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

by Janet Mock

  “You were never like Chad and me,” he said. “You never wanted to do the things that we liked to do.” Jeff even recalled an incident (that I don’t remember) when I was picking him up from school. A group of boys at the recreation center asked him how he felt about his brother becoming his sister. Jeff’s memory strikes me because I think my growing confidence and self-assuredness under the light of my friendship with Wendi blocked memories of the verbal brutality thrown our way.

  As I look back, what impresses me about my family is their openness. They patiently let me lead the way and kept any confusion or worry to themselves during a fragile period in my self-discovery. I recognize this as one of the biggest gifts they gave me. On some level, I knew they were afraid for me, afraid that I would be teased and taunted. Instead of trying to change me, they gave me love, letting me know that I was accepted. I could stop pretending and drop the mask. My family fortified my self-esteem, which I counted on as I embarked on openly expressing my rapidly evolving self.

  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. These young people are kicked out of their homes or are left with no choice but to leave because they can’t be themselves. That’s something both Wendi and I fortunately never faced.

  With an air of acceptance at home, it was fairly easy to approach my mother and declare my truth. Sitting at our kitchen table, I told Mom, with no extensive planning or thought, “I’m gay.” I was thirteen years old and didn’t know how to fully explain who I was, conflating gender identity and sexuality. What I remember about that brief exchange was Mom’s warmth. She smiled at me, letting me know that it was okay. I felt loved and heard and, more important, not othered. From her lack of reaction—her brows didn’t furrow, her brown irises didn’t shift from side to side—I felt as if I had announced that I had on blue today, a simple fact that we were both aware of. Mom later told me that she remembers feeling afraid for me because she sensed that there was more I wanted to say but didn’t know how to. “My love for you never diminished, but a part of me was scared that people would hurt you, and that is what I had a hard time with,” she told me recently.

  A part of me was scared, too. I couldn’t acknowledge the gender stuff because I didn’t have a full understanding of it. Saying “I think I am a girl” would have been absurd for many reasons, including my fear that it would be a lot for my mother to handle. I didn’t know that trans people existed; I had no idea that it was possible for thirteen-year-old me to become my own woman. That was a fantasy.

  But no matter how incomplete my revelation to my mother was, I felt freer and began openly expressing my femininity under the grooming of my best friend. On a throw pillow in Wendi’s lap, I rested my head as she tweezed my eyebrows on her grandmother’s plastic-covered couch. I held an ice cube to my swollen eye, trying to numb the stinging pain.

  “You wanna look good, right?” she asked as I flinched from her tweezers. “Now I gotta make these even.”

  As she studied the curve of my brows, I felt them getting thinner with each sting. Wendi claimed she knew what she was doing, and I didn’t doubt her skills because she excelled at everything, from volleyball and flute to beauty, her latest obsession. Wendi was unwaveringly authoritative; she’d read something in a magazine or a Kevyn Aucoin book, and suddenly, she was an expert. I accepted her as nothing less. I also didn’t doubt her because I trusted her. The tweezing was my first experience of intimacy with another person, and it foreshadowed our current professional roles, with Wendi serving as my makeup artist for photo shoots and TV appearances.

  Wendi’s bedroom was sponge-painted purple, black, and white, and her grandparents gave her the freedom to be who she was, despite neighbors who referred to her as bakla (Tagalog for “sissy,” “gay,” or “fag”). She had a bunch of male underwear catalogs that she stacked atop her white dresser. She didn’t hide anything.

  We’d stay up late talking about everything and nothing, the only way two people eager to know each other can. I have never been as open as I was in those first few months of my discovering friendship with Wendi. I had butterflies about having found someone like me with whom I didn’t have to explain anything. I was fearless about sharing myself with her. Wendi was the first person I told about Dad’s crack addiction, about the disappointment of my mother’s absence and her preference for men over me, about the times Derek had made me blow him. She in turn told me things she had never told anyone.

  Wendi (I’ve known her only as Wendi; given names and “before” photos are irrelevant in our friendship) grew up in Kaneohe with her mother, who, like her father, struggled with meth addiction. I remember her giggling at her younger self when she told me she lost her virginity at eleven to a playmate a few years older than she was. “Girl, I was such an itchy queen!” she told me in reflection, adding that she’d been attracted to boys for as long as she could remember. There was never a point in her life when she pretended to be anything other than who she was. “That’s a waste of time,” she said. “And, girl, you were not fooling anybody, trying to be butch. I clocked you right away.”

  For as long as I’ve known Wendi, she’s been unapologetic about who she is. I can see her clearly at six years old, snatching her cousin’s pink one-piece bathing suit and proclaiming, “I’m a girl! I’m ovah!” Wendi told me she remembers older mahu who frequented her family’s flower shop. “They were tall, with long hair, and wore pareo s,” she said. “But, girl, you could clock them right away. I didn’t want to look like that!” When she learned that her mother was having an affair with a neighbor, cheating on her stepfather, whom she adored, Wendi said it was easy for her—at only eleven—to make the decision to run away, taking the bus across town to her paternal grandparents’ home in Kalihi, where she sought refuge and stability. “I knew that I wanted to transform without interruptions,” she laughed. “And grandparents are always easy.” Her Filipino grandparents took her in with no complaints about her femininity or the girls’ world that she had created for herself.

  It was in Wendi’s room that I heard about hormones. She mentioned them as if discussing milk, something you had to drink in order to grow. She told me the older girls she knew (“These fierce, unclockable bitches!”) went to a doctor in Waikiki who prescribed hormones for girls as young as sixteen. “I’m going to get my shots down when I turn sixteen,” Wendi, who was fourteen at the time, said with excitement. “Trust.”

  I knew about hormones and puberty and safe sex from the handouts Coach Richardson gave us in health and physical education class. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he’d lecture us about how we were raging with hormones, changing the shape and feel of our bodies. I felt nothing, barely five-two and a little chunky in the face and thighs; puberty hadn’t really touched me. But I noticed the suppleness of the girls in class, the ones who seemed to be towering over many of us in height and shape. They began to separate from the pack swimming way behind in the puberty kiddie pool.

  “Your grandparents are going to let you do that?” I asked Wendi, stunned.

  “They don’t know what that is and can barely speak English,” she said matter-of-factly. “My aunt’s gonna take me.”

  I trusted that she would do exactly as she said she would, and I admired her unstoppable determination. Wendi’s friendship gave me the audacity to be noticed. One morning after one of our beauty experiments, I walked into student council homeroom with arched brows that framed my almond-shaped eyes, which were sparkling with a brush of silver eye shadow that Wendi said no one would really notice b
ecause it was “natural-looking.” The girls in class, the ones who wore the white SODA platform wedge sneakers I so coveted, said, “I like your makeup.” I remember tucking my short curls behind my ears, beaming under the gaze my new look warranted.

  One early evening after playing volleyball, Wendi and I visited a group of her friends in a reserved room at the recreation center. They were rehearsing for a show they did at Fusions, a gay club on Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki. Most of them were drag queens, but a select few were trans women who performed as showgirls. Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!”

  The lines continue to be blurred due to the umbrella term transgender, which bundles together diverse people (transsexual, intersex, genderqueer, drag performers, crossdressers, and gender-nonconforming folks) living with gender variance. Unfortunately, the data on the transgender population is scarce. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t ask about gender identity, how trans people self-identify varies, and many (if asked) may not disclose that they’re trans. The National Center for Transgender Equality has estimated that nearly 1 percent of the U.S. population is transgender, while the Williams Institute has stated that 0.3 percent of adults in the United States (nearly seven hundred thousand) identify as transgender, with the majority having taken steps to medically transition. This number does not take into account the number of transgender children or individuals who have expressed an incongruity between their assigned sex and gender identity or gender expression.

  Despite the misconceptions, I understood the distinction between a drag queen and a trans woman because I came of age in the mid-nineties, and drag queens were in vogue. There was the 1995 release of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. I hated that movie because Wendi would tease that Noxeema Jackson—Wesley Snipes’s drag character—was my “Queen Mother.” Drag queens were on Cori’s favorite talk shows, Sally and Jerry Springer, and then there was RuPaul, “Supermodel of the World.” It was a time when a brown, blond, and glamorous drag queen was a household name, beaming on MAC Cosmetics billboards at the mall in shiny red latex.

  Like RuPaul, the queens at the rec center staked their claim on a smaller scale in Hawaii, part of the fabric of Oahu’s diverse trans community. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was blasting from a boom box, and they were huddled together, about ten of them, discussing their choreography. I watched, seated on the cold tile floor with my backpack and volleyball at my side. They soon reconfigured, gathering in a circle of arms as one woman knelt at the center, hidden by the fort of mostly rotund queens. With the tape rewound, each queen walked clockwise, slowly descending into a kneeling position as the lady in the center rose, lip-synching Toni’s lyrics.

  The lady had long, full wavy hair that served as a backdrop to her curvy body. She gracefully moved her head to the lyrics, basking in the glow from the yellow-tinted lightbulb directly above her. Her deep-set brown eyes, magnified by a pair of full false lashes, looked straight ahead, stoic, almost numb, mirroring the turmoil of an unbearable heartbreak. She was a diva among a moving mass of chorus queens who appeared blurred; only she was in focus.

  “Tracy’s ovah, yeah,” Wendi whispered at me, snapping her finger. “You can’t even clock her!”

  I want to be her, I thought, half nodding to Wendi, speechless and captivated. I was excited and afraid of my silent revelations. Though she didn’t look it, I knew Tracy had been born like us. I knew she had wondered at night about how she was going to change. I knew she had climbed the insurmountable summit of trans womanhood. Unlike the queens she was performing with, Tracy was a woman of her own creation, and I was moved and on the verge of so many emotions that I was fragile when they stopped the tape and Wendi approached the group.

  Lani, who wore a pair of knee-length denim shorts and a stretched white tank top with black bra straps visible on her shoulders, kissed Wendi on the cheek. I stood behind Wendi, looking at Lani’s winged black eyeliner, which she had whipped all the way to a sharp point where it nearly intersected with her penciled-in brows. The other girls gathered around her when Wendi turned around to introduce me. They were the first trans women I had met outside of Wendi.

  I extended my hand to Lani, and she pulled me to her fleshy chest and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which left a red lip print on my face. My heart was racing because they were staring at me. Tracy was standing off to the side, uninterested, brushing her hair. I could hear her raking through her mane, strands snapping with each stroke of her brush.

  “Mary, she’s fish, yeah,” Lani said with a chuckle, holding me at arm’s length by the biceps. The girls around her nodded. Then, looking directly into my eyes, she added, “You’re going to be pretty, girl. Trust!”

  I tried my best to smile, aware that she was giving me a compliment—blessing me, even. To Lani, my fishiness was something to boast about. To be called fish by these women meant that I was embodying the kind of femininity that could allow me access, safety, opportunity, and maybe happiness. To be fish meant I could “pass” as any other girl, specifically a cis woman, mirroring the concept of “realness,” which was a major theme in Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about New York City’s ballroom community, comprising gay men, drag queens, and trans women of color. Ball legend Dorian Corey, who serves as the sage of the film, offering some of the most astute social commentary on the lived experiences of low-income LGBT people of color, describes “realness” for trans women (known in ball culture as femme queens) as being “undetectable” to the “untrained” or “trained.” Simply, “realness” is the ability to be seen as heteronormative, to assimilate, to not be read as other or deviate from the norm. “Realness” means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative.

  “When they can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight and onto the subway and get home and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies,” Corey says in the film, “those are the femme realness queens.”

  Corey defines “realness” for trans women not just in the context of the ballroom but outside of the ballroom. Unlike Pepper LaBeija, a drag legend who said undergoing genital reconstruction surgery (GRS) was “taking it a little too far” in the film, a trans woman or femme queen embodies “realness” and femininity beyond performance by existing in the daylight, where she’s juxtaposed with society’s norms, expectations, and ideals of cis womanhood.

  To embody “realness,” rather than performing and competing “realness,” enables trans women to enter spaces with a lower risk of being rebutted or questioned, policed or attacked. “Realness” is a pathway to survival, and the heaviness of these truths were a lot for a thirteen-year-old to carry, especially one still trying to figure out who she was. I was also unable to accept that I was perceived as beautiful because, to me, I was not. No matter how many people told me I was fish, I didn’t see myself that way. My eyes stung, betraying me, and immediately I felt embarrassed by my visible vulnerability.

  “Oh, hon, no worry,” Tracy said, her brows furrowed in concern. “She never mean nothing by it.”

  “Sorry, babes,” Lani said, pursing her lips emphatically. “I meant it as a compliment.”

  As Wendi and I walked out of the room, I could hear Toni Braxton singing, and I imagined Tracy rising from the sea of queens.

  “How come you cried, Mary?” Wendi said, confused by my emotion. It was the first time I had cried in front of her. I’d learn with time that expressing vulnerability or sentiment made Wendi defensive, uncomfortable. In all the years of our friendship, I’ve never seen her break down or her eyes well up with emotion.

  “They were all staring at me, like they expected something from me, you know?” I said. “It just m
ade me uncomfortable.”

  “Mary! Life is uncomfortable,” Wendi said, rolling her eyes as she remained focused on the dark streets ahead of us. “You have to get used to it or you’re going to live your life trying to make people comfortable. I don’t care what people say about me because they don’t have to live as me. You gotta own who you are and keep it moving.”

  I pushed myself to stay in step with Wendi’s long-legged stride. She didn’t have a stroll in her. I reluctantly let her words soak into my skin, like the tears that watered the conversation. We remained in silence for the rest of our walk home. When we reached Gulick Avenue, she leaned in and her cheek met mine. Then she spread her arms around me and squeezed. She turned around swiftly and crossed the street at King and Gulick. I stood on that corner for about thirty seconds, watching her backpack bounce on her behind as she headed home.

  With Wendi at my side, I felt I could be bold, unapologetic, free. To be so young and aiming to discover and assert myself alongside a best friend who mirrored me in her own identity instilled possibility in me. I could be me because I was not alone. The friendship I had with Wendi, though, is not the typical experience for most trans youth. Many are often the only trans person in a school or community, and most likely, when seeking support, they are the only trans person in LGBTQ spaces. To make matters worse, these support spaces often only address sexual orientation rather than a young person’s gender identity, despite the all-encompassing acronym. Though trans youth seek community with cis gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer teens, they may have to educate their cis peers about what it means to be trans.

  When support and education for trans youth are absent, feelings of isolation and hopelessness can worsen. Coupled with families who might be intolerant and ill equipped to support a child, young trans people must deal with identity and body issues alone and in secret. The rise of social media and online resources has lessened the deafening isolation for trans people. If they have online access, trans people can find support and resources on YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and various other platforms where trans folks of all ages are broadcasting their lives, journeys, and even social and medical transitions. Still, the fact remains that local trans-inclusive support and positive media reflections of trans people are rare outside of major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.