Janet Mock Quotes
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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I would advise any 17-year-old to surround yourself with people who listen to you, nod when you speak, and smile when you enter spaces.
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I want to create the content I didn't have while growing up.
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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.
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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.
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My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary.
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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.
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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.
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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 trigger and pull up, where I'm like, 'Oh, that was really problematic.'
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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.
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I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.
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I don't have to explain anything to trans women. Trans women know exactly what's going on.
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My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.
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I get invited to a lot of college campuses, and administrators think it's going to be a lecture on 'trans-ness' or whatever. But when young people get there, their questions are about just life.
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One musical that deeply influenced me - and continues to do so - is the 1997 ABC TV movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella,' starring Brandy, with Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the prince's mom.
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My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose.
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Women are so policed and devalued and dehumanized when it comes to the work they do.
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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.
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We need space to discuss unspoken, uncomfortable dark truths.
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I just love to glow, glow glow, so with my skincare and makeup routine, I gravitate to products that help me achieve that sun-kissed, dewy look.
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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.
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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.