Explore Quotes by Janet Mock

I was six years old when 'The Little Mermaid' was released in 1989 and was immediately struck by the fiery-maned, melodic-voiced, tail-swinging mermaid protagonist. She spoke to me on levels deeper than her father's oceanic kingdom.

My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.

I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.

My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary.

A staple in my makeup bag is Black Opal's True Color Skin Perfecting Stick Foundation, which offers a range of colors with many undertones.

The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.

Media gatekeepers - editors, publishers, film studios and the like - need to begin investing in talent behind the scenes, developing and resourcing marginalized voices to tell their own stories. At the end of the day, it's about the story and what will enable the audience to truly see, understand, and know the life and times of the subject.

If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it's Kim Kardashian West.

My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose.

One musical that deeply influenced me - and continues to do so - is the 1997 ABC TV movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella,' starring Brandy, with Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the prince's mom.

For many, hair is just hair. It's something you grow, shape, adapt, adorn, and cut. But my hair has always been so much more than what's on my head. It's a marker of how free I felt in my body, how comfortable I was with myself, and how much agency I had to control my body and express myself with it.

What helps me when someone puts me down or aims to offend me is to not take what they say personally. I try my best to not internalize their comments.

We are all part of a larger collective looking to create a more beautiful and just world.

When I was younger, I wish I would have been told more often that I was right and nothing was wrong with me, that I was deserving of everything this world has to offer, and that my visions for my future were worthy of pursuit.

Reproductive rights are about body and medical autonomy: our collective and deeply personal right to choose what we want to do to/with our bodies. Trans people and feminists should be building natural alliances here.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

Stern and critical, my father couldn't accept how feminine and dainty I was in comparison to my rough-and-tumble brother.

I know how messy things can get when adults overstep their boundaries and insert themselves - their politics, their fears, their prejudices, their ignorance - into the lives of young people.

I don't chase beauty trends.

When I was a toddler, my father cut hair in the townhouse we had shared together in Long Beach, California, where Dad was stationed with the U.S. Navy. The buzz of clippers consistently hummed as he gave fades to his coworkers, my uncles, and my brother, but his clippers were never oiled and plugged in for my head.

'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.