Redefining Realness (24 page)

“Ohhhh, it’s healing really well,” Shayna said, and the older girls nodded in unison. “Girl, that looks really good!”

That was when I decided I knew nothing when it came to vaginas, despite my determination to have one of my own, straight from Thailand:
just one of a handful of far-flung places (Morocco was once a hub; now Brazil, Iran, Serbia, and Thailand reign) where trans people travel for affordable gender affirming surgeries. Genital reconstruction surgery in the States can cost upward of thirty thousand dollars, whereas in Thailand, at the hands of surgeons who have performed significantly more procedures due to high demand, it can cost about a third of the price. In 2001, GRS was offered for about seven thousand dollars plus travel. The cost of surgery is the sole responsibility of transsexual patients, who are often already grappling with social and economic marginalization. Most trans people cannot afford to pay these expenses.

Though I hadn’t saved enough money to pay for a ticket and hotel stay in Thailand, I asked Kahlúa for her surgeon’s contact information. Her positive experience and results presented me with possibility. Kahlúa wrote her surgeon’s name and Web address on a napkin, which I held on to tightly. It became my ticket to freedom.

S
ome of my most pivotal moments rose from pop culture. As a child who grew up in front of the television, I spent my adolescence blanketed in images from the late-nineties pop boom. I watched MTV’s
Total Request Live
(
TRL
) faithfully every day after school, and it was seeing the premiere of “Bill, Bill, Bills” on the countdown that shifted how I saw myself. I was in awe of one girl, waving a hot comb in the air at her mother’s Houston, Texas, salon while lip-synching Destiny’s Child’s outspoken lyrics. Her name was Beyoncé Knowles.

Oprah Winfrey talks about the moment she saw Diana Ross and the Supremes on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in the sixties. She has said that seeing Diana Ross being glamorous “represented possibility and hope . . . It was life-changing for me.” That’s what I felt as a teenager in front of my TV in a lower-middle-class apartment: no real possibilities beyond school, no images of any girls like myself in the media; it fed me to see Beyoncé in that video and, later, on magazine covers and at the Grammys and on my bedroom walls.

I was a mixed black girl existing in a Westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible. I was not represented in the media, but Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child validated me. If I was working at the mall, Chad and Jeff dutifully recorded Destiny’s Child’s TV appearances; they knew how serious I was about DC3. When Mom went to the drugstore, she’d pick up
Teen People
or
Vibe
if she saw Destiny’s Child on the cover. I still remember the black-and-white
Vibe
cover featuring Beyoncé as Diana Ross after three members of Destiny’s Child were booted from the group. If I went to the hair salon, I asked for a blond weave, steadily rocking those loose braids Beyoncé wore in the “Bug a Boo” and “Say My Name” music videos. She was my style icon, the epitome of a graceful, talented, strong woman. She was the mold for me. She made me love being brown, she made me love my adaptable curly hair, she made me love that my thighs touched.

All that admiration didn’t translate to those around me. No matter how much I loved myself, my growing self-confidence didn’t shield me from intolerance and ignorance. Some of my classmates refused to let Charles go. I’d hear my given name thrown at me in the hallways, at assemblies, at dances, or as I was walking home from school. It was a sure way of putting me in my place, of letting me know that no matter how much I evolved, they clung to the way things were. The past was more than prequel; they remembered and made sure no one forgot.

One day when I was walking home from school, a group of kids from the KPT housing projects, where Cori lived, were trailing me. I was wearing heels, slightly wobbly and unsure on the unpaved path that led to the bridge over Kalihi Stream. As I neared the bridge, I
heard the kind of obnoxious group cackle that’s meant to arouse fear in someone not part of the clique. A chant soon began: “Chaarrrlesss! Ohhh, Chaaaarles!”

Keeping my eyes on the rocky path, I carefully sped up and widened my stride. I had to be careful. If the thin wedge of my sandals met a rock at a bad angle, my ankle would buckle. I noticed one pebble, then another, and a few more hitting the ground around me, bouncing like Rice Krispies in milk. Then one hit the back of my head, and another my back. The rocks didn’t hurt, but they shook me, crumbling my pride. I wish I had been brave enough to turn around and confront them. Instead, I took the rocks on my back and my head until I crossed that bridge to my apartment while they laughed past me. When I got home, I collapsed onto my twin mattress and committed to traveling further than any of these idiots ever would. I found solace in the fact that nothing was wrong with me. Instead my audacity to be seen, to dare for greatness, moved those without that same courage toward defense. Feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks wrote, “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

Though I lost that battle, I did win others, including the grand prize in a speech contest where I fiercely recited Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman,” words that served as fuel, enabling me to recognize a legacy of resilience that lay deep within me. Then Alison told me with the biggest smile that I was one of four finalists for a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Hawai‘i at Maānoa. I wasn’t thrilled. I dreamed of going to NYU, like Felicity (or UNY, as it was called on the WB series), but I’d applied to UH because I didn’t want to leave Hawaii without having had bottom surgery. Alison told me that members of the faculty had nominated me, and the W. R.
Farrington Memorial Scholarship committee would interview me in a few weeks. The award was worth sixteen thousand dollars, covering tuition, books, and other expenses.

On the day of the interview, I knew the odds were stacked against me. When I saw Elaine, a Vietnamese girl who was by far the most academic girl in our school, I knew the interview process was just for show. The award had to be hers. We four finalists sat in the teachers’ lounge near the front lawn of the school, facing the circle sculpture by artist Satoru Abe. Called
The Seed
, it boasted bronze and gold leaves reaching out to the sun. I wasn’t nervous about the interview until I meditated on the cluster of three seeds at the bottom of the statue. The piece’s energy was in the reaching leaves, but they all emanated from those seeds. I thought about how this money could help me, how I’d be the first person in my family to attend college. I thought about accepting my scholarship and how it would be the seed money for my future.

When one of the counselors facilitating the interview called me in, I was surprised by the number of committee members in the room. There were three women and four men, one of them the publisher of the local newspaper, the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
, and another the great-grandson of the namesake of the scholarship and our school, a former governor of Hawaii. I sat at the head of a long table, in front of the eyes of all of these adults. My hands were uncomfortably placed in front of me, one of my acrylic nails missing and my French manicure chipped slightly. I wore black wide-legged trousers and a white button-down blouse. My hair was auburn with two blond strands in my front layers, mirroring Beyoncé’s signature highlights.

“So, you want to study law and be a certified public accountant as well?” one of the men asked, skeptical in the way that adults are when young people’s goals seem unrealistic. Quirky Ally McBeal had made
me want to be a lawyer, and my business accounting teacher, who treated me with kindness, had made me want to be an accountant. I didn’t tell the board that. I told them I appreciated the certainty of numbers and the uncertainty of the law’s interpretation.

They asked me other standard questions that spanned my involvement as a peer mediator and a member of Chrysalis. I effortlessly answered those questions because I expected them. As the interview was closing, one committee member gently inquired about what it meant for me to go through “the changes” I had gone through so publicly. I told her that I had transferred to Farrington to find the support that I needed, and though some students teased me, my experience had been mostly positive. Then she asked, in an unscripted moment of awe, “How do you do it all?”

That was the first time an adult besides Alison looked at me with genuine wonder, as if I were something to be marveled at. I didn’t give myself a moment to think about how I was an honor student, a trans girl, a mall employee, a part-time sex worker, and a soon-to-be college student dreaming of a sex change. Like Beyoncé on my walls and Janie in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, I felt validated, reflected, understood. Her recognition of my struggle, my circumstance, and my tenacity overwhelmed me with emotion. I didn’t know if there was a right answer. I just knew I had to be honest.

“I don’t think too much about how I do it all, because I have no choice but to do it all,” I said through mascara-stained black tears, resembling Lauren Conrad on
The Hills
. “I think it’s hard being any of us, and the only thing that makes it a bit easier is being okay with who you are. Some days are easier than others, but every day I am really happy to be me, and I think that helps a lot.”

That May, with my family, Wendi, and Alison cheering me on, I accepted the sixteen-thousand-dollar scholarship. I received a lei and an award certificate as the applause of three hundred of my classmates
and their families and friends roared in front of me. In my white cap and gown, I took in the sea of white and maroon filling our school’s amphitheater, feeling victorious and humbled and affirmed in a holistic way. These people believed in me, which made me believe in me even more. I felt nothing could stop me. We celebrated over Chinese food that weekend with Papa and Grandma Pearl and my aunts and uncles, whom Mom had reconnected with after her breakup with Rick. I received cards of congratulation and leis and school-supply money. I landed on the front page of the life section of our daily newspaper, which cited me as Janet Mock, not Janet Mock the transgender girl. I was Janet Mock, “the UH-bound daughter of Elizabeth Mock of Honolulu.”

•  •  •

College began that fall in the wake of much mourning. On my way to my first day of school, I heard on the radio that the singer Aaliyah had died in a plane crash in the Bahamas after a video shoot. She was only twenty-two, four years older than I was. I had known her through her music since she was fifteen. Having never known anyone close who had died, I cried those first few nights of my freshman semester to the songs of her self-titled final album, released just a month before her death.

Two weeks later, Mom shouted from the living room at six
A.M.
, telling us to get up. I joined my family in front of the TV, where we watched the footage of the World Trade Center on fire. We sat mere miles from Pearl Harbor, where sixty years earlier it was blazing by foreign attack. The world felt chaotic, the future uncertain, and the first thoughts in my head were selfish ones:
I do not want to die before I get a chance to be truly myself.
There were vigils at school, a march, and blood drives. Everyone wore American flag pins and ribbons on
their cars. Hawaii felt so far away, so detached from the mainland, from New York, that the attack’s impact felt as if it had happened to some foreign country. That sense of mass loss, though, made me think about my own death, about how my youth didn’t guarantee that I’d be here forever, and in the limited time I had left, I wanted to be fully me.

A flame of determination and urgency rose up, rivaling my internal angst and desperation about my body. I could not look at the mirror without panties on, and when I lay in bed, I was always tucked. There was never a free moment when I allowed my genitals to just be beyond the shower or in some man’s hand or bed for money. Even then, I cringed.
What woman lets a man touch her like that?
I thought. Not the kind of woman I saw myself as. That cycle of desire, the desire to be touched and loved and appreciated for exactly who I was and the messages that I sent myself about who I was and how I looked, sent me into a tailspin.

I never resorted to physically hurting myself, which seems to be a common thread among trans youth grappling with issues of identity, body, and the angst of being teenagers. I’ve heard stories from people who were so disgusted by their body, with the dissonance, incongruence, and conflict it presented to their sense of self, that they mutilated the parts that they wished they could be rid of. It seemed like it was the only way out.

I was willing to make any compromises to get my surgery, and those nighttime thoughts birthed a plan that would get me to my goal by the end of the year. I made the decision to engage in the sex trade full-time on Merchant Street to save the money I needed to fly to Thailand by the end of the year. It was a plan for my own survival. It was my decision, one of the only viable choices for me to get what I needed. Many people believe trans women choose to engage in the
sex trade rather than get a
real
job. That belief is misguided because sex work
is
work, and it’s often the
only
work available to marginalized women. Though we act as individuals, we can’t remove ourselves from the framework of society. Systemic oppression creates circumstances that push many women to choose sex work as a means of survival, and I was one of those women, choosing survival.

Pulling out the napkin Kahlúa gave me with her surgeon’s name, I found his website, which detailed that he had performed more than a thousand genital reconstruction surgeries and had studied under Thailand’s most acclaimed surgeon. His portrait was amiably confident. He stood in a black suit with his arms over his chest, flaunting a welcoming smile. I wrote him a detailed e-mail about my journey: I had been living as a girl for the past four years, three on hormone therapy. I told him I was interested in undergoing surgery in December, three months from now. He wrote back a day later, requesting that we consult over the phone and to ready myself with a letter from my physician.