"I have to tell you something," Janet Mock says to her boyfriend, Aaron, at the start of her new memoir, Redefining Realness.
Mock is sitting on Aaron's bed in an apartment in New York City, a pillow between her legs, avoiding his eyes. She is about reveal her trans identity, but before she does the chapter ends, and the reader is flung back into Mock's childhood.
She has to tell you something.
Mock's memoir, released Feb. 4 ( Atria Books/Simon & Schuster ), is the story of a trans woman coming of age in the 1990s and navigating the circumstances that require so many trans women to meet life with an extra dose of resilience: poverty, family drug addiction, childhood sexual abuse, sex work and discrimination. But the story is far more complicated than the tragic and mundane portraits historically produced about trans women of color. The memoir follows Mock's upbringing in Hawaii and Oakland, Calif. as she struggles to make sense of her unchanging identity as a girl, despite being assigned male at birth.
Redefining Realness has been hailed as an urgently needed and revolutionary contribution to LGBT literature, an affirmation to queer youth of color not typically reflected in books and media. And it is accessible enough to educate the unfamiliar. It is littered with explanations, definitions, facts and statistics about transgender lives.
But Redefining Realness stands on its own beyond the hype of Mock's identity or the multitude of hardships therein. Mock, a former staff editor for People.com, has produced a crafted memoir.
Mock found herself at the center of controversy recently following an interview on the book with CNN's Piers Morgan. Morgan referenced Mock's childhood by referring to her as a "boy," despite the fact that Mock writes that she always identified as a girl. Mock and other transgender activists accused Morgan of sensationalizing her story in the interview. The dispute between Mock and Morgan blew up on Twitter, prompting a second interview between the two and raising questions about transgender coverage in the mainstream media.
Windy City Times caught up with the writer to talk about her story, the Chicagoans who supported her in writing it and the Piers Morgan interview that has everyone talking. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Windy City Times: So, I do want to talk about the Piers Morgan interview, but I am more interested in talking about the book first.
Janet Mock: Yeah, there's where I want to be. I'm tired of centering this conversation around him. We're still centering this conversation around a white, cis ( short for "cisgender," a word to describe people who are not trans ), hetero man. I think that they have enough conversations centered around them. I would much rather center my work around what it's usually centered around, which is trans women.
WCT: I feel like I get so much of your life story from this book, but I don't know how you became a writer. When does that interest start?
Janet Mock: Memoir, if it's done well, it's supposed to be a reflection. So for me, a lot of the experiences in the book are long-time ago reflections, almost 10-15 years. So for me, I now have a fully holistic lens … so, for me, to reflect on my college years, when I really discovered being a writer would have been too soon for me. ... I think that's another book, most likely.
I think that my journey to writing started with reading. I think I touch on that a little bit, how I romanticize books because my mother loved books, and then in that sense when she took me to the library in the seventh grade, and I first had access to free books. I got to dream of my possible self through other writers…
WCT: The book is accessible to all audiences, but for a lot of people, this is going to be the first book they feel reflected in. Who did you write this book for?
Janet Mock: That's so funny. This is an argument me and my editor had 'cause my thing was, "I'm writing this book for trans girls who didn't have representation.."
So, first and foremost, my audience was young trans women. That's who I wrote it wrote it for. I think when I was growing up, I didn't have time to look for a definition. I didn't have the resources to do that. I think if I would have had access to words, I would have been more politically conscious.
WCT: Did you feel responsible for representing the broad trans community in this book?
Janet Mock: Yes, that is a real struggle, but I think for me it is always centering what my work is around. I center around trans women, and if you want to get more specific, it is around young trans women, poor trans women and trans women of color. So that is a very specific experience.
That's what I wanted this book to be at its core. And so to really talk about being someone who does not have a single identity lens—like there's so many different facets to my story—we talk about poverty, sexual abuse, sex work, drug addiction with my parents, and then the context of being a trans girl, and race and class and all of that. What you hear with writing, is that the more specific you get, the more universal it becomes. So, I didn't feel like I needed to speak for every trans person out there because I can't.
WCT: Did you learn anything important about yourself in writing the book?
Janet Mock: It was a validation of my identity as a writer. It was more healing than I think learning anything from myself. Everyone talks about it being a cathartic process. That's what it was. I really had to sit with myself in silence and solitude and write these experiences I was told that I shouldn't write about, told by our culture, told by the media, told by all this internalized stigma and shame that I shouldn't write about these experiences.
So, being able to sit there and hold myself accountable to my truth was healing to me. Now, I can talk about these issues, and I don't have the same sense of fear about them. They're still painful memories of course. The trauma doesn't go away, but it's easier because now I don't feel like someone's going to come out and say, "Look at this! I found out this about you."
WCT: It's all out there now.
Janet Mock: Yeah, it's all out there now, and I think that people have a fuller portrait of me than the media. From this experience [with Piers Morgan], we see that the media will warp things a little bit. Things become not even about who I am.
WCT: I want to go back a little bit to your decision to come out in Marie Claire in 2011. It was very important for a lot of people to see a successful woman come out as trans. Did you anticipate the outpouring of support from trans people?
Janet Mock: You know, it's so interesting—when you're in the middle, you don't really know. I feel like I'm in a similar moment right now. All this stuff is going on around me, and I don't really feel like I have reflections. It never hits me until some young girl or some young trans person comes up to me and tells me, "This story meant this to me." Or, "This enabled me to tell my story and reveal myself." And I'm like, "Oh my God." Or someone's coming to me in tears, and I'm like, "What?!" That's not something I can take on yet. It feels very similar with the book. I can't believe that I've written a book that a girl can be able to access and read and then have reflection and be like, "Oh my God, this is me. This is my life."
WCT: You have some Chicago connections. In your acknowledgements you thank Jen Richards and Angelica Ross, two Chicago trans activists. What is your connection to them, and what role did they play in your process with the book?
Janet Mock: We all met on Twitter. We live in different cities, and they became my community. They became my sisters. I think that when I talk about exceptionalism and all these notions that separate you from community, and I think that that's what kind of happened, especially when I was working at People and I wasn't really open about being trans. When I opened up about being trans, I became connected to all these sisters around the country, who I started doing Google Hangouts with.
When I went to Chicago, I remember I met up with Angelica and Jen for the first time. I think that was in late 2011. They just became my sisters because you don't have to explain as much, for me at least, about the experience to a trans woman. I feel like there's a sense that you can be fuller because you're not necessarily educating. They became constants in my life. As I became more and more public, they became my confidants. They helped shape me. They were my counsel. That's what Angelica and Jen are for me. They're part of that circle of sisterhood.
WCT: You are connected to Chicago in another way. You were so outspoken about Paige Clay, a Chicago transgender woman who was murdered in 2012. Why did her story move you?
Janet Mock: I was having the realization of intersectionality in my life. You see the numbers and the statistics—like trans women of color are most susceptible to violence and all of this horrific stuff.
But when you saw this girl. I think there was humanity in the little details that [Windy City Times] did publish about where she worked and who she was. You never saw portraits like that of trans women. There were never obituaries like that. That's part of having sensitive journalists, not just trying to be tolerant, but having journalists who see trans women—specifically those whose bodies are inactive—seeing them as human beings with lives that are full. I think that struck me so much because I was becoming desensitized to the violence that was happening.
The first keynote I ever gave was right after Paige's death. That was at [University of Southern California]. I had a whole speech prepared, and I had to change it. This was the commencement speech for a lavender ceremony. It's supposed to be celebratory, and I'm supposed to give them something, and I couldn't. CeCe [McDonald] was going on at that time. Paige's death happened. And Brandy Martell had just died. That was my awakening. Those three incidents, happening within months of each other, was too much for me. It really sharpened my political consciousness. I think that trans women of color had not had voices, and the only time people had heard about us is when we are gone. For me, it was like, "I'm alive, I'm here. How can I be of most use?" My mission became very clear for me.
WCT: This brings us back to the Piers Morgan interviews. How do you feel after the second interview?
Janet Mock: I think it's a huge commentary on what allyship is. I think it's something we've had huge problems with, specifically in the trans community, people who say that they think they know things, but they don't want to listen. And then when they're criticized and corrected, they vilify the marginalized who are saying, "No, this is our lives."
For me, my goal was to discuss this book which was a landmark book, which then got lost in a lot of discussion. I hope I held myself in a way that showed people that I have something to say. Hopefully that will lead them to the book. But the media warping of me as, I don't know, deceiving him in some way … or making it into book sales. The first time I actually have something, which is my life's journey and work, it's centered around him and this interaction. Now, everyone wants to talk about him. That is the problem. I am spending my time as a young trans women of color talking about a white, cis, hetero man with lots of privilege and voice.
But my biggest teaching moment here is that the community stepped out and spoke up and showed their love for me. That has been overwhelming.
WCT: In light of this and the interview with Katie Couric and Laverne Cox, do you think there is something that trans people need to strategize on changing the conversations in mainstream media?
Janet Mock: It's just the way our stories have been told since 1952 with Christine Jorgensen. You can't just change American media culture. It's not like Katie talks to Piers and then Barbara Walters talks to Katie. This is what we do. If we don't blatantly that she was a boy and her name was "this," then you may not know that she is trans. The only way that we can do that is by putting that consistently out there.
I think this is the first time that we've had a voice and come back said that that's not okay. I think that social media is key here, that it was a movement of people. I was at my book party. I didn't watch it live. I saw it on Twitter, and I watched the reaction, and I was like, "Whoa." They were talking back. That was powerful to say that, "No, we're not going to take this anymore. This is not a one way conversation. This is a dialogue. We're going to talk back to you."
WCT: What is next for you now that the book is out?
Janet Mock: I think right now it's centering the conversation around [the book] and the issues that are there. I think it's continuing to make sure that it's accessible to people. I did this story-giving campaign where I linked people who could give money to people who requested books because [some] people came to me and said, "I really can't afford books…" Eighteen dollars is a lot for some people. So for me, it's about making sure that this gets into the hands of those that I wrote it for.
Janet Mock will be at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St., 12:30-2 p.m. on Feb. 11. More information is available at janetmock.com/events .
See video coverage of her visit at www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Janet-Mock-makes-Chicago-visit/46169.html .
