Redefining realness: My path to womanhood, identity, love, & so much more

“I thought about telling Aaron on our first date. That moment in the back booth of that Brazilian restaurant in the West Village when my head rested in the space where his chest met his armpit. He smelled like sweat and cilantro and looked a lot like that one thing I yearned and feared: intimacy.”

In the opening Prologue, Mock characterizes Aaron as the embodiment of intimacy: everything, from her description of his smell to the touch of his body, represents and identifies their physical proximity to one another. However, Mock is not referring to physical intimacy, as she has had that with many people before. Rather, she refers to emotional intimacy, the idea that someone could know her and love her as she is. Mock is terrified of letting someone know her because she does not feel like she is worthy of love. This lack of self-worth represents an internalization of the harmful stigma associated with trans individuals in American society. Society has repeatedly told Mock that she is less than a woman, or not a “real” woman, whatever that is, and so she believes that no one will love her once they know the truth. Unfortunately, past experiences have also shown this to be true. Therefore, Mock sees in Aaron the hope that he will accept her for who she is—the entirety of her identity—and love her as well, but at this point in their burgeoning relationship, she is terrified that this is not the case. She becomes stuck in a kind of limbo, in which she both desires and is afraid of emotional intimacy.

“It was an invitation, one that didn’t fit my itinerary for our date. I imagined that he’d kiss me when he said good-bye, under the glowing gaze of the moon and my neighbor’s twinkling lights and the sound of the city cheering us on. Not in daylight with these brighter-than-white walls and reflective metal rails. It was too sterile, too open, too early. When I looked around to see if anyone was there to witness this impending kiss, Aaron laughed at me. I must’ve seemed about thirteen, like a girl contemplating taking a drag from a friend’s cigarette.”

Mock’s intimacy problems combine with her media-based expectations of date to contribute to her confusion and borderline alienation when Aaron refuses to abide by the standard date formula: that is, spending the day together and then kissing passionately as a goodbye. The reality of their first kiss is not the night-laden scene of a rom-com heroine, which Mock so desperately wants her life to mirror. Throughout the narrative, Mock must face that her expectations—of people, of situations—do not mirror reality. Rather, the fairytales she grew up with are actually indicative of the same systems of oppression responsible for her emotional—and at times physical—trauma. As such, when she meets a real Prince Charming in Aaron, his actions cannot mirror the same problematic narratives of the romantic movies she has seen on television. Rather, in order to be her perfect partner, Aaron must break free of these trite expressions of romantic interest. As a result, the environment itself mirrors the openness that Mock really needs, as opposed to the secrecy of a more intimate setting. She is still worried that people will care when they see, whereas Aaron, her perfect partner, encourages her to be visible. In this way, the audience understands even before Mock admits it to herself that Aaron is the partner Mock needs in life, specifically because he will support her visibility.

“I had presented Aaron a distorted me, and I couldn’t give him me while wrapped in secrets—stories I’ve never told. They trap you, and you become so wound up in your own story, in the pain inflicted on you in the past that you’ve worked hard to keep at bay, and the people and actions and all the things you’ve been running away from, that you don’t know what you believe anymore. Most important, you lose touch with yourself: The self you know, the you deep inside, is obscured by a stack of untold stories. And I had been groomed to believe that they were all I had in this world, and the keeping of them was vital to my survival.”

Throughout the narrative, Mock works to define the difference between realness and fakeness, truth and falsehood. Much of this definition exists at a crossroads between the conflation of appearance and identity, especially in regard to how appearance can distort identity. The secrets that Mock keeps regarding her personal truths obfuscate her identity. Because she is not truthful about her identity, she maintains an emotional distance within relationships. This prevents the kind of intimacy that Mock so desperately needs in order to feel accepted as herself. Although she guards these secrets in order to survive, these secrets and the distortion of her identity actually prevent her from achieving happiness in her life, as they preclude the kind of emotional intimacy necessary to her emotional survival. This further defines the difference between emotional and physical survival, as Mock makes apparent that the same secrets she keeps to facilitate her physical survival—i.e., to avoid violence perpetuated against trans bodies—also deny her emotional survival. More than anything, Mock wants to be known and accepted for all of who she is, not just for the polished woman that she appears to be. She wants to be loved for the challenges she has had to overcome, as they are an integral aspect of her life experiences and her identity.

“I was certain that when it was time for recess or bathroom breaks, we would divide into two lines: one for boys, the other for girls. I was certain I was a boy, just as I was certain of the winding texture of my hair and the deep bronze of my skin. It was the first thing I’d learned about myself as I grew aware that I existed. There was evidence proving it: the pronouns, the penis, the Ninja Turtle pajamas, the pictures of hours-old me wrapped in a blue blanket with my eyes closed to the world.”

Mock discusses the problems of certainty in a gender-binary society. From birth, American society presses upon infants the norms of a gender binary, which Mock likens to the heavy categorization of race. American society is distinctly divided into these categories, which are incredibly harmful to those who do not fit into these rigid categorizations. From birth, Mock was made to feel like a boy, her perceived gender based upon the penis she felt completely detached from. Here, Mock works to help her audience understand the cognitive dissonance that can occur when one’s genitals at birth do not correlate to one’s perception of self. Society has made her certain that it perceives her as male, even though this is not the way that Mock perceives herself. In this way, the root of cognitive dissonance becomes externalized; that is, emotional and psychological trauma associated with being trans is not an internal trauma, but rather a result of external preconceptions of behavior and the normalization of gender binary. However, this is especially traumatic for Mock because gender binary uses science in order to obfuscate identity. It presents evidence that Mock is male in order to align gender binary with science, thereby solidifying the gender binary as something that is allegedly natural. However, nothing about the way society perceives her feels natural to Mock; instead, it feels like artifice, something that has been constructed to keep her within easily delineated categories. In this way, trans individuals represent a challenge to the pseudoscience of gender binary in a way that one could argue is similar to how Mock as a biracial woman poses a challenge to the pseudoscience associated with race.

“She wasn’t reprimanding me. She was just telling me the way things were, the way she’d learned the world. In her learning, what I did by openly expressing femininity as her son was wrong and, in effect, from Cori’s cackle to Grandma’s smack, taught me that my girlhood desires were inappropriate. Resisting and hiding my femininity would keep me from being laughed at by my sister, being hit by my grandmother, and being lectured at by my mother. These women believed they were raising a boy child, and boys do not wear dresses, according to the rules of Western culture’s gender binary system […].”

Mock clarifies the interaction with her mother concerning her donning a dress at a young age. In this incident, the audience sees the socialization associated with the gender binary. As Mock argues, the gender binary is not natural; rather, it is a socially-prescribed mode of monitoring individuals’ behavior and appearances. Mock localizes the gender binary within western culture, suggesting that this is a cultural idea that can be overthrown, just as other cultural ideas have been overthrown before. Even though Mock listens to the lecture of her mother and the laughter of her sister, implicit within her statement lies a challenge to these cultural norms. If the gender binary is only a rule of Western culture, then Mock suggests it can be overturned, as she implies that other cultures do not uphold the same rigid conceptions of gender.

“He took off his shirt and boxer shorts, and for the first time I saw him fully erect. It was the length of a Barbie, with the girth of two dolls. I stared at it as he lay down in bed. This was a penis, not his privates or a thing or dingaling.”

Mock describes how Derek’s sexual abuse catapulted her into adulthood. It is important to note that this loss of innocence is forced, thereby representing a rape not only of her body but also of her childhood. The audience sees Mock’s loss of innocence within the words she chooses to use to describe Derek’s penis; Mock’s diction becomes forcibly adult-like, no longer using harmless euphemisms for genitals. Rather, imagining the word “penis” coming out of the mouth of an eight-year-old child is harsh and sudden, reiterative of Derek’s sexual abuse itself. Even though Mock’s use of the word penis in place of euphemisms represents her being forced over the threshold of childhood innocence into adulthood, the way she describes his penis is also heartbreakingly childlike, as she uses Barbies and dolls to communicate its dimensions. In this way, the audience sees how Mock already views the world through a feminine lens, although the lens itself is childlike in nature. In this way, Mock is able to communicate how Derek’s sexual abuse forced her into the realm of adulthood, even though she still remains a child. Mock’s description does not erase her youth but rather capitalizes it, making her loss of innocence at this stage all the more poignant.

“I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long as he wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay: we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned. These trysts and my resulting questions about my gender and sexuality isolated me from my brother, who I felt could never understand me.”

Mock discusses the harm and confusion surrounding sexual labels within her childhood. Even though it seems as though Junior assumes Mock is gay, Mock refutes this assumption, demonstrating her identity as female that arose before she was even ten years old. In spite of how other people might perceive her, Mock conceptualizes herself as fully female, thereby refuting the label of gay that Junior may or may not have intended to place upon her. She is brutally honest about the environment within which she grew up, which perceived gay as a weakness and something to be avoided. Within this hostile environment, there also continues the element of secrecy in terms of sexuality, as it is implicit that Mock keep her trysts with Junior a secret.

In this way, the audience sees the isolation this secrecy causes, as Mock is not able to openly acknowledge her sexuality. As a result, she feels disconnected from those around her, including her brother, because she feels as though no one understands her. Her secrets, then, are a cause of her isolation; however, they also seem to be necessitated by the hostility of her surrounding environment. Even Junior, who she chooses to engage with sexually, is disconnected from Mock, as they are unable to discuss their sexual explorations. She does not explain to him her identity as female, and he assumes that she is gay, preventing the two from emotional intimacy. In this way, even Mock’s earliest sexual experiences are deprived of emotional intimacy, paving the way for future problems in her relationships.

“I wondered if he burned on the inside. I also wanted to ask how he could do this to Chad. I was naïve enough to think that I could handle this. Looking at Chad, with his head down and his feet pointing into the carpet, I knew he had seen too much. In that moment, I realized that Dad meant more to Chad than he meant to me. For my brother, Dad was an all-knowing hero who could do nothing wrong. That was how I felt about Mom. But as with the heroes of childhood, you realize they’re make-believe characters, and the qualities you so admired in them were magnified through your obstructed lens of adoration.”

Mock presents the disconnect she feels from her father. Even though they are similar in terms of their personalities, there is very little—if any—emotional intimacy between the two of them. In contrast, Chad feels very connected to his father, looking up to him as a hero in the same way that Mock conceptualizes her mother. In this way, Mock is not the only character within Part 1 of the memoir to lose her innocence, as Chad must watch his hero fall into the void of drug abuse. Mock uses this vicarious loss of innocence to foreshadow her own realization that her mother is not the hero she thought her to be. Even as a child abandoned by her mother, Mock still holds some hope that her mother will save her from this life of isolation and abuse. The last sentence, however, warns the audience that Mock’s mother is not who Mock has constructed her to be.

“There were too many Mocks in Dallas for me to ever feel alone. Even when the sounds of questions regarding my identity began ringing louder in my head, I rarely had room to reflect because the sound of family was overwhelming. Grandma’s metal pots and pans clacking; Dad and Uncle Bernard and Uncle Ricky’s cheers for the Cowboys; Auntie Linda Gail’s mouth-smacking gossip and Auntie Joyce’s soothing mhmms.”

Mock experiences separation between herself and her family. Instead of the support she should receive from her family in interrogating her identity, she finds their presence and noise to be intrusions upon her life. Surrounded by other people, she does not have the time to understand her own developing identity, as she is constantly bombarded by the sounds of too many people living in too close proximity to one another. Even though Mock does not admit it, it seems as though this inability to be alone represents a ramification of living in poverty and familial instability. Because her father does not have a job, he cannot afford a space for his children; rather, they are forced to share their spaces with other family members, providing little time for self-reflection. However, it is also interesting and important to note that these spaces are heavily gendered; that is, they are defined by the rigid structures of gender binary. Even the noises that arise out of these spaces are gendered: the female sounds of pots, pans, and gossip juxtaposed against the male sounds of cheering for football. The gendered binary of these noises clouds Mock’s ability to understand gender for herself. She is constantly buffeted by the sounds of others who perceive her to be in contrast with the noises she associates with, distracting her from her own interrogation of identity.

“This is womanhood, I thought, watching the women in Dad’s life cook and cackle in the kitchen […] [Auntie Linda Gail] had more style than any woman I have ever seen in my entire life, the epitome of ghetto fabulous before there was such a thing. Auntie Wee Wee, on the other hand, chose an effortless approach to beauty […] My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world […] because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.”

For the first time in her life, Mock seems to have a clear understanding of the reality concerning womanhood, even though it does abide by certain preconceived notions of femininity. For example, Mock emphasizes the style and appearance of these central female role models in her budding adolescence, traits that are generally associated with femininity within the binary constructs of gender.

In this way, even though Mock rejects certain aspects of Western gender norms—namely that gender is assigned at birth—she still reproduces other stereotypes associated with Western society’s gender binary, namely the equivalency of femininity with an importance placed upon appearance and externalized identity. In keeping with the norms of Western patriarchy, Mock constructs womanhood as something that is externalized via attention to style and appearance, although she notes that this style and appearance changes from woman to woman. However, she does argue that there is a strength within this conception of womanhood, especially black womanhood, that is absent from patriarchal constructions of femininity. Just as she is unsure of where she fits in terms of her identity, she is also unsure of the extent to which she can upheave gender norms. As such, Mock exists within a kind of limbo, having not yet fully conceptualized or discovered what womanhood means.

“Dad didn’t say a word as he plugged his clippers into the outlet by the sink. I kept my eyes closed and opened them only when containing my tears stung. With the sound of each buzz, my curls fell against my bare shoulders and back before finding their way to the floor. When the buzzing stopped, the black-and-white-tiled floor was covered in tendrils and tears. The mirror reflected a hard truth: You are a boy. Stop pretending.”

Mock’s father’s silence as he cuts Mock’s hair is crucial to this experience. There is no communication between Mock and her father, as Mock refuses to even look at her father except when she must open her eyes to prevent the sting of her tears. In fact, both characters seem completely disassociated from one another, refusing to acknowledge the reality at hand. And the reality is a stark one: Mock explicitly associates her hair with girl/womanhood; Charlie’s shaving of Mock’s head therefore represents, to Mock, her father’s rejection of her girlhood identity. She closes her eyes against the stark truth that she sees reflected in the mirror: the fact that she is a boy or, rather, that others see her as a boy. Mock sees her appearance—her ability to pass as Keisha—as entwined with her identity. She constructs long hair as integral to womanhood, even though this association is itself problematic, as it adheres to a gendered binary of appearance and patriarchal construct of what womanhood is.

“Though we came from our native Hawaiian mother, Chad and I were perceived and therefore raised as black, which widely cast us as outsiders, nonlocals—and being seen as local in Hawaii was currency. When we first returned to Oahu, we spoke with a Texas twang that also got us teased. Chad has strong emotions surrounding those first few months; he was traumatized by his apparent blackness, which was a nonevent in Dallas and Oakland, where we were among many black kids. In Hawaii, we were some of the few mixed black kids around. And both our parents taught us that because the world would perceive us as black, we were black […] Skin color wasn’t necessarily the target as much as our blackness was the target for teasing. I say this because the kids who teased us were as brown as us, but we were black. There was a racial order that existed even in this group of tweens.”

Mock explains the ostracization and flat-out racism she and Chad experienced at the hands of her so-called local peers. She differentiates between brownness and blackness in terms of experiences of persons of color; even though persons of color experience racism, there is still a distinct divide between black and brown experiences for persons of color. This divide has little to do with skin color, as Mock mentions that her skin is more or less the same tone as that of the peers who made fun of her. Rather, this differentiation lies in the knowledge that she and Chad are black, which seems to be implicitly related to the coiled nature of their hair. This is interesting because Mock explicitly relates her hair to her girl/womanhood; however, it would seem that external forces equate her hair with her blackness, as though her identity as black is more solidified than her gender identity. It is also important to note, however, that Mock and Chad’s blackness is relevant to the surrounding environment. That is, they are perceived as more black when they are surrounded by people who are not black. In this way, race seems both relative and subjective to an individual’s environs.

“I was afraid that Wendi had seen me, but beneath that fear of being visible was a sense of belonging that thrilled me. I recognize now that her stopping to ask, ‘You mahu?’ (though I would later learn she didn’t identify as such) was her attempt at finding others like her—a connection I wasn’t ready to make. I gave her a scrunched, crumpled expression resembling adamant denial, which made her roll her eyes and prance away.”

Throughout the narrative, Mock is terrified of being seen, which she equates with intimacy. That is, she is afraid of being recognized for who she is, which is exactly how Wendi sees her. Mock is terrified at Wendi’s audacity to make this connection between Mock and Wendi as it represents the kind of emotional vulnerability that comes with intimacy, which Mock is not ready for. However, Mock understands that in this moment, even though she decides to repudiate Wendi’s attempt at connection, she still has conflicted feelings about this intimacy. She yearns for this sense of belonging, even though she inherently feels it. She worries that no one will love her if they know the truth about her; that is, she believes that emotional intimacy will make her vulnerable to inevitable heartbreak and rejection. Therefore, in order to survive, she denies Wendi’s attempt to connect with her. However, it is important to note that Mock does not say anything, but rather only makes a facial expression that suggests her answer. She cannot bring herself to verbalize this repudiation for intimacy and belonging. It is also important, then, that Wendi attempts to make this connection and invite this emotional intimacy through verbal communication, demonstrating the power that words can have to bring people together. As opposed to how Mock has been raised, in which words were used to denigrate her alleged lack of masculinity, Wendi offers the word, mahu, as a chance to accept Mock for who she is. Therefore, emotional intimacy and a chance at belonging are inherently linked to the words themselves.

“Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless and runaway American youth, as many as 40 percent are LGBTQ, according to a 2006 report […] A similar study by the Williams Institute cited family rejection as the leading cause of the disproportionate number of homeless LGBT youth.”

Mock repeatedly contextualizes her narrative within the wider social scope of LGBTQ youth. This is a trademark move of the creative nonfiction genre, especially within the subgenre of social commentary. She uses the authority of statistics to contrast with the personal subjectivity of her experiences, demonstrating how some of her experiences are alternately the same as and differ from many other trans experiences. However, it is important to note that within this instance, Mock notes her privilege in contrast to a large portion not just of trans youth but of all LGBTQ youth. Her family supported her, in their own various ways; she was not ostracized by members of her family nor was she kicked out of her home. Instead, she was able to explore her identity within a relatively safe and stable environment, in comparison to many other LGBTQ youth, who must face problems associated with homelessness, such as increased vulnerability and subjectivity to sexual and physical violence. Although Mock’s home life is unstable because of the hands-off approach of her parents, she does have a home to come back to every night, unlike many other LGBTQ youth, making her privileged by comparison. She is also privileged, as she repeatedly notes, because she is able to find a community of other trans individuals.

“To be called fish by these women meant that I was embodying the kind of femininity that could allow me access, safety, opportunity, and maybe happiness. To be fish meant I could ‘pass’ as any other girl, specifically a cis woman, mirroring the concept of ‘realness’ […] Being ‘undetectable’ to the ‘untrained’ or ‘trained.’ Simply, ‘realness’ is the ability to be seen as heteronormative, to assimilate, to not be read as other or deviate from the norm. ‘Realness’ means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative […] To embody ‘realness,’ rather than performing […] ‘realness,’ enables trans women to enter spaces with a lower risk of being rebutted or questioned, policed or attacked.”

The idea of passing is integral to Mock’s narrative, although it is also a source of frustration for her. She recognizes that this makes it easier for her to fit in with society, but at the same time she finds herself frustrated by the restrictive norms of the gender binary. Mock’s appearance allows her to fit in within society’s acceptable appearance for women. As such, she is able to assimilate into cis society with her so-called effeminate features. However, Mock also knows that the idea of passing leaves out a large portion of the trans community, affording her a certain amount of privilege that others are not allowed. Similarly, she is incredibly beautiful; in a society that values the beauty of women above anything else, Mock easily fits within the confines of heteronormative society. It is interesting to note that the idea of passing is equated with the word “realness,” which Mock seeks to redefine, as per the title of the memoir. Mock uses these words to demonstrate their power both within and outside of the trans community.

“Like most teen girls (whether they’re trans or cis), I had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that MTV fed me. I wanted Halle Berry’s or Tyra Banks’s breasts, Britney Spears’s midsection, Beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and I prayed that I wouldn’t grow any taller so I didn’t tower over the petite Asian girls who were the barometer of beauty in the islands.”

Mock’s vision of her perfect body is heavily influenced by pop culture. Her expression of self-identity is limited to a cut-and-paste of the bodies of various celebrities in a kind of vivisection of the female form, which reiterates patriarchal norms. In this way, Mock appropriates the male gaze of the female form, in which a woman exists as merely a series of attractive body parts. In fact, she embodies the male gaze in a way that is alternately devoid and full of sexualization. That is, she wants these body parts to create a body she believes men will find to be perfect. In this way, she is sexualizing these female bodies but through a lens that also removes them of sexual agency. These women are not sexual agents in and of themselves, but rather it is the voyeuristic view of another’s gaze that sexualizes them. They become nothing more than commodities to be selected and picked apart in order to attain the patriarchal norms of beauty. In this way, even though Mock at other points attempts to rebuke patriarchal beauty standards, she also ascribes to and promotes them in her quest to create her own “perfect body.”

 “Danger never entered my mind; I never thought about how easily he could’ve driven us past the mall to a place of his choosing. Nothing that dramatic ever happened during our pooching antics. Riding in cars with strange men soon became habit.”

Mock alludes to the potentially dangerous situations that she and Wendi put themselves in. Due to their poverty and lack of available transportation, they decide to hitchhike with strangers, usually men. Although Mock does not explicitly say this, their identities as trans girls add an increased layer of danger: there is the sense that if they were found out, the men could react violently. Mock does not need to explicitly state this because she has already mentioned how vulnerable her social positionality is many times. This vulnerability sharply contrasts with the invincibility of youth: that is, the belief that nothing bad will happen. As an adult, Mock now understands the danger that they put themselves in, although at the time, she did not believe this to be the case.

“In the bathroom, I was forced to engage with my penis. It had to be cleaned and it wanted to be touched. The pleasure I’d give myself filled me with a combination of release and revulsion. I felt guilty for achieving gratification from the part that separated me from my personal vision of myself, and I felt despair because I didn’t have the means to change it. Premarin stimulated that sense of discord and angst, one that cradled me as I cried myself to sleep at night, hoping that some genie would magically appear and all my troubles would be solved. No one came, though, and I struggled in secret, wielding nothing but despair and fierce determination.”

Mock identifies the cognitive dissonance she feels in regard to her body. Although she thinks of herself as a woman, she is still a teenager with raging hormones and a penis that has unavoidable physical responses and urges triggered by her maturation. She cannot avoid engaging with her reality, demonstrating the added level of stress and psychological trauma that trans youth experience when their physical bodies do not match their perceived identities. However, instead of allowing this to break her or cause her to go into a deep depression, Mock is resolved to attain the body that she has always wanted through any means necessary. This passage serves as foreshadowing for the fierce determination that causes her to engage in sex work: she feels like she has no other option to attain her happiness, and that her hand is forced in this way. Her body, then, is not only a source of pleasure but also a burden that she feels must be altered in order for her to attain happiness.

“I loved her fiery red curls and her equally vibrant smile, features that theolder girls said I had in common with the singer. I was deeply flattered when they nicknamed me Baby Janet, a name that stuck and that I took as my own. There’s power in naming yourself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are. Wielding this power is often a difficult step for many trans people, because it’s also a very visible one.”

Mock repeatedly conflates womanhood with appearance, as she takes on the name Janet after the older girls say that she looks like the singer. In this way, womanhood is explicitly related to appearance, as Mock’s name stems from her physical association with a woman she believes to represent societal beauty standards. The power of naming oneself and the power of words themselves—in this case, of names—is conflated with visibility and the idea of being seen. Mock feels like her physical association with Janet Jackson allows her to be seen as the woman she wants to be, as Janet. Therefore, the power of words and naming is also inextricably linked to the association of womanhood with appearance, even though this in and of itself is an appropriation of patriarchal gender norms.

“The woman I had dreamed about as a child, the woman with the perfume, long, dark hair, and shelves of books, did not exist. Mom was no longer my dream girl. I had to become that dream.”

Even though Mock’s disillusionment with her mother seems to begin when she returns to Hawaii, it is not until this point that Mock realizes her mother is no longer the heroine she believes Elizabeth to be. This quotation demonstrates Mock’s final loss of innocence as she enters adulthood, even though she is not legally yet an adult. This epiphany then triggers Mock to believe that she must do everything in her power to become her own ideal woman, which very quickly leads her down the road to sex work. However, it is still important to note that most of Mock’s associations with the ideal woman are the appropriations of patriarchal—and fairly Victorian—gender norms: a woman is someone who smells like perfume, has long hair, and reads many books. In essence, Mock’s ideal woman is Belle from Beauty and the Beast, an ideal that is important because even the title capitalizes on the beauty associated with womanhood. Before all else, women are meant to be beautiful, at least according to these restrictive patriarchal gender norms. In this way, Mock again appropriates the very thing she seeks to work against, which she feels constricts her and causes her cognitive dissonance.

“That night I had discovered that my body was worth money, and as long as I had a body, I would never be poor. I felt with Max’s money I could do more, be more, and so I craved more. Freebies with cute boys would no longer fly, not after getting paid to do much less. Sex was no longer something to do for fun; it was something to trade for the things I needed […] I learned to use my body as currency […] My experience mirrors that of a vulnerable girl with few resources who was groomed from childhood, who was told that this was the only way, who wasn’t comfortable enough in her body to truly gain any kind of pleasure from it, who rented pieces of herself […] I did what I had to because no one was going to do it for me.”

Mock discusses the commodification of the body in association with her transformation to becoming her ideal woman. She identifies the shift in her attitudes towards sex, which, at first, she only used for validation about her self-worth. Now, she realizes that a price tag can be put on her self-worth, via the commodification of her body. In her vulnerability regarding her identity, she rents out pieces of herself, as though her body were a kind of real estate. This commodification also alludes to the patriarchal idea that women exist as conglomerations of body partswhile simultaneously rendering a woman’s body as a landscape that can be viewed and attained by men for a price. It is also important to note that Mock identifies the money as belonging to the men, even though after her work she is in possession of it. In this way, it would seem that Mock exists as an extension of the men themselves; she becomes a kind of property without personal agency who cannot possess her own money. Rather, she is using their money to create the very body that men desire. Although Mock presents her venture into sex work as the only alternative in order to get the things—read: body parts—she needs, she appropriates the same problematic norms of American patriarchy that render women as possessions of men. In this way, nothing that Mock obtains—even, one could argue, her body—is really hers; as a woman, she does not possess the agency to lay claim to her own body, diminishing her ability to self-actualize.

“This ignited the fairy tales of all the girls on that block, the urban legend we’d heard our entire lives: Some handsome or at least decent man would swoop in and pay for your pussy without asking for anything in return. And you would live happily ever after as a legal female […] Despite my jealousy over Kahlúa’s swift transformation, I knew that having some man pay for your surgery involved sacrifice. Nothing is given to you for free. There’s a level of ownership when a man sponsors you, as the girls called it. I always wanted to say that I did this for me, that this was and is and will always be mine.”

Mock explains how Kahlúa’s becomes sensationalized by the other women of Merchant Street, a kind of Pretty Woman tale but with a twist. It is important, however, that these men are seen as heroes within this context, the saviors of these women, who can buy them anything they could ever dream of. Within this context, it would seem as though these women believe their dreams can only be fulfilled by men; however, it is these men who are continuously victimizing them, rendering their body parts as commodities for the voyeuristic male gaze. Mock reacts against this notion that a man will save her by paying for her reassignment surgery. However, even in her reaction against this male savior complex, she still commodifies her own body, asserting that nothing is given for free, which implies that her body can be purchased. Even more than that, her body is something that can be owned, either by herself or by a man who chooses to sponsor her. In creating her body as a thing that can be owned, she appropriates the same patriarchal language that has oppressed women for centuries, as it is the female body, not the male body, that one takes ownership of. In this way, she must explicitly assert her ownership over her body, possessing herself, as it were. It is important to make the distinction that Mock uses not the language of agency but rather the patriarchal language of ownership in her distinction from the other women of Merchant Street.

“As long as trans women are seen as less desirable, illegitimate, devalued women, then men will continue to frame their attraction to us as secret, shameful, and stigmatized, limiting their sexual interactions with trans women to pornography and prostitution. As if a trans woman believes that the only way she can share intimate space with a man is through secret hookups or transactions, she will be led to engage in risky sexual behaviors that make her more vulnerable to criminalization, disease, and violence; she will be led to coddle a man who takes out his frustrations about his sexuality on her with his fists; she will be led to question whether she’s worthy enough to protect herself with a condom when a man tells her he loves her; she will be led to believe that she is not worthy of being seen and must remain hidden.”

Mock argues that trans women’s worth directly relates to their attractiveness or desirability for men. She views men as responsible for shaping the way the world views trans women. This view is problematic because it constructs trans women as existing only in their relationship to men, pigeonholing them and their womanhood into a specific category and use. It does not allow for divergence from heteronormativity; in fact, it assumes that trans women are looking for heterosexual relationships, which of course is not the case. Although Mock’s belief that visibility will prevent trans women from being further victimized may in fact be true, the problem lies not with the visibility of trans women but rather to and for whom they are made visible. Mock seems to be arguing that trans women—and perhaps even all women—exist in terms of their relationship to men, a statement that is problematic for a number of reasons, including the limitations it places on women’s agency.