Top 70 Janet Mock Quotes

We exist in a culture where trans people are constantly delegitimized.

Our differences are what make us great. Let us think about how we can extend this appreciation to people of color, undocumented immigrants, and other members of the community.

I walk in the world as a woman because I am a woman, and people should take me as that. I’m not passing as anything that I’m not. I’m just being myself.

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.

When I was 12, my brother and I moved back to Honolulu to live with our mother. Hawaii felt like another universe, and reflecting on it, I am struck by how much more open and accepting it was.

When you hear anyone policing the bodies of trans women, misgendering and othering us, and violently exiling us from spaces, you should not dismiss it as a trans issue that trans women should speak out against. You should be engaged in the dialogue, discourse, and activism that challenges the very fibers of your movement.

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.

I’m an island girl, so I love super bronzy skin!

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.

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

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.

It is the world’s limitations and the myths that we internalize about ourselves that pushes us to diminish our power and ignore it.

I think a lot of people are very interested in why other people are trans or why people are gay.

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 transgender people because it’s also a very visible one.

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.

Throughout the day, I like to spritz my face with a rose water for extra moisture.

I don’t have to explain anything to trans women. Trans women know exactly what’s going on.

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

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.

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.

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.

We cannot and should not be reduced to just one sliver of ourselves, as it skews the truth of our lived experiences.

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.

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.

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 grew up at a time in Hawaii where there were trans women around, so there were visible role models for me. At the same time, as a low-income trans girl of color, there were so many things that I didn’t have access to. I didn’t have access to a great education. I didn’t have access to affordable healthcare.

In seventh grade, I met my best friend Wendi, who is a trans woman.

When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.

I don’t feel as if I’m typecast – like any writer, the difficulty is that one facet of my identity becomes louder, obscuring the fact that I’m also a woman, a writer, a lover of pop culture and other things.

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.

I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. ‘Marie Claire’ was offering the chance to be a part of a women’s magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.

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

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

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, it had become routine for me to be sent home for wearing dresses. My mere presence in a skirt became an act of protest that would get me called out of class and into the vice principal’s office.

It’s great to engage with the mainstream media to get messages out, but the most empowering tool is to create records of our lives, and our own images, which are not filtered through judgements, biases, or misunderstandings.

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

It was through my hashtag #girlslikeus where I connected with other trans women on Twitter and Tumblr. We had challenging conversations, courageous personal revelations, and shared insights and experiences, and just had fun. The hashtag tethered me to many women in my community in impactful, lasting ways.

Movies have always been spaces of refuge for me. For a few harmonious hours, I could escape my reality of being a girl living on the margins.

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.

Hawaii was so integral to my journey. I was just there at the right time.

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

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

Women are so policed and devalued and dehumanized when it comes to the work they do.

I wrote ‘Redefining Realness’ because not enough of our stories are being told, and I believe we need stories that reflect us so we don’t feel so isolated in our apparent ‘difference.’

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

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.

As a visible and outspoken trans woman myself, I know that it’s rare not to have your trans-ness lead the way for you in public spaces.

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.

‘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.

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

I hope being honest about my experiences and contextualizing them empowers young women to step into their truths, tell their own stories, and live visibly.

Trans people are not a monolith.

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

I still have a YA-genre-series type of a book in me that I really want to tell.

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

Curiosity is vital to the growth of our society.

In the evening, I use a cleansing oil – coconut oil also works – to remove makeup.

Because trans people are marked as artificial, unnatural, and illegitimate, our bodies and identities are often open to public dissection. Plainly, cisgender folks often take it as their duty to investigate our lives to see if we’re real.

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.

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.