A Quote by Janet Mock
For me, as an activist and a storyteller, I'm very centered in ensuring that we show the complicatedness of the human experience that happens to be rooted in my community's trans experiences.
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We're trying to humanize the trans community. It's about showing us as normal, everyday human beings who just happen to be trans.
Trans voices are really underrepresented, and trans stories are really underrepresented, and when they are presented, they're often reductive. I was interested in putting a trans person and a trans narrative on stage that didn't fall into cliché, that thought a bit more deeply about the experience of being trans, and how those issues tie into things that we all experience. How we tell the story of our lives, versus what might have actually happened, and how we communicate to our former selves. All of those questions were really interesting to me.
It just so happens that I'm trans. It shouldn't have to be like 'Oh, that's the trans model selling the trans clothes.'
I think it's really important to champion stories from trans women and trans women of color. That demographic has gone unheard and unsupported for so long, and it's really the community that's struck the hardest by a lot of issues. I try to do a lot of work to champion trans feminine issues and stories, but that said, I do have a personal and deep investment in seeing trans masculine stories reflected in culture. It is a little disappointing to me that trans men and trans masculine people have not really been part of this media movement that we're experiencing right now.
We have different experiences, but trans women have experiences that do parallel with the whole fabric of what womanhood is. Embracing trans women, listening to their stories, enriches what womanhood is. It expands it and makes it even better.
Experience is stronger than belief. Once we have experiences our mind begins to open. This works better than me forcing my own experience or knowledge onto anyone. Show them how to have their own experiences.
I knew I wanted to do a show on NBC - it's rooted in its history; it's part rooted in nostalgia and part rooted in the potential of it. For me, there was no other choice.
They were totally uplifting my work and gave me a platform, and now I have an ongoing relationship with the White House. We're working on some very, very, very big things for the trans community.
We still live in a country where there's disproportionate violence faced by our community, especially trans people and trans people of color. I think activism within the queer community continues to need to focus on those issues first.
If we took the passion and the conviction that the activist trans community has and we combined it with this over-the-top marketable charisma of drag, I feel like if we worked together, we could really effect major social change and world change.
Black Trans Lives Matter, to me, is really different. I think it speaks most directly to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of trans people within the black community.
I think accurately presenting a trans character means not presenting them as perfect - I think there's been a pressure to do this with trans characters. They can have no flaws because they must represent the entire trans community.
Many in the trans community are fed up with L.G.B.T. organizations that continue to erase trans identity or just give lip service to trans issues. We need our cisgender allies - gay and straight - to treat transgender lives as if they matter, and trans people need multiple seats at the tables in the organizations that say they're interested in L.G.B.T. equality; this absence has been painful since Stonewall.
I don't see myself as an activist. I understand that people, with me doing 'Satyameva Jayate,' for example, they will feel that I'm being an activist, but I'm not. Actually, I'm not, because I think an activist, as I see it, as a person who is very, very - takes up one issue and remains with that one issue for his entire life. I'm not doing that.
I don't dedicate my whole life to being a trans advocate. But I do believe that me, and how I represent myself and how I am honest and open to everybody, I do feel like I'm doing something for the trans community.
No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God's faithful love.
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