Janet Mock

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

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

“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.”

“'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.”

“The transgender community has always been a part of Hawaiian society, where people who don't conform to the binary system of man/woman, masculine/feminine are accepted or, at minimum, tolerated.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 often feel failed by feminism.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.”

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

“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.”

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

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