Trans Activist Janet Mock Finds Her Voice
Janet Mock first heard the word \u201cm\u0101h\u016b,\u201d a Native Hawaiian word for people who exist outside the male-female binary, when she was twelve. She had just moved back to Oahu, where she was born, from Texas, and, by that point, Mock knew that the gender she presented as didn\u2019t feel right. \u201cI don\u2019t like to say the word \u2018trapped,\u2019 \u201d Mock tells The New Yorker\u2019s Hilton Als. \u201cBut I was feeling very, very tightly contained in my body.\u201d\xa0\nEventually, Mock left Hawaii for New York, where she worked as an editor for People magazine. \u201c[Everyone was] bigger and louder and smarter and bolder than me,\u201d she tells Als. \u201cSo, in that sense, I could kind of blend in.\u201d After working at People for five years, she came out publicly as trans; since then, she has emerged as a leading voice on trans issues. She\u2019s written two books, produced a documentary, and signed a deal with Netflix. In 2018, she became the first trans woman of color to be hired as a writer on a TV series\u2014Ryan Murphy\u2019s FX series \u201cPose,\u201d which just concluded its final season.\nThis story originally aired January 4, 2019