Janet Mock

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

“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 h...”

“I think about Ellen DeGeneres, seeing her every single day on a show. Her identity is there every day, but what leads the way is her talent and how much you like her.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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 shoul...”

“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, i...”

“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 stor...”

“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 befo...”

“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 wa...”

“If I'm watching 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta,' there's a part of that that's just escapism. I'm not watching it with a political lens, but there is a part of me that certain things trigge...”

“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 dut...”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“On my road to self-discovery, only certain terms were available - I didn't use 'trans' or 'transgender' until junior high school, but I was living as trans much earlier.”

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

“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...”

“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...”