Janet Mock on the Trans Underground Railroad

(upbeat drum music)

There are two Hawaiians that have changed my life,

you and Bette Midler.

(Janet and audience laugh)

And any state that can produce the two of you is okay by me.

So I wanted to, tell us a little bit about

those first years in Hawaii and, mahu?

[Janet] Mahu, mmhm.

I'm so glad that I pronounced it properly, mahu,

and tell the folks what that means.

Well, mahu is a native Hawaiian identity and term,

a label for people who live outside of the gender binary,

largely folk

who in our loosely I guess Western translation

would be like trans women.

And so for me I remember in the seventh grade,

my hula teacher was a mahuwahine.

I love that you had hula lessons.

(both laugh)

I love that.

I know, yeah.

And so like the fact that the Department of Education

in Hawaii hired a trans woman, like my everyday life

just was changed and shifted.

You know, I didn't have to look to Law and Order

or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or Silence of the Lambs

to see trans people represented.

They were a part of my everyday.

I had hula lessons three times a week after school.

And so, Kumakuwahi was this person that was just,

she took up space, and she, I hate to use that term,

but she normalized gender nonconformity

and being different in that sense.

And then I met my best friend Wendy,

who clocked me at the playground and was just like,

Bitch, what are you trying to do here?

We can turn this buzz cut into a Halle Berry do

if you want.

We could remix this.

How old were you?

I was 12.

I just got so lucky that within the first few months

of being there I found this best friend

who had this like, this hallway of femininity in her home.

She had like porno magazines and she had wigs

and she had eyeliner and she had clothes

and it was just like this really great space

of desire and pleasure

that I got to share with like a sister.

I always saw her as a queen.

She very much saw herself as a goddess.

That's her, so I'm gonna respect her identity.

But she was--

How old was Wendy?

She was a year older than me

but we were in the same grade.

She's a little slow.

In terms of books.

Read read read read.

She could read but she couldn't read.

But...

She was so big, I could just hide behind her,

so if I started tweezing my eyebrows no one really noticed

or I started wearing eyeliner,

no one really noticed, you know,

because Wendy was always doing more.

She was always five steps ahead of me

and just so much more brazen.

And so, that was contagious, to have a friend

who didn't care so much about what people thought,

and I'm not the only girl that she did this to.

Like she literally was the passage.

Like the underground railroad was like Wendy's house

of transitioning. (laughs)

I was about to say the trans underground railroad.

That was the best.

Trans underground railroad.

I've been living for this.

That is the greatest thing ever.

That's what it was.

It was just a space of play.

Sections of the first book certainly is

getting the money to pay for the transition.

Yeah, for us, you know there was this block

called Merchant Street, which was in downtown Honolulu.

It's where the girls worked.

At first I came in very much

with like my National Junior Honor Society hat on,

which was like, I could never do what they do,

and so I remember this regular pulled up and saw me,

and he was like, I want her.

And so I knew that by doing this $60 handjob

that I would be able to have two months of hormones.

I remember making that decision to get in that car

and at, you know, 15 years old.

It was easier for me if I tackled it as a journalist

or as someone that was looking at my life

and then treating myself as a subject

and then maybe later turning it into I statements.

Yes.

Tell us about Bangkok and then coming back.

So I had known a woman who had gone there

for her bottom surgery, and I knew

that that's where I was gonna go.

I saw her results.

I was like, that looks good.

I didn't know if she was lying.

She said she could have organisms, but I was like,

okay, whatever.

I'll figure that out.

And so yeah, I went there alone.

[Hilton] How old were you at the time?

I was 18.

For me, it was just so deeply affirming.

It was like things made sense to me

in terms of looking at my own form

and because I had to live in this body

and exist in this body, I wanted to learn to love

my body and accept it.

And you started to do something.

Was it with the support of this therapist,

this idea of writing about yourself?

Yeah, he just told me, he was like,

you should keep going with that.

Because I was sitting in here and I had

all these pathologies in my head

that I had learned from the world that I grew up in,

that I was not deserving and worthy

of love and affection and all this stuff.

And so, he believed that there was a part of me

that wanted to express so much of this stuff

but had never really expressed it.

And he was like, you have quite the story.

You should probably sit down and think about

really just spending time in the morning

before you go to your job at People Magazine,

and go and sit and just write for yourself for one hour.

Extraordinary moment happens when you're writing

this hour every morning.

You start to find yourself, and before you know it

there's a book.

There's a significant person comes across your book

and it's a man named Ryan Murphy

and he has a lot of interest in queer communities and so on.

How did Ryan get your book?

I think he was looking to add a trans woman of color

into the writers room.

I didn't think he knew--

[Hilton] In what show?

For Pose.

For Pose, which was a series that premiered on FX in June.

(audience applauds)

It made history for assembling the most

trans actors as series regulars.

There's five trans women of color

who are the centers of the show

in addition to the magnificent Billy Porter.

For me it was just about, you know,

that we could be the protagonists.

I think in so much of the work that I've tried to do

was to recenter us and no longer put us

as these great martyrs that come in for an episode

or as a subplot to the straight cisgender characters,

life to teach them about, they die,

and then it teaches them about authenticity.

Like oh, I can be my real self too, you know?

And so instead, we wanted to reframe that

and say that what our lives,

our only struggles are not just with our bodies

and what we do with our bodies

but also how we share our bodies and what are our dreams

and what are the obstacles that it takes to get there,

and how do we get in one another's way as well,

because when we say family it's complicated.