Janet Mock: Trans Women

When looking at the long history of self life-writing, these productions were the largely written stories of white people in power’s experiences, until the popularity of the slave narrative expanded the genre from it’s original form to include vital gazes into the experiences of oppressed people. This continues in today’s culture, as the autobiographical genre grows to include not only celebrity tell-alls, but informative and insightful memoirs of people with any number of intersectional identities. In the introduction of her memoir, Janet Mock writes, “I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act.” (xviii) In writing this, Mock is analyzing how sharing a story, such as

When talking about the terminology Mock chooses for herself at the beginning of her autobiography, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so Much More, she notes, “I prefer to use trans over transgender or transsexual when identifying myself, although I don’t find either offensive.” (xi) When Mock makes this statement, she is displaying an openness in the way the she, or others, choose to identify herself (xi). In leaving this open Mock is showing that the moniker of trans, whether that be transgender or transsexual, is not more important then her identity as a woman, a belief which she confirms when she later states, “My assignment at birth is only one facet of my identity… Acknowledging this fact and how it has shaped my understanding of self that has given me the power to challenge the ways in which we judge, discriminate, and stigmatize women based on bodily difference.” (255) In this declaration, Mock is suggesting that being trans is not the core of her identity, but simply one of the ways in which she is a women; to Mock, being trans is a “bodily difference,” like her identities of African American, Hawaiian, woman, or any other identities she was born into

Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: a Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity isn’t simply about her experiences, but the understanding that she has about how specifically trans women are treated. She explicitly lays out her beliefs surrounding the term transgender early in her book