Explore Quotes by Janet Mock

Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.

I learned to hide aspects of my personality. Playing with girls was fine, for example, but playing with their Barbies was something I could do only behind closed doors.

To say that I loved school would be an understatement. It was my oasis, my sanctuary.

When I was a high school freshman in Honolulu, I would sit with my girlfriends on the bleachers of the school amphitheater every morning. We'd meet in the same spot and chat for an hour before homeroom began.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.

Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.

I knew very early on that I was not pretty. No one ever called me pretty. It was not the go-to adjective people used to describe me.

I want - no, I need - to see images of black girls and femmes twerking, slaying and primping, just as much as I need to see Symone Sanders bopping her head and Representative Maxine Waters reclaiming her time.

We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.

As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.

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 know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders.

We are multiplicities, and none of us live single-identity lives.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I was used to hearing other words: Smart. Studious. Well-spoken. Well-read. They became pillars of my self-confidence, enabling me to build myself up on what I contributed rather than what I looked like.

Great conversations always spark in a genuine interest to recognize and know the other person's story and, therefore, recognizing and understanding and celebrating their humanity.

If we want to enlighten people or give them new thoughts and ideas, we have to be willing to do the work of educating them.

We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.

I want to create the content I didn't have while growing up.

Our culture often demeans and devalues the work, the pleasures, and the contributions of women and feminine people. This is, in part, why beauty culture is dismissed as unimportant and frivolous.

Once, when I was 5 years old, a little girl who lived next door to my grandmother dared me to put on a muumuu and run across a nearby parking lot. So I did. I threw it on, hiked it up in one hand, and ran like hell. It felt amazing to be in a dress. But suddenly my grandmother appeared, a look of horror on her face.

I was in the seventh grade when I first began to identify as trans and express my gender identity as a girl. My social transition began with growing my hair and wearing clothes and makeup that made me feel like Destiny's Fourth Child.