by Janet Mock
I soon became known at Moanalua as the bell-bottom and baby-tee-wearing boy-girl freshman who’d tweeze your brows for five dollars. I found refuge among the girls, most of whom were also volleyball players. They took me under their wing and complimented me on the photos I took with Wendi, which I finally had the courage to display in a transparent slip on the school binder I clutched to my flat chest. It was a gesture, reminding myself that I was a girl. “Oohhh, you look good!” one of the senior girls said to me one day during lunch, passing my binder around. “I wouldn’t even know you were boy.”
I took their words as nourishment, the kind of affirmation I needed to grow the courage to transition. Their words fed me more than the lineup from the cafeteria’s make-your-own-nachos station. I don’t believe a single student truly understood me, but I think I projected a high level of self-confidence that made most of my classmates leave me alone. It was something I learned from Wendi: Fake it until you make it. I was no wallflower, but I also wasn’t encroaching on anyone else’s life. I didn’t believe in asking for acceptance or permission to be myself; I took what I felt I deserved. That self-assuredness prepared me for the monumental summer to come.
Living in Salt Lake, I grew comfortable taking the city bus thirty minutes to Wendi’s with my weekend bag packed. Separate schools couldn’t break our sisterhood, though if I suggested that Wendi jump on the bus to meet me at the mall, she’d roll her eyes and say, “Girl, do I look like I would have a bus pass?” Thus the birth of pooching rides anywhere we needed to go, whether it was Ala Moana or Waikiki or town, where the older girls hung out. I have no idea where the term pooching originated. It feels like an innate phrase, but it definitely predated us. Pooching basically meant to hustle rides, money, or anything from guys. It began innocently to get rides from Dillingham Boulevard, near Wendi’s apartment, to Ala Moana, where we hung with the salesgirls at the MAC counter. The first time I ever pooched with Wendi—I’m sure she did it long before I joined her—we pranced on a corner a few blocks from her apartment. I was in my usual uniform of bell-bottoms and platform sneakers paired with a T-shirt while Wendi flaunted her long, skinny legs in tight spandex pants and a sparkly top that plunged low on her padded chest. I watched her flag down cars with her wrists flailing in the air. A silver Mustang slowed, turning on a side street near us and signaling us with his lights.
“Come on, girl. Let’s book it,” Wendi said as I followed her apprehensively.
Everything was an adventure with her, and I was along for the ride. The man was in his forties, with blond hair that matched the brightness of his car. He wore an aloha shirt and khaki pants, the uniform for professional men in the islands. From where I stood, peering over Wendi’s shoulder into the car, I saw that he had kind blue eyes, which eased my fears.
“Like give us ride to Ala Moana?” Wendi asked, pointing him to Oahu’s biggest shopping center. He nodded.
Wendi opened the door with familiarity, pushing the seat forward so I could jump in the back. I watched her as she talked about the weather, asking him what he did for a living, and where he lived. He seemed unconcerned with our age and treated us as the girls we failingly presented ourselves as. Danger never entered my mind; I never thought about how easily he could’ve driven us past the mall to a place of his choosing. Nothing that dramatic ever happened during any of our pooching antics. Riding in cars with strange men soon became habit.
The ladies at the MAC counter in Liberty House, Hawaii’s version of Macy’s, always made us feel welcome as teens experimenting with our look. The saleswomen, with their all-black ensembles and smoky eyelids, were as open and affirming as the sight of RuPaul’s spread legs in the Viva Glam lipstick ads. We spent entire Saturday and Sunday afternoons getting our makeup done by the girls, who would tolerate us because we let them go in on our faces, painting dramatic, clownish looks. Wendi would spend her allowance from her grandmother on new products for her growing artist’s kit. I didn’t have an after-school job or an allowance, so I giddily got C7, Amber Lights, and Prrr applied to my mug for free.
It was during these afternoons that I witnessed Wendi discover her passion. She never spoke about how school was going; I knew she was fidgety to get somewhere. But when we were filling out those paper face charts, I watched her become still and focused, as attentive as she was when she studied her Kevyn Aucoin and Sam Fine books. It was a gift to watch my best friend take those steps toward becoming the person she was meant to be. It pushed me to begin asking myself questions about who I wanted to be and how I would get there.
With MAC on our faces and strappy sandals on our feet, we took our style outside of Wendi’s room that summer—the same summer Wendi concocted one of her best creations: hip pads. We walked into Savers, the same thrift store where we’d bought our soccer shorts in middle school, wielding a pair of scissors. Going into the dressing room with a bunch of bold-shouldered blazers, we cut the shoulder pads out of the jackets and threw them in our backpacks. Back at Wendi’s, we sewed the pads together, creating half-moons that we stuck into our underwear to pad our hips. Since she had a flat ass, Wendi would double the pads and put some on her butt as well, while I used mine to fill out the sides of my hips.
We’d flaunt our faux-hourglass figures at night in Waikiki, prancing up and down Kalakaua Avenue and stopping outside Fusions, where all the older girls, the queens, and the gay guys partied. We’d gallivant outside, cackling at each other and flirting with military guys and tourists. I also remember the sex workers imported from the mainland in their clear pumps and pleather skirts. There was this one black woman who had the longest legs I have ever seen in my life. She galloped along the sidewalk in a black leather dress and a shiny black ponytail to match the luster of her outfit. Wendi and I nicknamed her Tyra because we thought she resembled Tyra Banks. I watched her closely when she did her rounds on Kuhio Avenue. I stood slack-jawed when she whipped her ponytail purposefully in the face of a short Japanese tourist to get his attention. Her choreography was undeniable as she invited him to make a proposal for the night, her long legs ready to wrap around his slender shoulders. In my denim capris and leopard-print halter top, I yearned to be that sexy and powerful.
Wendi was sixteen that summer, a year older than I was, though we were in the same grade. As she had mapped out in the eighth grade, she was beginning hormone replacement therapy. Her grandmother, who I’m confident was unclear about what Wendi was asking permission for, outsourced the task to Wendi’s aunt, who took her to Dr. R.’ s office in Waikiki, the go-to place for transsexuals on Oahu. Wendi told me that she and her aunt had a short consultation with the esteemed endocrinologist, who assured her aunt that the medicine was safe and well tested. They left his office with a prescription for Premarin, a conjugated estrogen from the urine of pregnant horses. I remember the excitement I felt when I met Wendi at Long’s Drugs to get her first script filled. She paid thirty dollars for a month’s supply of pills, the copay from her grandmother’s insurance plan. I silently brainstormed how I would convince Mom to let me follow Wendi’s lead.
“Do you feel different?” I asked Wendi as we lay in her bed after she took the first pill.
“Mary, didn’t I tell you it’s not a miracle drug?” she said, slightly exasperated. I figured she was just moody from her first dose. “Why?” she said after a brief silence. “You like take one?”
I nodded, and she handed me one as if it were a Tic-Tac. I ran to her bathroom sink, staring at the maroon tablet in my hand. Despite Wendi’s assertion that they were not magic, I believed they were. This little oval pill would reveal to everyone who I truly was. I bent over the sink and tossed the two and a half milligrams of Premarin into my mouth, forcing it down with a sip of water from the faucet.
“Mary, you feelin’ fish now, huh?” Wendi laughed. “We gotta get you more, girl.”
When she graduated to Estradiol injections weeks later, Wendi passed her Premarin bottles to me. She claimed she didn’t like the pills because
they bloated her, but I knew part of her didn’t want to go on the journey alone. When I think of this time with Wendi, I’m reminded of the line from Toni Morrison’s Sula: “Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.” I was her sister, and she didn’t want to leave me behind. We needed each other to create who we were supposed to be. I gave her thirty dollars to cover the copay, which I had saved in my underwear drawer from weeks of lunch money and handouts from Papa. I had enough money to cover about three months of medication.
This underground railroad of resources guided me during the years of uncertainty, giving me an agency that empowered me to take my life, my body, and my being into my own hands. Wendi and I were low-income trans girls of color. We didn’t have many resources, but what we were blessed with was being at the right place at the right time. Hawaii’s community of trans women was vast and knowledgeable. There was a deep legacy of trans womanhood passed on to us by older women who had been exactly where we were. And this provided us with stability despite what some view as a dramatic shift in our adolescence.
We were also under the examination of a sensitive endocrinologist who gave transsexual patients the medicine they needed with minimal barriers. Dr. R. believed in self-determination and diversity in gender and bodies, which is not the norm in the medical establishment. In order for trans people to gain access to hormone replacement therapy and gender affirming surgeries, these procedures must be deemed “medically necessary” from the standpoint of mental health professionals, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care (SOC) guidelines. Though the series of steps the SOC recommends is not legally mandated, they are held as the standard to which transsexual patients have been treated, viewed, and covered financially by the medical establishment.
According to these recommendations, in order for a transsexual to undergo treatments or surgeries, they must be pathologized, diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” (previously “gender identity disorder”), as described in the American Psychological Association’s bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ). These diagnoses stigmatize transsexual patients as mentally unwell and unfit. The diagnosis does help those with health insurance, decreasing out-of-pocket costs for medically necessary hormone treatments and surgeries, which are usually excluded from most insurance plans that often categorize gender affirming surgeries as “cosmetic” rather than medically necessary. It’s a tough compromise. Regardless, it’s expensive to see a therapist without adequate health coverage. The medical barriers lead many transsexuals to self-medicate with little to no medical supervision, which is dangerous and can be fatal.
Not all trans people followed these guidelines. Frankly, Wendi and I didn’t even know they existed. We were able to operate outside the system because we had a physician who championed body autonomy and the idea that we should make our own decisions about our bodies.
Everyone deserves access to quality health care, yet access is challenging for trans people who live in rural areas or cities without trans-inclusive clinics. Even those with insurance must take their health care into their own hands, often tasked with educating their physicians about recommendations for treatments because most doctors are unfamiliar with transsexual patients. Many low-income young trans women self-medicate in spite of the risks. I’ve heard stories of girls who buy vials of injectable estrogen from other trans women with prescriptions or young trans women who share P.O. boxes so they can receive hormones from online pharmacies without a prescription or a parent’s approval. Like these young women, I created a system that worked for me without my mother’s knowledge, piggybacking on Wendi’s access to Dr. R. and health insurance.
After a few months on Premarin, I noticed bloating from increased water retention. My appetite was insatiable, leading to weight gain in my thighs and butt, which settled to a shapely size seven in juniors’ jeans. My skin, which was never affected by facial hair, began breaking out with heavy acne across my forehead, a direct effect of my hormone levels. There were desirable effects, too, like the suppleness of my skin, which was unnaturally smooth, like a puppy’s hairless belly. Breasts were my favorite feature. I remember being struck by the sensitivity of my areolas, which swelled within weeks, prompting the budding of my breasts. If they rubbed too hard against my shirt, my nipples throbbed. Despite the pain, I flaunted my fleshy chest during our weekend nights out in a push-up bra filled out with a pair of silicone cutlets.
My breast growth was extraordinary compared to Wendi’s; she was basically as flat as she was before she started hormones. She didn’t gain any weight at all, her long legs thin as ever, though she did experience a change in her complexion. Her skin, which was always covered with acne, was now clear, and the shape of her face became less angular and subtly filled out, giving her an overall softer appearance. Despite her gradual shift, she never had to hide her changes like I did. The breasts that I flaunted in my friends’ company had to be concealed at home under layers so I could keep my pill popping under wraps.
The hormones also made me more emotional. I found myself snapping at Chad and Jeff for blasting The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin on TV. I also was more prone to isolation, vegging out in my room, listening to Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope on loop while reading heavy heroine novels like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, A Room with a View, and The Age of Innocence. My thoughts in bed and in the shower darkened around this time. As long as I could remember, I’d felt discomfort with my genitals, and this only escalated with the emotional changes brought on by puberty. I had a foreboding impatience to be rid of it. My tuck was a temporary solution to make it nonexistent for a few hours.
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. Premarin stimulated that sense of discord and angst, one that cradled me as I cried myself to sleep at night, hoping that some genie would magically appear and all my troubles would be solved.
No one came, though, and I struggled in secret, wielding nothing but despair and fierce determination.
Part
Three
Nobody’s going to save you.
No one’s going to cut you down,
cut the thorns around you.
No one’s going to storm
the castle walls nor
kiss awake your birth,
climb down your hair,
nor mount you
on the white steed.
There is no one who
will feed the yearning.
Face it. You will have
to do, do it yourself.
—GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “LETTING GO”
Chapter Eleven
Good morning, Class of 2001!” I shouted from center stage in our school’s cafeteria. “I’m Janet, your class treasurer, and I just want to thank you for your votes and your support!”
More than three hundred sophomores applauded as I unwrapped my blue-polished nails from the microphone. The riotous reception signaled my successful reintroduction, and the sight of my fellow elected leaders standing with me at our back-to-school assembly emboldened me. The majority of the people in that cafeteria were aware that they had elected Charles to office the previous semester, but I had known Janet would reign.
I was obsessed with The Velvet Rope for a year straight, letting Janet Jackson’s confessional lyrics lull me to sleep and comfort me when I felt lost. I felt that the album was the vehicle onto which Janet finally expressed her full self, her anger and pain, her fluid sexuality and passion. I loved her fiery red curls and her equally vibrant smile, features that the older girls said I had in common with the singer. I was deeply flattered when they nicknamed me Baby Janet, a name that stuck and that I took as my own. There’s power in naming you
rself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are. Wielding this power is often a difficult step for many trans people, because it’s also a very visible one.
To announce your gender in name, dress, and pronouns in your school, place of work, neighborhood, and state is a public process, one in which trans people must literally petition authorities to approve name and gender marker changes on identification cards and public records. Becoming comfortable with your identity is step one; the next step is revealing that identity to those around you. As with medically transitioning, there are economic and legislative barriers that make it difficult for low-income trans people to make the public changes that align their lived and documented gender.
To legally change my name at fifteen would have required me to appeal to my mother to petition for my name change, pay the three-hundred-dollar-plus filing fees, and plead with my father in Dallas to cosign on something he had absolutely no knowledge of. So I postponed the legal process until I was eighteen and wielded the power of self-determination, announcing to my peers and my family that I would only answer to Janet and she and her pronouns.
Though I kept the fact that I was taking hormones a secret over the summer before my sophomore year, I was not hiding my dress, makeup, and longer hair from my family. Mom allowed me to spend my back-to-school clothing allowance on skirts, dresses, tight denim jeans, and tops. As long as I brought home good grades, I was in the clear. This was our informal, unspoken agreement. The only conversation we had was about my name and pronouns during that summer.
