. I wish I had been brave enough to turn around and confront them. Instead, I took the rocks on my back and my head until I crossed that bridge to my apartment while they laughed past me. When I got home, I collapsed on my twin mattress and committed to traveling further than any of these idiots ever would. 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 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.’”
Sex Work
“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.”
“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 man’s prison or jail is vulnerable to sexual assault, contracting HIV, and being without hormones and trans-inclusive healthcare during her incarceration. Yes, this is cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Usually, I’d be out on the street from 10pm to 2am on weeknights. Weekends were more reliable, dating consistently from 10pm to 5am, since the nightclubs, mostly in Waikiki, closed at 4. I averaged anywhere from $600 to $1000 a weekend, giving $60 blow jobs, $40 hand jobs, and $20 to $40 upgrades (if they wanted to see, touch, or suck my penis). Occasionally, if the guy was cute enough, anal sex was on the menu for $120, but only if I was receiving it. I never topped because my very personal definition of womanhood didn’t involve exerting myself in that way. Plus, I couldn’t guarantee an erection due to years of hormone therapy.”
“Most of the guys who dated me wanted to be pleasured by a woman who had something extra, something that made me a rare sex goddess in their eyes. Sexuality and people’s desires, preferences, and fantasies are difficult to define. But what I know for sure is many men are attracted to women, and trans women are among those women, and our bodies in all their varying states of being are desired. 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.”
“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 porn and prostitution. And if a trans woman believes that the only way she can share intimate space with a man is through secret hookups or transactions, she will be led to engage in risky sexual behaviors that make her more vulnerable to criminalization, disease, and violence; she will be led to coddle a man who takes out his frustrations about his sexuality on her with his fists; she will be led to question whether she’s worthy enough to protect herself with a condom when a man tells her he loves her; she will be led to believe that she is not worthy of being seen and must remain hidden.”
“For many dates, I was the first trans woman they had sex with. They were men who had spent years looking at trans porn or cyber-sexing with trans women through webcams but had never met a trans woman in real life. Honestly, many didn’t even see me as a person. If I hadn’t had a penis, I would not be as attractive to many of the dates I profited from. My allure and income on Merchant Street was dictated by what hung between my legs, and some of the men who became my regulars sexually evolved beyond me, preferring a girl who could top them or give them sexual experiences that aligned with their imaginations and fantasies.”
“I went to bars in Honolulu and flirted with guys. There were numerous times when the man I was dancing with would be tapped on his shoulder or pulled away. He would return with a look of confusion, detection, or disgust, as if he had lost something, as if he had been blind to something, as if he were the only person in the bar who didn’t know. The moment of forced disclosure is a hostile one to experience, one in which many trans women, even those who had the conditional privilege of ‘passing’ that I have, can be victim to violence and exiling. In Hawaii, my home, disclosure was routinely stripped from me. People would take it from me as if it were their duty to tell the guy I was flirting with that I was trans and therefore should be avoided. It’s these societal aggressions that force trans women to live in chosen silence and darkness, to internalize the shame, misconceptions, stigma, and trauma attached to being a different kind of woman.”
The Surgery
“I woke up a bit groggy in the recovery room with my knees spread apart at a 45-degree angle. I immediately felt like I had to pee, though the attending nurse said I had a catheter and my urine would release itself. I was puzzled because the need-to-pee sensation didn’t leave me for that first hour. I didn’t feel any pain because I was given a Demerol drip intravenously. Discomfort from bed rest was a reality no narcotic could ease. I wasn’t able to get up from my bed for four days because my vagina, covered with an ice pack to reduce swelling, was packed tightly with petroleum gauze to maintain its depth.”
“Dilation was the most labrious part of the recovery process. Handing me two white 8-inch stents — one was 2 inches in diameter, the other 3 — [she] applied lube to the thinner one and helped me guide it in. She told me to hold it there for 20 minutes. It was a process I’d have to repeat twice a day for the next 6 months, gradually increasing the size of the dilator to ensure that I maintained the depth Dr. C had created. The healing process took 6 months, with the sutures and swelling disappearing. After a year, I stopped dilating altogether.”
“It would take me years to feel at ease in my body. I was able to have pleasurable, comfortable sex with men, and I even learned to share my body in an intimate way, beyond transaction, with a partner for whom I cared deeply during the years in college. Unfortunately, having a successful operation did not relieve me from the universal awkwardness of first-time sex. Having the body I had always wanted helped me feel liberated in bed, but I was still wracked with insecurity about the size of my thighs, the attractiveness of my vagina, the diameter and darkness of my areolas. These insecurities are the same that any person experiences when exposing their body in intimacy.”
Peace
“I wanted to be fully known and I had finally told my story to someone I felt deeply for. His brown eyes were flung open, looking at me in all my bare honesty. Then Aaron stepped toward his bed and parted his legs. ‘Can I hug you?’ he asked, resting one of his knees on the foot of the bed. I rose to my knees as he leaned toward me, and I fell into his arms, exhaled heavily, and cried. For the first time in my life, I was recognized in totality. Not in spite of my experiences but because of my experiences. Aaron embraced me, though I knew, with his smooth, solid, sunburned arms surrounding me, that my challenge would be embracing myself. How could I expect this man to love me when I didn’t know what it meant to accept, embrace, and love myself?”
