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

by Janet Mock

  Recently, the media (from the New Yorker and the New York Times to ABC’s 20/20 and Nightline) has focused its lens on trans youth. The typical portrait involves young people grappling with social transition at relatively young ages, as early as four, declaring that they’re transgender and aiming to be welcomed in their communities and schools as their affirmed gender. As they reach puberty, these youth—with the support and resources of their welcoming families—undergo medical intervention under the expertise of an endocrinologist who may prescribe hormone-blocking medications that suppress puberty before graduating to cross-sex hormones and planning to undergo other gender affirmation surgeries.

  To be frank, these stories are best-case scenarios, situations I hope become the norm for every young trans person in our society. But race and class are not usually discussed in these positive media portraits, which go as far as erasing the presence of trans youth from low-income communities and/or communities of color. Not all trans people come of age in supportive middle- and upper-middle-class homes, where parents have resources and access to knowledgeable and affordable health care that can cover expensive hormone-blocking medications and necessary surgeries. These best-case scenarios are not the reality for most trans people, regardless of age.

  Certainly, this was not the reality for Wendi and me or the girls and women we would soon cross paths with in Honolulu.

  Chapter Nine

  Chin down, Mary. Hide that Adam’s,” Wendi said from behind her Kodak disposable camera. She wasn’t reading; she was aiming to capture me at my best.

  I smiled into the little round plastic lens, trying to keep my balance in her black platform heels. They were chunky and heavy and a size too small. I had grown a few inches over the summer, topping off at five-six at age fourteen, the same height as Wendi, with a size-ten foot, or, as Wendi would call it, “supermodel, supercanoe size.”

  Wearing her black wig, which she had cut into a sharp, angular Vidal Sassoon bob, and her black-and-white chevron-print halter pantsuit, I was feeling myself, and Wendi was cheering me on. She painted my face in bronzes and browns and tweezed the ends of my brows so she could have a wider shadow palette to work with. She didn’t ask, she just did it. To this day, my brows are struggling to grow back in full.

  “Arch your back and stick your butt out,” Wendi said. I did as she instructed. “Yaaaasss, bitch! Stay just like that.”

  I glowed under her focus and creative direction. She consistently made me feel good about myself; it was the kind of relationship I now know to be rare, in which the other person wants to see you at your best. Wendi has always wanted me to shine beside her, not behind her.

  Wendi was more comfortable behind the lens, behind the brush, behind the curling iron, even though she was one of the prettiest girls I knew. Wendi’s black eyes were held in wide-set slanted lids that flanked her flat, wide nose. She called it “too Filipino for my taste” because she didn’t have what she called an “elegant bridge,” something she would later attain with the help of a plastic surgeon. She often wore her jet-black bra-strap-length hair in a ponytail to stay cool in the humidity, and she effortlessly maintained a yellowish-brown glow that most people can achieve only with a spray tan.

  After using every click available, we booked it to Long’s Drugs at Kam Shopping Center and dropped off the camera at the one-hour photo. We grabbed gravy fries at Kenny’s and browsed Everblue Casuals to kill time. When we picked up the double prints, Wendi praised, “Oooh, bitch! You’re serving it.”

  I sat, incredulous, with the photos. I loved my makeup, my hair, and my smile. But other features I hadn’t taken note of before came into focus: shapely arms and shoulders that had developed from volleyball; a bubble butt that looked like Auntie Linda Gail’s; a small, sharp Adam’s apple playing peekaboo under my chin. There was no denying that my body was changing. Seeing the things I disliked made it hard to see the good. The photos became an image-shattering moment that birthed insecurity in me about my growing body. Most teenagers grapple with body image, but to be a pubescent trans girl with few resources to change what you don’t like only magnifies the features that begin negating a mental self-image. It probably didn’t help that the beauty standards I held myself to were rigid and impractical. Like most teen girls (whether they’re trans or cis), I had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that MTV fed me. I wanted Halle Berry’s or Tyra Banks’s breasts, Britney Spears’s midsection, Beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and I prayed that I wouldn’t grow any taller so I didn’t tower over the petite Asian girls who were the barometer of beauty in the islands.

  Holding myself to this impossible beauty standard led me to pick myself apart critically. The incessant comparing and measuring of my body and physical attributes against this ideal occupied my mind, and the chasm between my physical reality and the elusive ideal led to personal discontent. I was chasing an ideal that was separate from my personal appearance, and my preoccupation with this pursuit amplified the tick-tock of a clock alerting me daily that it would take only a couple of years for me to become a man, something I wanted to avoid at all costs. Though Wendi always said hormones were “not a miracle drug,” I knew that starting them would mean the beginning of my real life.

  “Promise not to show anyone, okay?” I said to Wendi, who nodded while studying the photos.

  We were nearing the end of eighth grade, and I was frequently frustrated that I dressed basically the same as I did in seventh grade, while my best friend seemed to blossom under the blind eyes of her grandparents. Her hair was long, her jeans tight, her T-shirts snug. She’d come to school in the baby tees that all the girls were wearing with the platform sneakers I so envied.

  Though my uniform wasn’t quite as girlie as I wished, it leaned in bits and pieces toward my own femininity. I didn’t have the independence Wendi had when it came to buying clothes. Everything I had I had to ask Mom to buy. When we went to Ala Moana, I’d ask her to get me Keroppi notebooks and pens at Sanrio Surprises. I’d try on jeans a size smaller in the dressing room and not show her, and she’d trust that they fit. But I always lost the hair battle. I remember the three haircuts I got in the eighth grade that absolutely broke my heart. When my “Halle Berry meets Gumby” hairstyle grew too bushy for Mom’s taste, she would force me to sit in the barber’s chair next to my brothers. With each haircut, I was reminded that I was nothing but a boy pretending to be something I was not. Mom couldn’t handle tears, especially ones she created, so she did what she did best: ignored them.

  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.” I straddled the line of gender as well as I could and made concessions and compromises. I clutched tightly to my green Keroppi folders and my size-too-small jeans and my arched brows and, when I could grow my hair long enough, my side part. These elements, though small and insignificant to passersby, made up my girlhood, and I fought hard to ensure that they were seen.

  My most prized possession was my lanyard of Lip Smackers. Mom bought my first one at Long’s; it was green apple flavored. She thought nothing of buying me lip balm, and I remember snatching it out of the plastic shopping bag at checkout, afraid she’d realize what it was and return it. I tore it out of the confines of the paper package, which read, “All the flavor of being a girl.” I balled the package in my fist, hiding it from her view. In the car, I draped the black lanyard around my neck with a single green plastic balm dangling. I proudly dangled my girlhood in all its fruitiness. It cost only $2.99.

  As I was transitioning, our family was about to experience yet another change. I met Rick on that rare day when I came straight home from school because I didn’t play volleyball, have band practice, or hang at Wendi’s. I saw Mom lying on her bed with a bronze-skinned man who had a prominent underbite and brows in focused judgment. Mom hopped out of bed, and he followed her
to me, just outside her room. “This is Rick,” she said, looking to the man behind her, who stood about five-ten, with wide shoulders that made Mom look smaller than she was.

  I said hi, and he said hi back. That was the extent of our interaction. He wasn’t a talkative man. Going straight to Cori’s, I asked if she knew who that was. Cori knew everything, the original Gossip Girl.

  “Heeelloooo, dummy, that’s my dad,” she said, looking at me as if I was supposed to know that the man with the furrowed brow was her father.

  “Why is he here?” I said.

  “They’re back together,” she said nonchalantly, as if a twenty-year reunion with your high school sweetheart who gave you two adult children was not a head-scratching moment. I blamed Cori’s desensitized delivery on the fact that she watched way too much Maury and Jerry.

  “I’m confused,” I said, wondering how it all had happened.

  “Well, that wouldn’t be da first time, Mary,” she joked. Cori went on to explain that they had rekindled their romance after seeing each other at his mother’s funeral. Cori claimed to have seen sparks flying, predicting their reunion. “Next thing you know, she grabbed all her stuff from Hawaii Kai, dumped her boyfriend, and now they can’t get enough of each other,” she said.

  Rick soon moved in with us. He didn’t have anything of his own because he had been in and out of jail since he was a teenager, arrested for everything from drug possession to petty theft. He was a crystal meth addict and a repeat offender who seemed at ease with having spent most of his life in prison, succumbing to the fact that he didn’t know how to make it on the “outside.” Mom had a bottomless capacity to forget and embrace, and I assumed that history bound them. The nostalgic fairy tale of rediscovering your first love was irresistible to my mother, and Rick knew this, feeding her illusion that maybe, just maybe, the man she first fell in love with at sixteen, the one who changed the trajectory of her life, was The One she was supposed to be with. This was their second chance.

  Rick was no Prince Charming, though. He butted heads with nearly everyone in those first few months on Owawa Street. Chad and Jeff weren’t too keen on having a sudden live-in Dad, and I wasn’t about to be governed by another man; I had just escaped a home ruled by masculinity. I wasn’t sacrificing the new set of rules I had so expertly worked to my own advantage.

  “The little queen seems to be able to come in and out as he pleases,” Rick said to Mom one night in the living room. I overheard them from my room. Not one to avoid confrontation, I walked out of my room and rolled my eyes at him.

  “You get one problem?” he asked, walking toward me shirtless, his broad shoulders towering over me, blocking my view of Mom.

  “It’s okay,” Mom said through a shaky smile, unnerved by the tension.

  “Why is he always here?” I asked, assuming Mom was on my side.

  “What’d you say, faggot?” Rick erupted in anger, waking the house and scaring the shit out of me. I hadn’t been yelled at like that in my entire life. Jeff and Chad peered from the crack in our bedroom door, and Cori rushed out of her room. I looked to Mom to defend me. She said nothing, grabbing Rick by the arm as tears blurred my vision. They went into her room as faggot lingered in the air and my siblings looked on. It became clear to me that when I was six, she had sent me away for a man. It became clear to me that she hadn’t spent time with us that whole first year back in Hawaii because she preferred being at her then boyfriend’s house. And it became clear to me that she had chosen this convict over me. It was difficult to face the reality of my mother, someone I had seen as my heroine, the one who would save me. In fact, Mom had done nothing to deserve this dream-girl role in my childhood imaginings.

  A few months later, I heard a crash in Cori’s room and deep groans. Cori screamed, “Stop it!” Her daughters were crying. Her boyfriend and her father were tangled on the ground. That fistfight pushed Cori to finally move out on her own, choosing Kuhio Park Terrace, a large public housing complex down the street. Mom could no longer afford our three-bedroom house without Cori’s share of the rent, so the rest of us relocated to Salt Lake, a nearby suburb. Despite its material upgrade, our new two-bedroom apartment felt lifeless without Cori and the girls. It was quiet, compact, and sterile.

  Salt Lake’s demographics reflected middle-class Honolulu, its residents mostly Japanese and Korean, compared to Kalihi’s mix of Filipinos and Samoans. There were no rooster wakeup calls or shopping carts rattling down the sidewalks. Still, I saw my beloved Kalihi daily, commuting to Kalakaua on the bus with Chad and Jeff to finish eighth grade. In the fall, I would enroll at Salt Lake’s Moanalua High School, which was considered stronger academically than Farrington, the school Wendi and the rest of my friends would attend.

  “You transferring to Moanalua next year, yeah?” Mr. Higa, my school counselor and National Junior Honor Society adviser, asked over the buffet at Pizza Hut during our final volunteer outing as NJHS-ers. “You excited? They got one good marching band, I hear.”

  “I guess,” I said as Mr. Higa took in my Lip Smackers necklaces and snug jeans and tee. “But I don’t know anyone there.”

  “Ahhh, you gone make new friends. No worry.” He winked. “People like you.”

  I shrugged, blocking my smile with my pepperoni slice. “I’m just scared I won’t meet anyone like me,” I confessed, trusting Mr. Higa, who always welcomed me into his office even when I didn’t have an appointment or anything to say.

  “Eh, we all different, you know. What matters is you one good person, and people will see that,” he said, wiping his greasy fingers on the napkin across his lap. “You’re gonna find your place there, like you did when you moved here from the mainland.”

  I nodded again, knowing that Mr. Higa wasn’t being all after-school-special on me. That wasn’t his style. I thought about the blue poster in his office with the cheery white starry letters: “The decisions you make will dictate the life you will lead.” He was being as honest as he could be. That short exchange was just what I needed as I began studying the horizon of who I would become. I was able to reveal who I was to myself and others because I was surrounded by people who allowed me to explore despite not having the answers themselves.

  “Like give me one?” Mr. Higa winked again, looking at my lip balms.

  I rolled my eyes and laughed, delighted that he saw me.

  Chapter Ten

  Moanalua High School sat haughtily atop a sloping hillside, looking down at the rest of Honolulu, painted gray with accent squares of blue. Its mascot was the menehune, mythical Hawaiian dwarves. I felt there was an advantage in calling myself a Moanalua Menehune. To say you went to Farrington was to say you were from Kalihi, which meant you were rough around the edges, tough because you had to run away from Samoan bullies asking you for “dollah” on a daily basis. To say you went to Moanalua was to say you were solidly middle-class, with test scores as high as the school’s altitude and on your way to college, a summit no one in my family had climbed.

  I was eager to move up in the world and gladly sloughed Kalihi from my résumé during my time at Moanalua, where I basked in extracurriculars and the focus of teachers who’d kneel beside me and praise me for my essays. It was in English class, through I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Color Purple, where I met a young Maya Angelou and her brother Bailey, and Celie and Nettie. I had never read stories about people who looked like me, about girls who had been touched and told to be quiet about it. I was deeply struck by Maya Angelou’s self-inflicted muteness brought on by guilt and abuse. And though I am unable to carry a child like Celie, I, too, was pregnant with trauma and fear. Celie’s audacity to write to God to give her life meaning continues to influence me.

  When the 2:40 bell rang, I would sprint to either volleyball or band practice. I was the starting setter on the junior varsity boys’ volleyball team. I wore the shortest shorts and my growing curls in a topknot, accessorized with a brown tortoise headband. I loved volleyball, a sport I excelled at.
Though I hadn’t publicly proclaimed that I was a girl, I did consider playing with boys, and in effect being categorized as a boy, one of the many compromises I made during my girlhood.

  At the time, I wasn’t aware of athletic trailblazers like Renée Richards, a professional tennis player who was banned from playing in the 1976 U.S. Open because she was a transsexual woman. After disputing the ruling, the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor, and the landmark decision gave her access to play tennis with other professional women athletes. Today trans athletes are helping change the game, pushing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the National College Athletics Association (NCAA) to create regulations that are making the sports world, which is segregated by sex, more inclusive of trans athletes.

  In my experience, the only thing that mattered on a court was that you were skilled. I played setter and outside hitter, taking charge of our team’s offense. I blossomed in this position of leadership, which earned me a level of respect despite my visible difference. In Hawaii, volleyball was an LGBT-friendly sport, one where even the fiercest queens and flamboyant gay boys dominated. Expressing femininity on the court didn’t underscore or negate my skill as a player. During my first year on the team, I was just happy to be starting as a freshman, but during my sophomore year, as I embarked on transitioning, the dissonance between my gender identity and my team sport heightened. Despite those conflicting feelings, I was co-captain of our team as a sophomore, and I ended the year with the Best Offensive Player award before quitting volleyball because the sex segregation that forced me to play on the boy’s team was unsettling, publicly negating my identity.