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

by Janet Mock

  I swiftly judged Wendi. She was becoming a night creature, like the older women we knew who came out only at night, when they knew getting clocked would not be an option. The night shielded them from obligations, from what I saw as the “real world.” I wanted Wendi to be better than they were, to rise above them. I was also bitter because she was a deciding factor in my decision to transfer to Farrington. I had wanted us to eat lunch together, to go to prom together, to strut down the aisle in our white graduation gowns together. But school was never Wendi’s thing, and I never told her I was angry with her for what felt like abandonment. We were best friends who became young women together, pooched rides together, learned the tricks of the streets together, and dreamed together. Her leaving school created a wedge between us, one that in hindsight was a gift.

  Throughout my adolescence, I was compared to Wendi, the louder, more flamboyant half of our relationship. I was envious of the attention that she commanded, of her long and silky hair and equally lengthy legs—fitting so perfectly into Hawaii’s standard of mixed-Asian beauty—and, most striking, her unapologetic air. Wendi always seemed light and free, operating without obligation, without a filter, without the sense of impending judgment that I admittedly had. She didn’t care what people thought or said about her, and I respected her for that. I had hoped, ever since we met in the seventh grade, that some of her would rub off on me. Ultimately, she decided to drop out on her eighteenth birthday, at the end of our junior year. She fast-tracked her GED and went to cosmetology school as I continued on alone in my senior year, a time that allowed me to step out of the shadow of our friendship and find myself. I made new friends, like the cool-girl clique Allure Ladies, who embraced me, welcomed me to their table at lunch, and invited me to parties on the weekends. I also joined peer mediation at the Teen Center under the guidance of Alison, who became one of my first allies. She took me to conferences where I trained middle school students on conflict resolution and the benefits of creating LGBTQ student alliances. I talked to her about the complex issues in my life, including my gallivanting on Merchant Street.

  “But I don’t do what they do,” I lied, not wanting Alison to know that I had an arrangement with Max and a handful of loyal regulars. I knew she was acquainted with Merchant’s because our Chrysalis co-facilitator April did outreach there. “A lot of young girls go to just hang out. It’s like Chrysalis, a place where we can be with our own.”

  “It’s important to be around people who understand who you are,” she said, looking at me as I picked at the bowl of Chex Mix in front of me. “Do you ever worry about money?”

  “Only when I think about the cost of surgery and stuff,” I said, feeling a bit defeated. It was the first time I had told anyone besides Wendi about my desire to have bottom surgery.

  “That doesn’t make you a girl, Janet. You are complete just as you are,” she said, trying her best to lighten the burden I felt as a seventeen-year-old with no money to reach such a goal.

  I first became aware of the fact that genital reconstruction surgery (GRS) was a possibility when I was thirteen, lying in Wendi’s bed, hearing stories of older girls who had undergone the procedure. Now they were in front of me on Merchant’s, living possibility. In my gut, I knew that I was a woman regardless of what lay between my legs. Most of the women I knew hadn’t undergone GRS; some had been saving for years but life got in the way, while the majority chose not to have it. I knew that their genitals didn’t dictate their womanhood, and I knew there were many paths to womanhood. My path and my internal sense of womanhood included a vagina, and that does not negate anyone else’s experiences. I was determined to have GRS. It was never a question of if  but when. When depended on how fast I could attain those resources.

  “I want other things, too, like I want to go to college as a girl, and I want to move to the mainland and just live my life,” I said. “But I can’t do all of that without first getting over this. It’s like the first big step I have to make.”

  Alison nodded in the assuring way she always did, telling me that she was confident I would do everything I wanted and more. Years later, when I replayed this conversation to her and told her that I had crossed the threshold into sex work while at Farrington, she was surprised. She told me that she’d had an unwavering faith that I had dodged that fate. “You were always so smart,” she said. “So I just knew you would find a way. I just hate that it had to be that way.”

  It was Alison who urged me to get a work permit so I could nab an after-school job and start saving for my dreams. I soon landed at a popular urban clothing boutique called Demo at Pearlridge Mall in Aiea, known for its crew of fly salesgirls. I felt honored to be one of them, in cropped graffiti tees and embellished low-rise jeans. This distinction made up for my pathetic paychecks, about a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars for thirty to forty hours of work, an amount that I spent on employee-discounted Baby Phat. The girls on Merchant Street would’ve laughed at my salary. When your self-identity and worth are tied up in how much you can make and how many men want you, it can be hard to see value in doing anything else. Though I knew I earned more with sex work, I wanted to prove I could do something else, to prove that Merchant Street wasn’t my only option.

  I took pride in the fact that I could get a job, that I could be out in the daytime, that I could spend my humble earnings on Taco Bell Mexican pizzas in the food court, that I could be visible, out of the darkness. Some people in the mall knew I was trans, but most did not. It was a taste of the freedom I would experience as a young woman in New York City. Those paychecks weren’t going to get me to New York, though. That was real. No matter how much I loved working at the boutique, I knew it couldn’t ease the urgency prompted by the clock that ticked within me, reminding me daily that it would take money for me to get where I needed to be. I couldn’t ignore the fast money available to me. The survival sex trade economy and the women of Merchant Street would lead me to realize those dreams.

  It was the sight of Kahlúa’s newly stitched-up vagina during my final year of high school that put me in touch with possibility, just a few thousand dollars away. Kahlúa, who was in her late twenties, came to Merchant Street for one reason that night: to flaunt her new Lexus, boobs, diamond ring, and vagina, fresh from Thailand.

  “Honey, I’m getting married next spring,” she said, extending her knotty knuckled hand, which sparkled with an emerald-cut diamond. “Congrats, girl!” was said all around. We wanted to ask how she’d funded this quick transformation and knew it had to be the guy who had proposed. Just a year before, Kahlúa had seemed like all those other butch queens, who’d put on a wig, a dress, and some heels on the weekend to attract cute guys who wanted a girl with something extra. I didn’t even know that Kahlúa was living her life as a girl, and she knew any girl would be envious of her progress, so she came there to make us gag. And gag we did.

  “I met this guy at Hulas about nine months ago,” she said, prompting Rebecca to walk away because Kahlúa’s Cinderella story was already too much for her. Rebecca believed you had to earn your womanhood. She was out on Merchant Street nearly every night, and no one gave her anything; she worked for it.

  “Girl, never mind her,” Shayna said, consoling Kahlúa, who was obviously hurt by Rebecca’s shade.

  “Well, we began dating, and he told me that I looked good in drag,” she said. “I told him I actually wanted to be a woman but didn’t have the money, and he said he would help me because he loved me. Next thing you know, I was flying to Bangkok to do it with Kalani’s doctor. I went in January.”

  “And he paid for everything?” Wendi said as a crowd of girls zeroed in.

  “Yes, girl. All twelve thousand dollars of it,” she boasted.

  This ignited the fairy tales of all the girls on that block, the urban legend we’d heard our entire lives: Some handsome or at least decent man would swoop in and pay for your pussy without asking for anything in return. And you would live happily ever after as a legal fe
male or, as Octavia St. Laurent said in Paris Is Burning, “a full-edged woman of the United States.” Despite my jealousy over Kahlúa’s swift transformation, I knew that having some man pay for your surgery involved sacrifice. Nothing is given to you for free. There’s a level of ownership when a man sponsors you, as the girls called it. I always wanted to say that I did this for me, that this was and is and will always be mine.

  “Girl, we like see,” Shayna said, not even feigning propriety. She had seen it all.

  As if she’d been practicing this choreography her entire life, Kahlúa crouched down, lifted her skirt, and spread her lips. I had never seen a vagina this close before. I had seen porn only through cable stations we didn’t have access to. It was always behind a haze of black-and-white moving pixels, and the vaginas I saw in Playboy were always prettily posed, with soft lighting and retouching. They looked more like illustrations. I naively thought there was one uniform vagina template, and Kahlúa’s looked nothing like that. It looked like a gruesome scene from Law & Order: SVU.

  “Ohhhh, it’s healing really well,” Shayna said, and the older girls nodded in unison. “Girl, that looks really good!”

  That was when I decided I knew nothing when it came to vaginas, despite my determination to have one of my own, straight from Thailand: just one of a handful of far-flung places (Morocco was once a hub; now Brazil, Iran, Serbia, and Thailand reign) where trans people travel for affordable gender affirming surgeries. Genital reconstruction surgery in the States can cost upward of thirty thousand dollars, whereas in Thailand, at the hands of surgeons who have performed significantly more procedures due to high demand, it can cost about a third of the price. In 2001, GRS was offered for about seven thousand dollars plus travel. The cost of surgery is the sole responsibility of transsexual patients, who are often already grappling with social and economic marginalization. Most trans people cannot afford to pay these expenses.

  Though I hadn’t saved enough money to pay for a ticket and hotel stay in Thailand, I asked Kahlúa for her surgeon’s contact information. Her positive experience and results presented me with possibility. Kahlúa wrote her surgeon’s name and Web address on a napkin, which I held on to tightly. It became my ticket to freedom.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Some of my most pivotal moments rose from pop culture. As a child who grew up in front of the television, I spent my adolescence blanketed in images from the late-nineties pop boom. I watched MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) faithfully every day after school, and it was seeing the premiere of “Bill, Bill, Bills” on the countdown that shifted how I saw myself. I was in awe of one girl, waving a hot comb in the air at her mother’s Houston, Texas, salon while lip-synching Destiny’s Child’s outspoken lyrics. Her name was Beyoncé Knowles.

  Oprah Winfrey talks about the moment she saw Diana Ross and the Supremes on The Ed Sullivan Show in the sixties. She has said that seeing Diana Ross being glamorous “represented possibility and hope . . . It was life-changing for me.” That’s what I felt as a teenager in front of my TV in a lower-middle-class apartment: no real possibilities beyond school, no images of any girls like myself in the media; it fed me to see Beyoncé in that video and, later, on magazine covers and at the Grammys and on my bedroom walls.

  I was a mixed black girl existing in a Westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible. I was not represented in the media, but Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child validated me. If I was working at the mall, Chad and Jeff dutifully recorded Destiny’s Child’s TV appearances; they knew how serious I was about DC3. When Mom went to the drugstore, she’d pick up Teen People or Vibe if she saw Destiny’s Child on the cover. I still remember the black-and-white Vibe cover featuring Beyoncé as Diana Ross after three members of Destiny’s Child were booted from the group. If I went to the hair salon, I asked for a blond weave, steadily rocking those loose braids Beyoncé wore in the “Bug a Boo” and “Say My Name” music videos. She was my style icon, the epitome of a graceful, talented, strong woman. She was the mold for me. She made me love being brown, she made me love my adaptable curly hair, she made me love that my thighs touched.

  All that admiration didn’t translate to those around 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 clung to the way things were. The past was more than prequel; 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: “Chaarrrlesss! 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 onto 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 and cultural critic 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.”

  Though I lost that battle, I did win others, including the grand prize in a speech contest where I fiercely recited Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman,” words that served as fuel, enabling me to recognize a legacy of resilience that lay deep within me. Then Alison told me with the biggest smile that I was one of four finalists for a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Hawai‘i at Maānoa. I wasn’t thrilled. I dreamed of going to NYU, like Felicity (or UNY, as it was called on the WB series), but I’d applied to UH because I didn’t want to leave Hawaii without having had bottom surgery. Alison told me that members of the faculty had nominated me, and the W. R. Farrington Memorial Scholarship committee would interview me in a few weeks. The award was worth sixteen thousand dollars, covering tuition, books, and other expenses.

  On the day of the interview, I knew the odds were stacked against me. When I saw Elaine, a Vietnamese girl who was by far the most academic girl in our school, I knew the interview process was just for show. The award had to be hers. We four finalists sat in the teachers’ lounge near the front lawn of the school, facing the circle sculpture by artist Satoru Abe. Called The Seed, it boasted bronze and gold leaves reaching out to the sun. I wasn’t nervous about the interview until I meditated on the cluster of three seeds at the bottom of the statue. The piece’s energy was in the reaching leaves, but they all emanated from those seeds. I thought about how this money could help me, how I’d be the first person in my family to attend college. I thought about accepting my scholarship and how it would be the seed money for my future.

  When one of the counselors facilitating the interview called me in, I was surprised by the number of committee members in the room. There were three women and four men, one of them the publisher of the local newspaper, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
and another the great-grandson of the namesake of the scholarship and our school, a former governor of Hawaii. I sat at the head of a long table, in front of the eyes of all of these adults. My hands were uncomfortably placed in front of me, one of my acrylic nails missing and my French manicure chipped slightly. I wore black wide-legged trousers and a white button-down blouse. My hair was auburn with two blond strands in my front layers, mirroring Beyoncé’s signature highlights.

  “So, you want to study law and be a certified public accountant as well?” one of the men asked, skeptical in the way that adults are when young people’s goals seem unrealistic. Quirky Ally McBeal had made me want to be a lawyer, and my business accounting teacher, who treated me with kindness, had made me want to be an accountant. I didn’t tell the board that. I told them I appreciated the certainty of numbers and the uncertainty of the law’s interpretation.

  They asked me other standard questions that spanned my involvement as a peer mediator and a member of Chrysalis. I effortlessly answered those questions because I expected them. As the interview was closing, one committee member gently inquired about what it meant for me to go through “the changes” I had gone through so publicly. I told her that I had transferred to Farrington to find the support that I needed, and though some students teased me, my experience had been mostly positive. Then she asked, in an unscripted moment of awe, “How do you do it all?”

  That was the first time an adult besides Alison looked at me with genuine wonder, as if I were something to be marveled at. I didn’t give myself a moment to think about how I was an honor student, a trans girl, a mall employee, a part-time sex worker, and a soon-to-be college student dreaming of a sex change. Like Beyoncé on my walls and Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt validated, reflected, understood. Her recognition of my struggle, my circumstance, and my tenacity overwhelmed me with emotion. I didn’t know if there was a right answer. I just knew I had to be honest.