“In a nutshell, it’s a harsh world out there for trans public figures and Janet Mock is likely going to experience that harsh world first hand,” I wrote back in the spring of 2011 in one of two open letters to Janet Mock on her publicly coming out as a woman of transsexual history.
I explicitly and implicitly warned her about how the world would perceive her in the years to come. Sadly, some of my predictions are coming true, and these have been especially acute since the recent publishing of her memoir Redefining Realness.
I wrote my open letter to her from the position of being a minor public figure – a “sublebrity” – so some of the things that Mock, a true celebrity, is experiencing are happening on a grander scale than I predicted. I warned her that the religious right media would define her as male, but didn’t anticipate mainstream media doing it.
“Among those new realities she will experience will be a partial loss of membership in the ‘club’ of women,” I wrote to Mock in the LGBT Weekly open letter. “There are now going to be a large number of women who will forever now look at her not as a woman, but as a man in a dress. Those will include less than accepting coworkers who will smile to her face, and then viciously rip into her behind her back. And, members of the religious right will likely soon be calling Mock a ‘mutilated man’ too, and identify her relationship with her boyfriend as a ‘homosexual’ relationship.”
And as those of us who watched the two interviews of her by CNN’s Piers Morgan, there was a focus on when and how she told her boyfriend Anthony she “was born a boy.” The subtext is the narrative that trans women are deceptive – we really aren’t the women we define ourselves as. And, anyone who enters a relationship with a woman of transsexual history is really entering a relationship with a man.
I also wrote in that LGBT Weekly piece that, “Mock will also experience being a celebrity in the T subcommunity of the LGBT community, as well as the broader LGBT community itself. There will be speaking requests. However, as she already knows from working as an editor and journalist in the entertainment field, the people who will want her as a speaker will often see her as a celebrity and not [as] a whole human being.”
As for the advice regarding those things I stated, “I’d advise her to be aware of these attacks on her womanhood and not take it too personally. As she already knows, she cannot allow western societal sex and gender norms to dictate for her who she is and still be true to herself.”
If I could go back in time and rewrite that line of advice, I’d tell her to take it personally because it is personal, and then add “but fight mainstream media and mainstream society defining you in a way you don’t define yourself; you cannot allow western societal sex and gender norms to dictate for you who you are. You can be a leader in changing the ‘born a man’ and ‘man in a dress’ narratives that society tries to impose upon us.”
Personally, I’ve never been the kind of trans celebrity that broke through to the mainstream community, so I couldn’t give Mock advice from the perspective of how mainstream media was going to define her. But, as she saw in those recent interviews on CNN by Piers Morgan, she is going to be defined as a male who had surgery to become a female and not as a female who was assigned male at birth. She never defined herself as male so she didn’t have surgery to become herself, but to align her body with her mind. As Mock knows herself, she was never a boy; she was never a man.
Janet Mock is going to change the world for trans community members, and she’s going to do it by changing the narrative that trans women like her are deceptive men. We in the trans community have needed a trans community member like her to begin the process of changing the trans narrative for a long, long time.
You know full and well that for a TG the spotlight is unavoidable, it is a force that cannot be resisted. You guys all do it to yourselves, you can’t simply live your life. You have to tell the world about your transition, what is or is not in your pants, you write books about it and complain when people question you on what you wrote and said.
So tell us Autumn, the advice you offered up to Janet Mock, was that from experience because you couldn’t keep out of the spotlight?
Seems to me the whole lot of you need the services of a good psrink.
Anne
Yes, you have hit the nail on the head. “Transgender” seems to be favored by those who have no real desire to be what they claim to be, but who want to straddle the line between “genders.” They claim they are women, but they cling to being men…often with the same tenacity that NRA members cling to their guns.
Mock goes of the way to insure that everyone knows that Mock “used to be a man” and then acts outraged when they mention it. That seems to be a big part of the “thrill.” They want to force people to comply with their claims, even as they rub everyone’s noses in it.
Now, some have no real hope of ever assimilating as “just women,” but others, who easily could, still feel a bizarre need to wear being “transgender” on their sleeve, and then complain when people don’t “fully” accept them as women. It is just silliness.
My name is Anne, and I do NOT endorse the comment made above. I would respectfully request that sd woman not use my name when signing her comments.
ROTFL! No, I suspect she is using HER name.
Typical TG, god forbid someone with the same name dare speak against the TG party line. But those TG-s have no problem hijacking and speaking for legitimate TS.
Anne
That was pretty much my thought. Of course, to them it is all a game and I guess this person thinks they can just order you to use a different name, even if you had it first…or even if it is your legal name, and for them, it is just what they call their self when “en femme.”