Live: Janet Mock and Chris Hayes

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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.” Since coming out as transgender publicly, Mock has emerged as a leading advocate for trans people; she is the author of a best-selling memoir and the first trans woman of color to be hired as a writer for a TV series, Ryan Murphy’s FX series “Pose.” Plus: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, the youngest prime-time host for a major cable-news channel, on the psychic toll of covering the news in Donald Trump’s America.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every year, we invite some of the most interesting people in America to come talk with us at the New Yorker Festival, writers, musicians, inventors, leaders in government
0:21.6	and policy. Today you'll hear from Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's program All In, but we'll start
0:28.2	with the writer and trans activist Janet Mock. Mock made her name with a best-selling memoir called
0:33.6	Redefining Realness, which is about her childhood growing up trans in Hawaii and Texas.
0:39.9	She writes about gender, sexuality, identity, and self-discovery.
0:44.4	The book won a pile of awards, and in the last few years,
0:47.7	Mock wrote another book, hosts the podcast Never Before,
0:51.7	and contributed to the FX drama Pose,
0:54.0	which takes place in the LGBT ballroom
0:56.7	scene in 1980s, New York. Staff writer Hilton Hall joined Janet Mocken, October 2018 to talk about
1:04.3	directing, writing, and growing up in Hawaii.
1:10.4	I thought I would start by declaring that there are two Hawaiians that have changed my life,
1:18.6	you and Bet Midler.
1:21.6	And any state that can produce the two of you is okay by me.
1:26.6	So I wanted to, for those folks who haven't seen,
1:31.2	or read Janet's books rather, redefining realness and surpassing realness, it's a really
1:37.3	quite extraordinary story. Tell us a little bit about those first years in Hawaii and also it's a very complex marriage
1:47.9	that your parents had.
1:50.5	So I think in order to understand where you're going, we need a little bit about where
1:54.5	you're coming from.
1:55.5	Yeah, my dad is a black man from Texas.
	...

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