Redefining Realness – Janet Mock

Somewhere in Nevada Sorry, I’ll start that again – somewhere in “Nevada”, the book, Imogen Binnie talks up Janet Mock, the memoir-novelist advocates the memoirist. That’s the way I remembered it anyway so I took the bait and read “Redefining Realness” with the anticipation that Janet Mock was/is the trans memoirist’s trans memoirist. In America of course literature is a serious business, - books change you, make you rich and famous - and trans literature is a sub-division of the business, so I wasn’t expecting to find a world which included me particularly, just another life to consider and one at a high level of writing. And so it was. “My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More”, that’s the byline. In one way it’s a classic trans memoir. Many life-story components will be familiar – the dysfunctional family, the feeling of alienation, the close supportive friendships in adolescence, the unsuccessful attempt to reverse a growth towards transition, the early sexual abuse, the sex-work, the college ambition, the travel to have surgery. I don’t know how many trans stories you’ve read but I almost think there’s a blue-print of a trans emergence into adulthood and seniority, which includes the above. Back in 2014 when “Redefining Realness” was first published this was the way trans declared itself and Janet Mock did it with superior intelligence, grace and literary verve. Since then the trans memoir has become a bit more selective in its emphases, and indeed Janet Mock takes her identity as a woman of colour as a main theme, as does, more recently, Monroe Bergdorf, for example. At the same time she also places a strong emphasis on the poverty in which she was brought up. Some classic trans experiences though don’t figure in the book, - Janet doesn’t “do drugs” (other than aids to transition), doesn’t commit crime beyond a spate of shoplifting, and keeps a steady eye on where she’s going. That’s the clue to how this success story maintains a sense of direction and focus – it’s in the structure, both of the life and the book. She says, “I now know that I survived the dissonance of my daytime and nighttime lives through compartmentalization.” What, in this instance, she is referring to is a sustained bout of sex-work alongside her progress through college, but that compartmentalization is the main thing which marks off this book from many others. We are told a lot of quite vivid stuff about growing up, adolescence and street-life – we get the Tv programmes and the snacks and clothes - but we are also, with a lot of emotional intelligence, kept abreast of Janet’s emerging sense of her transness. The book even undertakes a few digressions into the issues which present along the way with reasoned arguments about, for example, the nature of sex-work, the best way to deal with transgender in school and education generally, and current understandings and misrepresentations of trans, - and it all reads well. It’s all integrated into a single narrative. One other aspect of Janet’s life which distinguishes it is that almost all of her formative years are spent in Hawaii. Not the romantic, exotic cliché of Hawaii but the tough poor-family, drug-and-crime, hard-knocks Hawaii. The place does though seem to cast a kind of lovely-island spell over her dreams and ambitions, even if those ambitions and dreams are to be elsewhere. There is an interlude in California, - tough, poor, chaotic Oakland – to point up the belongingness of the Hawaiian landscape. It’s clear that it is not a paradise but perhaps its sweetness does keep the more boosterish elements of the “American Dream” in check. The result is that “Redefining Realness” is not an overwrought account of an overwrought life. All the book’s elements are woven together with skill and flexibility. The extended Mock family are seen through Janet’s childhood perspective in all their prejudicial complications, - drug use, erratic behaviour, crime, neglect, unpredictable care and concern, deficient parenting. From the vantage-point in the 20-teens when many of those violations have been resolved and Janet has achieved a measure of success and a physical transition the narrative is often interrupted with accounts of how her parents have moved on in their attitudes, siblings have embraced Janet’s independence and even how Janet herself has revised the judgemental view she took of her upbringing. In some memoirs all this comes at the end of the story but here we are continuously reminded that everything is happening as part of growth. Another way in which this book avoids literary cliché is by the use of a framing story. It begins and ends with Janet developing a loving relationship with Aaron, a man who initially assumes that she is cisgender. We plunge into the main memoir when she is agonizing over how to tell him her story. And the concluding resolution of that problem is also irregular as it takes more than simply sweet words to help Aaron come to terms with the situation. Many times along the way the memoir confronts the complicated nature of life, and not just the complications of the trans life. This is, as I see it, the “realness” referred to in the book’s byline. It’s not the realness derived from and popularized by the vogue and ball scene, an end in itself which has often declined into the notion of “passing”, but a realism which is lived on a daily basis. It’s also something we have in common with the most alive of our cisgendered companions on Life’s journey. As a writer I appreciate the sophistication of Janet Mock’s writing, not least in the way that it merges good storytelling with the actualities of contemporary transness. The climax of the memoir is when Janet’s sex-work encounters violence. Up to this point we might even feel a little disbelieving that she can have survived so long on the street without any serious incidents, rather as we might wonder at her avoidance of drugs. Actually that gives the clue to her actual vulnerability because her drug has become her need for surgical transition, her determination to achieve it within a limited time-frame and her almost frenzied commitment to sex-work as a way of getting the money to pay for it. And the moment happens, - she momentarily abandons her self-set safe-guards and is attacked and robbed. The story continues with an offer from one of her regulars to pay the remainder of her surgery bill. She refuses, but she then commits to a pornographic photo-shoot which pays the final instalment, and away she goes to Thailand. What really redeems this storytelling from the taint of good old US “can do/will do” happy endings and lifts us off from the almost timeless Hawaii of childhood is that we emerge into a cusp moment of history. Janet has spent her young life consuming and retreating into television programmes but the pornography shoot takes place in the world of the internet and her porn-shots go viral across social and commercial media. Now Janet needs to self-recriminate – to self-justify and explain is not enough. This is the bonus lesson of “Redefining Realness” and it works for me – the story will not end here. Self-determination is not a straightforward solution. The rules of “normality” and security have changed. Since then this media wave has carried Janet Mock onwards and upwards into journalism, television and film, activism and celebrity. She has married Aaron and they have divorced. I haven’t followed her career in detail, but I’m sure that she has responded to all of these developments with dedication, self-awareness and a literary nous similar to that which we find in this, her first book. I hope that she is now putting all her cultural weight behind trans resistance to the political backlash which has dominated the 2020’s so far. Maybe she didn’t anticipate it – who did predict the backlash? most of us were enjoying our new currency as trans – any more than she anticipated that attack back on Merchant Street in Hawaii in her late teens, but it badly needs her attention now.