Janet Mock Finds Her Voice
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Janet Mock first heard the word “māhū,” 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’t feel right. “I don’t like to say the word ‘trapped,’ ” Mock tells The New Yorker’s Hilton Als. “But I was feeling very, very tightly contained in my body.”
Eventually, Mock left Hawaii for New York, where she worked as an editor for People magazine. “[Everyone was] bigger and louder and smarter and bolder than me,” she tells Als. “So, in that sense, I could kind of blend in.” 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’s written two books, produced a documentary, and hosted for MSNBC. She is a contributing editor for Marie Claire, and, in 2018, she became the first trans woman of color to be hired as a writer on a TV series—Ryan Murphy’s FX series “Pose.” Now she’s working on a film adaptation of her Times best-selling memoir, “Redefining Realness.”
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| 0:49.0 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. |
| 0:50.9 | On today's Politics and More Podcast, the New Yorker's Hilton Al's talks with the writer and trans activist Janet Mock. |
| 0:58.2 | Mock is the author of two memoirs and an editor at Marie Claire. |
| 1:02.3 | In 2018, she became the first trans woman of color hired to write for a TV series. |
| 1:12.5 | Every year, we invite some of the most interesting people in America to come talk with us |
| 1:17.1 | at the New Yorker Festival, writers, musicians, inventors, leaders in government and policy, |
| 1:22.4 | but we'll start with the writer and trans activist Janet Mock. |
| 1:26.3 | Mock made her name with a best-selling memoir called |
| 1:28.4 | Redefining Realness, which is about her childhood growing up trans in Hawaii and Texas. |
| 1:34.7 | She writes about gender, sexuality, identity, and self-discovery. |
| 1:39.3 | The book won a pile of awards, and in the last few years, Mock wrote another book, |
| 1:44.1 | hosts the podcast Never Before, and in the last few years, Mock wrote another book, host to the podcast Never Before, |
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