Janet Mock
Movies have always been spaces of refuge for me. For a few harmonious hours, I could escape my reality of being a girl living on the margins.Collection: Movies
Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.Collection: Society
For so much of my life, I lived feeling as if, if I spoke, if I said something, I would lose everything. I would be pushed out. No one will want me. No one will love me. No one would want to be friends with me. It took me decades to get to a space of saying, 'This is my truth. This is who I am, and I don't care if you like me or you don't like me.'Collection: Space
I would advise any 17-year-old to surround yourself with people who listen to you, nod when you speak, and smile when you enter spaces.Collection: Smile
Once, when I was 5 years old, a little girl who lived next door to my grandmother dared me to put on a muumuu and run across a nearby parking lot. So I did. I threw it on, hiked it up in one hand, and ran like hell. It felt amazing to be in a dress. But suddenly my grandmother appeared, a look of horror on her face.Collection: Amazing
One musical that deeply influenced me - and continues to do so - is the 1997 ABC TV movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella,' starring Brandy, with Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the prince's mom.Collection: Mom
My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.Collection: Birthday
Reproductive rights are about body and medical autonomy: our collective and deeply personal right to choose what we want to do to/with our bodies. Trans people and feminists should be building natural alliances here.Collection: Medical
The transgender community has always been a part of Hawaiian society, where people who don't conform to the binary system of man/woman, masculine/feminine are accepted or, at minimum, tolerated.
I still have a YA-genre-series type of a book in me that I really want to tell.
If I'm watching 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta,' there's a part of that that's just escapism. I'm not watching it with a political lens, but there is a part of me that certain things trigger and pull up, where I'm like, 'Oh, that was really problematic.'
If we want to enlighten people or give them new thoughts and ideas, we have to be willing to do the work of educating them.
Women are so policed and devalued and dehumanized when it comes to the work they do.
For me, as an activist and a storyteller, I'm very centered in ensuring that we show the complicatedness of the human experience that happens to be rooted in my community's trans experiences.
I just love to glow, glow glow, so with my skincare and makeup routine, I gravitate to products that help me achieve that sun-kissed, dewy look.
Throughout the day, I like to spritz my face with a rose water for extra moisture.
In the evening, I use a cleansing oil - coconut oil also works - to remove makeup.
I'm an island girl, so I love super bronzy skin!
I wrote 'Redefining Realness' because not enough of our stories are being told, and I believe we need stories that reflect us so we don't feel so isolated in our apparent 'difference.'
We need space to discuss unspoken, uncomfortable dark truths.
I hope being honest about my experiences and contextualizing them empowers young women to step into their truths, tell their own stories, and live visibly.
We exist in a culture where trans people are constantly delegitimized.
Hawaii was so integral to my journey. I was just there at the right time.
In seventh grade, I met my best friend Wendi, who is a trans woman.
I just am trans. That's just the way it is. I knew this as a child. But I was told that because I expressed femininity in a boy's body, I needed to be silent about it. To be ashamed. That led to isolation, which then made it easier for me to be prey to a predator in my own home.
I think a lot of people are very interested in why other people are trans or why people are gay.
It is the world's limitations and the myths that we internalize about ourselves that pushes us to diminish our power and ignore it.
Trans people are not a monolith.
I grew up at a time in Hawaii where there were trans women around, so there were visible role models for me. At the same time, as a low-income trans girl of color, there were so many things that I didn't have access to. I didn't have access to a great education. I didn't have access to affordable healthcare.
As someone who wasn't heavily supported or resourced as a young person when I was going through the hardest times of my life, I'm used to operating outside of systems. The trans movement has always been that way.
I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. 'Marie Claire' was offering the chance to be a part of a women's magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.
I don't feel as if I'm typecast - like any writer, the difficulty is that one facet of my identity becomes louder, obscuring the fact that I'm also a woman, a writer, a lover of pop culture and other things.
On my road to self-discovery, only certain terms were available - I didn't use 'trans' or 'transgender' until junior high school, but I was living as trans much earlier.
It's great to engage with the mainstream media to get messages out, but the most empowering tool is to create records of our lives, and our own images, which are not filtered through judgements, biases, or misunderstandings.
There's a burden of responsibility for me to show up correct - in my head, if I don't do it right, then I'll get shut out, and then other trans women of color will be shut out.
Our differences are what make us great. Let us think about how we can extend this appreciation to people of color, undocumented immigrants, and other members of the community.
I often feel failed by feminism.
Any woman's right to self-identify is a personal freedom I fight for, and those women who claim trans women are not women are perpetuators of gender-based oppression, and all feminists should be upset and moved to action against this.
Great conversations always spark in a genuine interest to recognize and know the other person's story and, therefore, recognizing and understanding and celebrating their humanity.
I don't have to explain anything to trans women. Trans women know exactly what's going on.
I take the time to show up for people in my field who are often not seen and heard in the same capacity as I am. Applauding other women and queer writers of color enables me to recognize and showcase the abundance of talent and work being created.
We are multiplicities, and none of us live single-identity lives.
We must resist the pressures of others to soundbite our complicated, nuanced experiences.
We cannot and should not be reduced to just one sliver of ourselves, as it skews the truth of our lived experiences.
One of the most difficult parts of 'The Trans List' was coming up with a list of 11 people. For me, what was important was to ensure that we were as diverse as possible across a lot of different intersections.
We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.
When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.
I think millennials are the most woke generation because they understand that differences are just in the fabric of who we are.
We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.
I walk in the world as a woman because I am a woman, and people should take me as that. I'm not passing as anything that I'm not. I'm just being myself.