Janet Mock Finds Her Voice - a podcast by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Janet Mock first heard the word “m?h?,” 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 tellsThe New Yorker’sHilton Als. “But I was feeling very, very tightly contained in my body.” 

 

Eventually, Mock left Hawaii for New York, where she worked as an editor forPeoplemagazine. “[Everyone was] bigger and louder and smarter and bolder than me,” she tells Als. “So, in that sense, I could kind of blend in.” After working atPeoplefor five years, she came out publicly as trans; since then, she has emerged as a leading voice on trans issues. She’s written two books, produced a documentary, and signed a deal with Netflix. In 2018, she became the first trans woman of color to be hired as a writer on a TV series—Ryan Murphy’s FX series “Pose,” which just concluded its final season.

 

This story originally aired January 4, 2019

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