Janet Mock Quotes
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We exist in a culture where trans people are constantly delegitimized.
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Our culture often demeans and devalues the work, the pleasures, and the contributions of women and feminine people. This is, in part, why beauty culture is dismissed as unimportant and frivolous.
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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.
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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.
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It is the world's limitations and the myths that we internalize about ourselves that pushes us to diminish our power and ignore it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think a lot of people are very interested in why other people are trans or why people are gay.
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We cannot and should not be reduced to just one sliver of ourselves, as it skews the truth of our lived experiences.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing 'the most,' meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction. But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments: they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity.
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Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.
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Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.
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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.
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For so much of my life, I lived feeling as if, if I spoke, if I said something, I would lose everything. I would be pushed out. No one will want me. No one will love me. No one would want to be friends with me. It took me decades to get to a space of saying, 'This is my truth. This is who I am, and I don't care if you like me or you don't like me.'
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I still have a YA-genre-series type of a book in me that I really want to tell.
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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.
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I don't chase beauty trends.
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I take the time to show up for people in my field who are often not seen and heard in the same capacity as I am. Applauding other women and queer writers of color enables me to recognize and showcase the abundance of talent and work being created.
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Stern and critical, my father couldn't accept how feminine and dainty I was in comparison to my rough-and-tumble brother.
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I think millennials are the most woke generation because they understand that differences are just in the fabric of who we are.