Author Janet Mock talks being a woman, battling against media sound bites, and her new memoir, Redefining Realness .
Via janetmock.com
On the Life Stories podcast (available on iTunes), memoir writers talk about their lives and the art of writing memoir. Janet Mock's interview took place the morning after her second appearance on CNN's Piers Morgan Live — where Morgan showed less interest in discussing Mock's book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, than in attacking her and other trans people for not being sufficiently appreciative of the attention he'd given them, and for getting upset when he said she was "born a boy." It's a familiar struggle for Mock. "Ever since I was a child," she says, "I was fighting, mostly the people I loved, against their ideas of who I should be or who they expected me to be based on what they learned in the world, especially about gender expectations. Trying to explain that to people who want to sound bite my experience in order to entice readers or viewers has been a huge battle."
Below are some highlights from that conversation — the entirety of which you can listen to right here:
Life Stories: Janet Mock, Author of Redefining Realness
Via beatrice.com
For Mock, Redefining Realness isn't a "transition" story, nor is it about learning to "pass" as a woman.
"I walk in the world as a woman because I am a woman, and people should take me as that. I'm not passing as anything that I'm not. I'm just being myself.
My struggle is not just [about] my gender. It's poverty, it's systemic oppression, it's criminalization and drug addiction, all of these different things. It's a child growing up in an environment that is super loving but ill-equipped. For me, it's very reductive to just say that it's a transgender memoir, but I think that that's the most enticing, attractive thing for many people listening to me… For me, it's centering around trying to mess up that single-identity lens focus a little bit, and say: How do we talk about someone in all of their facets? How do we explain that?"