144 Quotes by Janet Mock

"My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary."

"I just am trans. That's just the way it is. I knew this as a child. But I was told that because I expressed femininity in a boy's body, I needed to be silent about it. To be ashamed. That led to isolation, which then made it easier for me to be prey to a predator in my own home."

"I think a lot of people are very interested in why other people are trans or why people are gay."

"I know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders."

"It is the world's limitations and the myths that we internalize about ourselves that pushes us to diminish our power and ignore it."

"I know how messy things can get when adults overstep their boundaries and insert themselves - their politics, their fears, their prejudices, their ignorance - into the lives of young people."

"When I was a toddler, my father cut hair in the townhouse we had shared together in Long Beach, California, where Dad was stationed with the U.S. Navy. The buzz of clippers consistently hummed as he gave fades to his coworkers, my uncles, and my brother, but his clippers were never oiled and plugged in for my head."

"Trans people are not a monolith."

"Because trans people are marked as artificial, unnatural, and illegitimate, our bodies and identities are often open to public dissection. Plainly, cisgender folks often take it as their duty to investigate our lives to see if we're real."

"If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it's Kim Kardashian West."