“Redefining Realness” (2014) by Janet Mock is her coming of age story as a transgender woman of colour in the US, the book she wishes she could have read growing up.
On page 4:
“I had yearned for true love ever since my junior year of high school, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in Mrs Chun’s English class. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that Janie’s ‘soul crawled out from its hiding place’ when she met Tea Cake. I wanted to come out of my hiding place. I wanted a love that could open me up to the world and to myself. I wanted my own Tea Cake who wanted all of me.”
From that moment I was hooked – and then found myself on a harrowing roller coaster ride. I had read her May 2011 Marie Claire article about her trans story, and wrote a post about her based on it in 2013, but that turned out to be the Disney version. The book goes into the sexual abuse and poverty she experienced, her parents’ drug addiction, and the porn and sex work she did.
The book mainly covers the period from 1989 to 2001, ages six to 18, growing up in her Black father’s Oakland and Dallas and in her Native Hawaiian mother’s Honolulu.
Omission: Although she makes a big deal of full disclosure and not hiding who you truly are, the book leaves out her first marriage, to her husband Troy. You are left to believe that her boyfriend Aaron was the first man to seriously love and accept her as she was.
In 2017 she said of that omission:
“What I love about writing in this genre is the sense of revealing myself to myself, revealing my desires to myself, getting to know and figure out the ways in which I think and the ways in which I act in the story that I choose to tell – having that, and then breaking the walls (breaking the page?) and telling that to the reader, and trusting them to not think any less of me for having made that distinct omission and choice.”
At times I did wonder if it was one of those fake memoirs – it is a bit too Oprahesque – but in the main it reads like an unfiltered trans woman’s story, the kind you hear on YouTube. If it is not strictly true, it is true enough.
In her sex worker days:
“In the small denim handbag that held my condoms, lube, baby wipes, hand sanitizer, scented lotion, and lip gloss, I carried a folded piece of paper with words from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings: ‘I didn’t come to stay.'”
Mock on Beyonce:
“She was the mold for me. She made me love being brown, she made me love my adaptable curly hair, she made me love that my thighs touched.”
Black-girl interns of New York on Mock:
“[They said] I was different because ‘You’re the right amount of black,’ the kind white woman editors aren’t intimidated to work with.”
– Abagond, 2018.
Source: Powell’s.
See also:
531
It is great that someone with her family background and experience, and her journey has the courage to write about it.
This statement also reminds me of my experience working in New York:
The multinational company I worked for in midtown Manhattan was stratified by race – blacks and puerto ricans in the mailroom, Asians in the backroom systems development area, white consultants. There was not one single black full consultant in New York, and only one Asian out of over 100.
But, in the consulting area, there was one associate consultant and one analyst which I heard many refer to as the “right kind of black”. The associate consultant was a mixed race British woman, who spoke with her distinctive British accent, and the analyst grew up in Haiti, but was also not too dark, grew up in the wealthy neighborhoods and educated in French.
The only black professional staff they hired were light-complexioned non-Americans.
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Reblogged this on League of Bloggers For a Better World.
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[…] Source: Janet Mock: Redefining Realness […]
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one company? there were black american IT consultants out there when I was working in the city, ca. 1994-1998, and at AT&T.
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core staff is another thing entirely
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and i was back into desktop support in the mid 2000’s, in NJ, it was mostly black and white americans doing IT for corporate stuff, again, core staff not so much
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Wow now im reading trumps comments today, thats awkward, that trans stuff is deeper than skin color.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/28/politics/trump-tweet-jay-z-van-jones/index.html
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This notion or issue seems to be popping out of the media woodwork, the trans thing.
http://www.bbc.com/news/disability-42751434
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Jesus Christ Abagond, what the hell is wrong with you why do you instead on putting these disgusting condemned people on your blog what the hell!!!!!! I say to myself – “OK Satan, Abagond should be done with this mermaid crap, so let’s see what’s up! ” What was I thinking…….
The media is putting these he-she, she-its to clown us and to replace actual black women. Basically there all saying “Hey – look at this transvestite and look at an actual black woman! Get it! Even a black man looks better than a black woman.” Nasty bastards.
Time to get back to your senses.
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@ Satanforce
LOL!
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@v8driver
Many like to think that trans people are screwed up or Black people are screwed up. In truth it is they who are screwed up: they never learned to love themselves. Trump is like that too. They have to pump up their fragile egos by putting down anyone who they see as different. I used to think racism was simple ignorance, but it goes way deeper than that.
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Hey Satanforce
“Time to get back to your senses.”
Oh the irony in that statement.
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One of the the things that made me realize how true this is is the way whites view themselves versus how black people like me view them. From a cultural perspective anyway.
When Foreign blacks like me think about white American culture: Sees and reads about Space shuttle, metal- and salt-cooled nuclear reactors, mechanization of agriculture, transistorized electronics, Tennessee Williams, Bruce Timm cartoons, Saturn V rockets, Interstate Highway, ARPAnet etc. Says to self, “This is some awesome stuff! How can adapt and integrate this into my own culture and society?”
When white Americans think about white American culture:** “Well, at least I’m NaN!”
I think we all know what NaN means. Hint – I don’t mean “Not a Number.”
For all this far- , alt-Right, wierdo white right wing , white supremacist, paleoconservative crap talking about the preservation of the white race and whatever, they can only attack other people. They will right all these essays and postallthese 19th century looking oil paintings but when comes to an actual appreciation and evaluation of their own cultural achievements there is none. The funny thing is , that this is not a fringe action , but seems to me to be the mainstream white response in defense of whiteness (ie. the absence of non-whiteness). By this, I mean the women who clutches her purse and crosses the street when she sees me, or goes to back of the elevator when she and clutches her bag when me and my old man went in are simply signalling their status of being an approved ethnicity. After all, how would I be able to perform such a robbery? It is the same with the White Supremacist – they are just signalling their status in a failed society.
Notice that this sort of thing is happening exactly when a specific form American Civilization is in decline. No more space program. A return to primary industries for economy (fracking, agriculture). Military projects overbudget, cancelled or just out right disappointing. Movies that are basically factory produced CGI. A music industry, once a main for for influencing the world, dead on the sword of Bittorent. Its the same attitude as when the Japanese looked like they were going to take over in the 80s , early 90s (Plaza Accord had fixed that though.) But who can they blame for their decline now? Maybe some sort of culture based on national self-examination? Well I guess its hard to sustain a narcissistic culture when you can’t bear to look in the mirror.
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‘redefining realness’ i had surgery because i hurt something inside me lifting heavy things. To fix something. I really can’t say it’s not a tautology saying trans ppl are ‘not messed up’ because surgery made her real? I mean it literally does not follow. It’s giving me a headache.
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How is that different from a dark skinned person using a lightener. It’s not accepting your body as is.
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@ v8driver
“How is that different from a dark skinned person using a lightener.”
Generally a dark skinned person who uses a lightener does so because society tells them lighter skin is better.
Trans people on the other hand go through reassignment even though society tells them they should be happy with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Whatever causes someone to be transgender, it is something that they are even when their society vehemently disapproves.
I wonder how many people would lighten their skin in a society that thoroughly disapproved of it.
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“Many like to think that trans people are screwed up or Black people are screwed up. In truth it is they who are screwed up: they never learned to love themselves. Trump is like that too.”
Hmmm, that’s an interesting spin.
That’s like saying: Many like to think that Caitlyn Jenner is screwed up or White people are screwed up. In truth it is they who are screwed up: they never learned to love themselves. Obama was like that too.
To me, or in the alternative, my measly opinion, these people are living empty lives; have an abundance of the NEED to belong to something. Like a house of horrors and meaningless vileness. In a lot of instances, they seek the glory or attention of the dominant society. Who, by the way, secretly look upon them as the ultimate skanks of the earth.
Wisdom of Solomon 14:26 Disquieting of good men, forgetfulnesse of good turns, defiling of souls, CHANGING OF KIND, disorder in mariages, adulterie, and shameles un-cleanliness.
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“…I mean the women who clutches her purse and crosses the street when she sees me… After all, how would I be able to perform such a robbery?”
I used to get so infuriated by that behavior. Then over time, I realized that White people who do things like that don’t see me. They literally don’t see me as a person. To them, me and all Black people are just human-ish shapes that they project their stereotypes, news images and fears onto.
Once I became aware it was their mental movie they were reacting to and not me as a person, I realized how stupid such people were. If they were that silly, they didn’t deserve the energy it took for me to get angry.
Your point about White Supremacists, et.al. defining themselves by who they are not instead of who they are is instructive. Likely all of their talk of superiority masks hovels of inferiority like a massive Potemkin Village.
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“…they seek the glory or attention of the dominant society. Who, by the way, secretly look upon them as the ultimate skanks of the earth.”
Good thing they are learning to love themselves and move beyond caring what the dominant society thinks of them, huh?
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Exactly. We would not let an anorexic be allowed to have a medic ration them out amphetamines and diuretics so that they may allow themselves to become freakish bone-curtains. Even though we could do this. Have some 5′ 11” fellow stay alive for the rest of his life at 99 pounds. We rightfully laugh at Sammy Sosa’s freakish transformation from Don Cheadle black to Will Ferrell white. We know that anorexia and skin-bleaching are an outward manifestation of mental illness and social breakdown. So why we do we accept he-shes and she-its? Why don’t we help them get the help they need?
That whole uproar with Rachel Dolezal when she revealed that she was “transracial” just shows the utter hypocrisy of the whole shemale movement and their avant-garde enablers. Both the transracial and transvestite believe that they are something that can only be subjectively experienced as a result of social or biological conditions respectively. That is why when these weirdoes “transform” themselves, they are always an exaggerated stereotype of what they seek to become. The transvestite is always some Jessica Rabbit looking freak that must crust its face with cosmetics, or an androgynous 250 pound hippopotamus he-beast that has merely changed its stretchy pants and hipster t-shirt for a tablecloth with a whole cut in the middle for the head to go through. Or like how Rachel Dolezal became a radical upon her “transformation”.
Of course, Bruce Jenner had “transitioned” around the same time Dolezal was found out so, according to the Liberal Hierarchy of Pity, we had to protect the white man becoming a “woman”, while condemning the white woman faking “blackness”. Yet, both of them were merely engaging in stereotypical performances copied from a sick media created by a sick society that reduces the experiences of lived people to fodder for punchlines, pornography and profitability. That is why I am not surprised at this embrace of transvestites- even though when they are less the 1 percent of the population. If gender is a social construct, then the transvestite is truly the ideal of a sick society.
In the early days of Christianity, one of the main debates the Christians and and cults like the Gnostics had was the role of the body in Creation. The Christians (quite rightly) understood that God doesn’t make mistakes – he didn’t make with the “wrong body.” God doesn’t make mistakes. He made you. Thus you cannot separate the physical, with its hormones and chemicals, from the mental. The Gnostics didn’t think so. They believed that the body was a creation of an evil God – the Demiurge. In fact , they believed that we are just Ghosts in a Shell, and that the eternal soul was imprisoned by our filthy mortal bodies. Yet here we are, over 1800 years later still having to debunk this Gnostic foolishness. Only now, we have modern neurology and philosophy of mind to show that our body is integral to our mental state. Yet here we are, still doing battle with modern-day death cults. Some things just never change.
Well at least people aren’t amputating themselves so that they can become “transabled”.Oh… wait a minute….
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Satan, I’d love to see you kitted out in a dress, pumps, a wig, and full-faced makeup!
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yellow sun dress, pink thong!
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jk
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“Sammy Sosa’s freakish transformation from Don Cheadle black to Will Ferrell white. We know that anorexia and skin-bleaching are an outward manifestation of mental illness and social breakdown. So why we do we accept he-shes and she-its? Why don’t we help them get the help they need?” – Satanforce
Exactly, … very good Sir!
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Two days later Satanforce awakes. But he is not his usual self. Instead he is attired, not in his typical garb but a Christian Dior sun dress, Manolo Blahnik pumps, what appears to be virgin a Russian Remy hair implanted into his head as the form of yaki, and enough makeup and maskara to both paint and build the Sistine Chapel. The Enemy defeated in his lat battle. Rendered him unconscious. Beat him. Humiliated him.
Satanforce wept.
But he did not bawl. He did not wail. He barely made a sound. But he did cry but a single tear. Being the utter example of virility and manliness that he his, the single tear that rolled down his cheek was enough to chemically react with that disgusting coat of make-up creating the hair growth compound that grew him a beard that makes Fidel Castro’s own look like Jack Sparrow’s.
But if a single tear could do that, what of the source of his testosterone itself? Almost instantly, his thong split apart, reforming itself into a reinforced Kevlar jockstrap barely able to contain the weight of his testicles, and his pantyhose morphed into a pair of dark grey Lee’s Dungarees (34×36 Straight Fit. Amazon Wishlist available via e-mail).
A simple crick of his neck was enough to transform that weave into his trademark dreadlocks and that overpriced dress into a beige coloured Kariba.
Realizing the Enemy’s victory, he quickly ran downstairs nearly breaking down the door. For he knew his task has just begun. As though it may be a cool Caribbean weekend, to Satanforce, the Reedemer of Black Race, the Restorer of the Throne of the Black Man and Defender of the Virtue of the Black Woman to be weak, is to meet his end.
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@ satanforce
Too Darn Funny! ROTFLMAO!
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Christian Dior sundress and Manolo Blahnik pumps?
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Blame v8driver and his comments above yours.
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