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

Author:Janet Mock [Mock, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

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 yourself, 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.

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