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

by Janet Mock

  When I was watching TV with my brothers or typing my term papers at the computer lab, I didn’t think about my dates or the girls on Merchant Street. It was a short-term coping mechanism that allowed me to survive the intensity of the situation. It gave me the freedom that I needed to believe that I was still just any other college coed with plans and promise, though I broke the law four nights a week. I realize that I was able to make it through and actually succeed despite many traumatic situations, from sexual abuse to my father’s drug addiction to our family’s homelessness, because of compartmentalization. What I had done with my body issues, my family’s economic struggles, and my academic success was place them all in compartments. I isolated each from the other as I dealt with them separately.

  In the evenings, as Chad, Mom, and Jeff were saying their good nights, I was preparing for my nights out. One of my friends who also worked the streets would pick me up on her way to Merchant Street (I usually filled up her tank once a week by way of thanks) at about nine-thirty P.M. When we arrived downtown, I always greeted the girls who were out, and we’d have small talk about whether it was slow, dead, or busy and how their previous night went. We’d swap stories about the randomness of the streets, like the guy who’d approach a girl and ask her to pee on him in the alleyway for forty dollars. Or some poor girl, her arms bruised, would detail her unfortunate run-in with one of the tax-collecting queens. They were trans women, most likely high on meth, who worked for cheap or for drugs on the “back streets,” a seedier area at River and Kukui Streets. They randomly made their way to Merchant’s, asking girls for twenty here, fifty there. If you didn’t give them money and they thought you were lying, they would attack you. Fortunately, I never crossed paths with those vicious queens.

  At home, though, with the exhaustion of the streets and my course workload, I was turning into a vicious queen myself. I didn’t really try to hide the fact that I was on the streets nearly every night. Frankly, I couldn’t care less what my mother thought at the time because she had no right to pass judgment on my life after what she had put us through. I remember one day Mom was complaining about the electric bill, scolding me and my brothers for leaving lights on in empty rooms. She had these outbursts, when she cursed and slammed cabinets in the kitchen while cleaning, once every few months. Rightfully, she was stressed, overburdened, and underappreciated. Tired of hearing that particular woe-is-me monologue, I lifted myself from the couch, walked into my room, grabbed $120, and placed the cash on the kitchen counter. When I returned to the couch, Chad’s eyes went from the twenties to my face. He wore a look of shock and suspicion that asked, Where’d you get that?

  I watched my mother closely. She dried her hands on the striped dishrag and turned toward the money. She paused on the bills lying on the counter for a few seconds. I waited for her to ask me how I got that money. I wanted to confess to her about what I was doing. I wanted to cry into her chest and tell her that I rented out my mouth and sometimes my ass to men to make money for the things she couldn’t afford to get me. I wanted to tell her I was tired and I needed help. I needed her. Instead, she picked up the six bills and went to her room. Even then I knew that I was never a priority for my mother. It was the curse of always excelling. I never got in trouble. I always took care of things, and this was a blessing for my overstretched mother, who knew I had a handle on things.

  I wanted her to be the parent in that moment and demand that I stop. I wanted her to shake me and tell me that she’d find another way for me. But we both knew that she had no solution, no money, no resources that would stop me. She wouldn’t be saving me, so she remained silent and paid the electric bill.

  Chad, seventeen and a senior in high school, was worried about his sister. His look let me know that he knew where the twenties came from, why I was rarely home at night, and why I had new clothes and hairstyles. I wish I’d been empathetic enough to lie to Chad and say I had a rich boyfriend whom I spent nights with, who bought me things. At the time, I didn’t have the capacity to care what others thought. I was going to do what I needed to do regardless of anyone’s input.

  Chad recently told me he became suspicious after he heard whispers at school from his jock friends about seeing me on Merchant Street. His friends were among the caravan of guys who’d drive by, throwing obscenities, pennies, or eggs at the girls. They were the same guys who’d drop their friends off and return alone to date the girls. Chad also told me that he woke up a few times a night when I was out, checking my room periodically to see if I was home. “I couldn’t really sleep if you were out,” he said. “I was scared something was going to happen to you.”

  It broke my heart hearing this because I loved my brother, but I felt alone and was angry at the world. It was an anger and despair that blinded me to the genuine concern he had for me at a time when I was reckless and arrogant enough to think that I could handle it all.

  “I didn’t like some of the decisions you were making,” Chad told me recently. “I hated the fact that you were out there doing whatever you were doing. But I knew that you were doing it to be who you are today.”

  The woman I am today has sensory triggers that transport me back to late 2001. The smell of latex never fails to place me naked in the passenger seats of men’s cars. Waiting for a friend alone on a dark street corner of New York takes me back to being eighteen, scantily clad and in high heels, waiting for someone to pick me up. Any woman wearing Victoria’s Secret Amber Romance, the lotion I wore at the time, brings me back to the reflective windows on the buildings of that block where I’d primp myself between dates.

  It took years of self-reflection and heightened political consciousness for me to look back on my time as a teenager in the sex trade with the same compassion that I easily extended to young girls I read about in articles or saw featured in documentaries on sex trafficking. I saw these girls as vulnerable, controlled by an abusive man who lured them under the guise of love into the commercial sex industry. They even called him Daddy. No one on Merchant Street had a pimp to blame. I operated under the illusion that I was out there on my own free will. I had no villain, no one person to blame for my circumstance, so for years I blamed myself. This lack of a villain initially made it difficult for me to look at my younger self with compassion. I’ve argued with myself for years that no one forced me to do it; no pimp wooed me with sweet nothings and gifts to work the stroll. I chose to do it. But how many choices did my younger self really have?

  Selling sex seemed like a small price to pay in order to get what I needed. I did it for “free” my whole life, I thought, with Derek and Junior and the men I blew and fucked in my adolescence. I later learned that sexual abuse is a common pathway for many women in sex trade and work, with an estimated 66 to 90 percent of teen and adult women reporting that they were sexually abused prior to engaging in sex work, according to anthropologist Dorothy H. Bracey, who spent years profiling youth and women engaged in sex work. Uncovering that fact led me to realize that I was not alone, and there were many factors that made young trans women like me all the more vulnerable to the survival sex trade, whether by choice, circumstance, or coercion.

  Trans youth, especially those of color, represent a large portion of young people engaging in survival sex, yet they are often erased from narratives of organizations serving youth sex workers. The greatest push factor for trans girls engaged in the sex trade is poverty, stemming from homelessness (often brought on by parents and/or guardians refusing to accept their gender identity) or growing up in already struggling low-income communities where resources are scarce. A young trans woman, especially a runaway with no familial support, may not find a job due to lack of education or prior experience, age, or no updated ID documents showing her appropriate gender markers, which can lead to further discrimination. Most likely, if you’re a low-income trans woman of color, you don’t have access to health care, which makes it difficult to cover hormones and surgeries. With this systemic lack of resources glaring in your face,
your body aching for food and hormones, your mind internalizing the pressures of society that say you must look a certain way and that you don’t matter, survival sex work becomes a tried-and-true solution that you’ve seen older girls survive on for years.

  Without money of my own, I had no doctors, no hormones, no surgeries. Without money of my own, I had no independence, no control over my life and my body. No one person forced me or my friends into the sex trade; we were groomed by an entire system that failed us and a society that refused to see us. No one cared about or accounted for us. We were disposable, and we knew that. So we used the resources we had—our bodies—to navigate this failed state, doing dirty, dangerous work that increased our risk of HIV/AIDS, criminalization, and violence.

  Fortune and luck were the elements separating me from the hundreds of vulnerable women killed every year for being poor, trans, feminine, and of color. I later learned that trans women of color are disproportionately affected by hate violence. In 2012 alone, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) documented twenty-five homicides of people in the United States who were murdered because of their gender identity and/or sexual orientation. Thirteen were trans women, all of whom were women of color, comprising an astounding 53 percent of all anti-LGBTQ homicide victims, despite representing only 10.5 percent of survivors who reported incidents of hate violence to NCAVP. These stark statistics point to the disproportionate and deadly impact of hate violence against trans women of color.

  On a late night in November, just four weeks before my scheduled surgery, with my flight to Bangkok booked and finals around the corner, a white van pulled up to me on Queen Street. I had a rule never to date men in vans. I couldn’t know what they carried in the back of their vehicle, like weapons or other men. Too much risk was involved. So I just kept walking.

  “Can you please stop and talk to me?” the man said, heightening the pitch of his voice to sound less intimidating. “I’ve dated other girls before.”

  “Sorry, I don’t date men in vans,” I said as he continued to trail me slowly.

  “I’ve dated Shayna, Rebecca, and Heather,” he said, stopping me in my tracks. “Everyone knows me.”

  My guard went down a bit, and I asked him to turn on his overhead light. The yellow glow uncovered a chubby-cheeked man with brown shaggy hair under a Rainbow Warriors football cap. His eyes were bulgy, like a pug’s.

  “What do you want?” I said from the sidewalk, refusing to lean into his passenger window. I knew distance would keep me safe.

  “I’d like you to suck me off while I touch your sweet titties,” he said in the unabashedly horny way of horny men with no need for pleasantries.

  “You okay with my eighty-dollar donation?”

  He nodded while licking his lips. I had to do everything in my power not to laugh. I had become a professional at controlling my instincts and reactions in the pursuit of money. When I told him I’d follow him to the public parking lot on Beretania Street, he put his tongue back in his mouth. “Oh, just come with me,” he pleaded. “I’m really fast, easy. I’ll give you an extra forty.” He pulled a fan of crispy twenty-dollar bills from his pocket. They looked fresh, like unhandled bills from the ATM, my favorite kind. They made the work appear less dirty.

  Something in my core whispered, Wait for another date. But the sound of those crisp twenties in his stubby fingers was too loud. I jumped in the van and directed him to the parking lot where I took a lot of my dates. After he parked, he unbuttoned his cargo shorts and began stroking himself. “Help me out,” he said. “Show me those sweet titties.”

  I couldn’t stand men who said titties. It made me not want to have breasts. I lifted the bottom of my brown boobs out of my bra and began tweaking my nipples. He was hard, oohhhing and ahhhing as he kept stroking. I pulled a condom out of my purse and twisted the cap from my lube, filling the condom.

  “Ahhh, no need condom,” he said.

  “I don’t blow without a condom,” I said.

  “Okay, what about just a hand job, then?” he asked.

  “I don’t jerk without a condom,” I lied, because he was starting to skeeve me out.

  “Come on, I’ll give you two hundred dollars,” he said. “The easiest two hundred of your night.”

  “Money first,” I said as he let his penis stand on its own and grabbed the bills from his pocket.

  I put the money in my denim handbag and began stroking him. Under the beams of the moon, I could see the darkness of his dilated eyes. He looked at me with a focus that scared me. I realized that he was high on something. That internal whisper escalated to a shout: Just leave the money and get out. I ignored it, and he came within five minutes. I put my breasts away, handed him some wipes, and rubbed sanitizer on my hands, the smell of alcohol filling the car.

  “Told you I was easy.” He smiled as he turned the ignition. “Should I drop you at the same spot?”

  I nodded as my anxieties about him left me. He came, I got paid, and we were on our way back to the block. As we approached the corner of Merchant and Bethel, I noticed more girls were out at the far corner and asked him to drop me near them. Instead, he pulled over and grabbed my arm.

  “Give me your purse,” he said calmly. Under the lights of the street, I could see the irritated pocks on his cheeks and the frightening intensity of his stare. He was definitely tweaking.

  “No,” I said, lifting the lever of the door while tugging my purse, which held about eight hundred dollars from two nights of work.

  “Let your fucking purse go or I promise I’ll gut you,” he said as the glare of the pocketknife in his hand reflected slightly.

  “Please, just let it go,” I pleaded with him in my sweetest voice, hoping to ignite compassion in him, something absent in all of these exchanges.

  “Bitch,” he said, grabbing a handful of my hair and bashing the side of my face into the center console between our seats. “Let the fucking purse go.”

  “HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY FUCKING HELP ME!” I screamed. I didn’t feel the throbbing of my head, just the rush of adrenaline.

  Miraculously, I got the door open with my left hand gripping my bag, my right foot on the street, and some of my hair still in his hand. He was too strong and won the tug-of-war, speeding off with my purse and a hair extension as I fell on the street. The sting from the glued track stung my scalp as I lay there in defeat.

  “GET THAT LICENSE PLATE!” I screamed when a couple of girls ran down the street to me. I called the cops from one of their cell phones, even though some of the girls predicted that they wouldn’t do anything for me. I told the operator that I’d been robbed, describing the van, the license plate, and the incident.

  Two police cars—the normal squad car and a single-rider golf-car-like vehicle—arrived within ten minutes. I sat on a bench in Fort Street Mall as three officers asked me to relay the details of the attack. I felt naked, unprotected without my purse or identification, and inappropriate, like a girl with no keys to any home.

  “Why did you go in the van?” asked the officer writing the report.

  “He was giving me a ride home,” I lied, knowing that the truth couldn’t be written in the report.

  “Aren’t you out here every weekend?” asked the officer who drove the cart, chewing his gum nonchalantly. I recognized him and his mustache. He never bothered us but did drive around the block every few hours, often stopping to chat with Rebecca.

  I nodded with embarrassment. He wanted to squash this report and put me in my place as a prostitute unworthy of justice. His indignant tone said what all three officers were thinking: There is no purpose in writing a report for you as you pretend to be a victim. You brought this on yourself. I wanted to cry, because I realized the absurdity of my claims, of the fact that I had the audacity to report someone else’s wrongdoing to the police when I was breaking the law on the regular. Still, I wanted to show them my worth, to say that I was more than just a teenage prostitute. I was different, special, worthy. I
was a college scholar with promise and a 3.8 GPA. My cleavage-baring tank top and frayed denim miniskirt betrayed me. To them, I was nothing more than another hooker. No one would miss me if I went missing.

  “Do you want to press charges?” the officer with the notebook asked in an exasperated tone.

  I shook my head and watched as they drove away. I used one of the girls’ phones and called one of my regulars, Sam, whom I had been dating since my junior year of high school, to pick me up. I didn’t have the courage to return home. I felt unworthy of my own bed and stayed at Sam’s high-rise apartment overlooking Ala Moana Beach. I relayed the details of the attack while lying in his Notre Dame T-shirt.

  Sam was in his late thirties, with sandy blond hair and large green eyes that always took me in with a warm compassion that I rejected each time he hugged me, touched me, moved deep inside me. Sam was from San Diego and had lived in Hawaii for about five years, working as a lawyer. He moonlighted as a photographer, traveling to Brazil, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Thailand to capture trans women for his friend’s popular pornography portal.

  I cried myself to sleep that night and woke in the morning to the smell of eggs and coffee. He handed me a mug as I sat at his breakfast bar, where I saw the brightest blue ocean. I still marvel at the fact that I grew up surrounded by such powerful beauty, the Pacific Ocean nestling me in its majesty.

  “You know, Janet, I was thinking,” he started. He was my only regular who knew my name and where I lived. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

  “You think I want to do this?” I said, swishing the sweet bitterness of the coffee in my mouth. “I’m too close to bow out now.”

  “What if I gave you another option?” he said. “What if you let me pay for the rest of your surgery?”

  “I couldn’t let you do that,” I said, tucking my knees to my chest, stretching his college shirt.

  “Why not?”

  “It just wouldn’t be right,” I said.