Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

  Quickly, Chad and I assimilated as best as we could, speaking pidgin like the local kids on the playground, though Mom couldn’t stand the sound of it. Pidgin is the language of the islands, not to be confused with the Hawaiian language of the indigenous people. Mom rejected pidgin as “broken English,” but it was hard to dismiss because it was the tongue of the people, created by the people. The sugar plantation laborers who were brought to the islands in the nineteenth century from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines slowly created a common language out of their varying tongues, a hodgepodge of Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, English, and Cantonese. It was a tool of resistance that allowed the plantation workers to communicate without the mediation of the English-speaking haole (a Hawaiian term for someone who is foreign, particularly white, and not of the islands) plantation owners.

  Looking back on my return to Hawaii makes me think about what family has come to mean to me. In Hawaii, family showed itself in the way that my siblings and I never dared to call one another “half” anything. We were fully brothers and sisters. Family appeared in the pile of rubber slippers and sandals that crowded the entrance to everyone’s home; in the kisses we gave when we greeted one another and said good-bye; in the graceful choreography of Grandma hanging the laundry on the clothesline; in the inclusiveness of calling anyone older auntie or uncle whether or not they were relatives; in the sound of Papa and Uncle Junior and Uncle Toma’s empty beer cans bouncing against the grass; in the way all the folks in Ka’ahumanu Housing remembered Chad and me despite all those years away.

  No one knew where I’d been, knew about Keisha, or had heard Dad’s incessant complaints about my femininity. There was freedom in a clean slate, in new beginnings, in being able to leave the past behind and start anew. I vowed silently to be the good son I thought Mom wanted. I would leave my swishiness behind, I would play catch with Chad and the boys in the park, I would pretend to be into girls, I would keep my hair short, I would do well in school. If I did these things, then Mom would never send me away again, I told myself. I could stay with her right here forever.

  On the road toward self-revelation, we make little compromises in an effort to appease those we love, those who are invested in us, those who have dreams for us. Those people tend to be our parents. I didn’t want to be without my mother. I wanted her to be happy, and I believed I could make her happy if I were the kid she’d always wanted, the one who stopped all the girlie stuff that had angered my father for years. Mom never asked me to butch up; I just did it, and the world reacted differently. I noticed a shift in how other kids treated me. The teasing that I had endured in Oakland and Dallas stopped. The name-calling that I had grown desensitized to came to a halt. There was no longer a target on my back, and for once, it felt good to be invisible, even if I was masked by untruth.

  Hiding myself for that brief period allowed me to operate under a guise of normality that made me feel temporarily secure. For many trans people, the pretending can last months, years, even decades; no two people have the same journey, yet a common fear threads us: Being who I really am will lead to rejection. Concealing who you are warps your sense of self and heightens feelings of hopelessness about ever being able to be your true self. A defeatist feeling loomed over me, telling me that no one would ever understand and accept me. I began believing that people, including my family and friends, would be disgusted by me, and these new belief systems anchored in the shame that I internalized from the world around me led to further isolation. It’s no surprise that trans people are more likely to struggle with depression, suicidal thoughts and actions, substance abuse, and a wide range of self-harming behaviors that make it that much more difficult to live healthy, thriving lives.

  Thankfully, suicidal thoughts were not part of my journey, though feelings of isolation and hopelessness followed me. In rare moments of self-reflection, when I faced no one but myself, I dropped the mask. I didn’t have the words to define what I saw or who I was, but I recognized me and often chose to dismiss her with the one question that pushed me to put the mask back on: Who will ever love you if you tell the truth?

  Chapter Eight

  Wendi’s first words to me were “Mary! You mahu?”

  I was sitting on a park bench as Jeff ran around with his friends on the lawn that separated my school from his. Wendi was passing by with her volleyball in hand, her backpack bouncing on her butt, and her drive-by inquiry in the air. Though there was definitely a question mark floating around, her direct yet playful approach made me internalize her words as a statement. If she’s asking—even kiddingly—then I must be suspect, I thought.

  Everyone took notice of Wendi. She was hard to miss, prancing around Kalakaua Intermediate School in super-short soccer shorts, with her green mop of hair vibrantly declaring her presence. Subtlety was not—and still isn’t—her thing. Her irritated red skin, peppered with acne, glistened with sweat as she played volleyball on campus. I’d never been this close to her, and her scrutinizing stare was intimidating.

  Jeff, whom I picked up every day after school while Chad was at basketball or baseball practice, wasn’t paying attention, but I remember feeling self-conscious. I was afraid that if I got close to Wendi or someone saw me interacting with her, I would be called mahu—a word that I equated to sissy. In my playground experience with the term, it was an epithet, thrown at any boy who was perceived to be too feminine. Until Wendi crossed paths with me, I was under the impression that I was doing a good job at being butch enough that such words wouldn’t be thrown my way.

  I was afraid that Wendi had seen me, but beneath that fear of being visible was a sense of belonging that thrilled me. I recognize now that her stopping to ask, “You mahu?” (though I would later learn she didn’t identify as such) was her attempt at finding others like her—a connection I wasn’t ready to make. I gave her a scrunched, crumpled expression resembling adamant denial, which made her roll her eyes and prance away.

  At the time, mahu was limited by our Western interpretation, mostly used as a pejorative. What I later learned in my Hawaiian studies classes in college was that mahu defined a group of people who embodied the diversity of gender beyond the dictates of our Western binary system. Mahu were often assigned male at birth but took on feminine gender roles in Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) culture, which celebrated mahu as spiritual healers, cultural bearers and breeders, caretakers, and expert hula dancers and instructors (or Kumu s in Hawaiian). In the Western understanding and evolution of mahu, it translates to being transgender in its loosest understanding: to cross social boundaries of gender and/or sex. Like that of Hawaii’s neighboring Polynesian islands, mahu is similar to the mahu vahine in Tahiti, fa’afafine in Samoa, and fakaleiti in Tonga, which comes from the Tongan word faka (meaning “to have the way of”) and leiti (meaning “lady”). Historically, Polynesian cultures carved an “other” category in gender, uplifting the diversity, span, and spectrum in human expression.

  To be mahu was to occupy a space between the poles of male and female in precolonial Hawaii, where it translated to “hermaphrodite,” used to refer to feminine boys or masculine girls. But as puritanical missionaries from the West influenced Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century, their Christian, homophobic, and gender binary systems pushed mahu from the center of culture to the margins. Mahu became a slur, one used to describe male-to-female transgender people and feminine men who were gay or perceived as gay due to their gender expression. Despite mahu’s modern evolution, it was one of the unique benefits of growing up in a diverse place like Hawaii, specifically Oahu (which translates to “the gathering place”), where multiculturalism was the norm. It was empowering to come of age in a place that recognized that diversity existed not only in ethnicities but also in gender. There was a level of tolerance regarding gender nonconformity that made it safer for people like Wendi and me to exist as we explored and expressed our identities.

  The first person I met who took pride in being mahu was my hula in
structor at school. Kumu Kaua’i was one of those mahu who reclaimed her place in society—specifically, being celebrated in the world of hula, where the presence and talent of mahu was valuable. Some trans women, who actively engaged in restoring native Hawaiian culture, reclaimed mahu at that time, choosing to call themselves mahuwahine (wahine is Hawaiian for “woman”), just as some people in marginalized communities reclaimed formerly derogatory words like dyke, fag, nigger, queer, and tranny. It was theirs to claim, use, and uplift. Kumu didn’t call herself a woman or gay despite her femininity and preference for she and her as pronouns. She simply identified as mahu and had no qualms about the vessel she was given and nor any desire to change it.

  Kumu had long, bushy black hair that waved all the way to her behind, which she draped in bright floral-print pareo s or lavalava (wraparound skirts). I marveled at the unique ways she wrapped her pareo s around her neck, letting the lush fabric flow over her rotund belly to her long, thick legs. Her skin was the color of coconut husks (a combination of her Hawaiian-Filipino-Chinese ancestry), her nose was broad, and her eyes were framed by thin high-arched brows that curved fiercely, mirroring the sway of her hips when she showed us how to ’ami and ’uwehe.

  “Soft hands,” she would gently instruct our small hula halau (Hawaiian for “dance troupe”). “You must always offer the gods soft, graceful hands. Don’t stomp the land like you’re mad! Be gentle and gracious. This dance is our offering to the gods, thanking them for everything.”

  Kumu bewildered me initially because I had been raised within the strict confines of male and female. This was a far cry from football Sundays with Dad in the projects. I was shaken by the dissonance of bright floral dresses and long hair on the form of a male-bodied person, someone who expressed her femininity proudly and visibly. Adding to that was the regular presence of Kumu’s “husband,” a tall, masculine man who appeared Samoan in stature and looks. He would pick up Kumu at the end of our practices, affectionately kissing her and helping her load the truck with the hula instruments—the ipu (a drum gourd) and ’ili’ili (set of smooth black stones)—that she brought for us to dance with. I now realize that my fascination with Kumu wasn’t that she puzzled me; I was in awe. She resonated with me at age twelve as I yearned to explore and reveal who I was. With time, I accepted Kumu’s own determination of gender and learned to evolve past my ironic need to confine her to the two boxes I had been raised to live within. Kumu Kaua’i, like mahuwahine who came before, staked a given righteous place in Hawaii by uplifting, breeding, and spreading many aspects of native Hawaiian culture, specifically through hula. Kumu taught me, this mixed plate of a kid, how to mirror the movements of my ancestors and give thanks for the island culture that respected various other identities.

  Wendi similarly captivated me because she refused to be jailed by anyone’s categories or expectations. There was no confining this girl. I noticed her everywhere after our brief exchange, during which she recognized something in me that I thought I had expertly hidden behind buzz cuts and polo shirts. I took note of her slamming her volleyball at recess, whipping her flamboyant bob around campus, carrying her black flute case as she sashayed to band practice. What still stuns me about Wendi is that no one tolerated her. She was not something to be tolerated. She was accepted as fact, just as one would accept the plumpness of the lunch ladies or the way Auntie Peggy, the counselors’ secretary, would grab your palm as you waited for a meeting and read you your future (I recall her telling me, “You’re going to get married in white!”). Wendi’s changing hues, her originality, her audacity to be fully herself, was embraced and probably even more respected at an age when the rest of us were struggling and striving to fit in.

  I refuse to pretend, though, that her uniqueness didn’t make her a target. Wendi was called faggot at recess and asked when she was going to get her sex change. She used such ignorance as ammunition, threatening to kiss the boys who sought to humiliate her. I wasn’t as daring as Wendi, and looking at her I was frightened by what I saw: myself. I told no one about her calling me mahu at the swings and avoided her as her long legs in her rolled-up shorts and knee-high socks glided past me in the halls.

  Instead, I became all the more unwavering in my commitment to being the good son that year. I didn’t put up a fight when it came to haircuts at the beauty school that offered barber discounts. I earned awards for my academic performance in class, was bumped into advanced courses, and even worked as an editor for the yearbook and the quarterly newspaper. My teachers praised and encouraged me, and in the spring of 1996, I was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. I was the only boy from our class to be inducted. I loved the distinction of only, though the boy part I could’ve done without.

  At our induction ceremony, Mom, Chad, Jeff, Cori, and the girls sat in the audience as I received my certificate and posed for pictures with Mr. Higa, my counselor and our NJHS faculty adviser, and the rest of the girls, who surrounded me in white dresses. I wore a white button-down shirt with black slacks and my knockoff Timberland boots. This was around the time when I began parting my shorn curls at the side, resembling what I imagined was a Halle Berry–esque hairdo, a haircut that Cori loved to tease: “You look like Gumby!” All teasing was aside that day as I beamed in our school library with its gray carpet and rows of books and encyclopedias and Hawaiian quilts hanging on the wall. My family sat in the brown metal foldout chairs, listening to our rendition of Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me.”

  That same year, I had my first and only girlfriend for a couple of weeks. We met in Mr. Wong’s social studies class, where she sat behind me, wearing gray contact lenses that made her sharp eyes look catlike and a short haircut that complemented her petite frame. Like the majority of kids in Kalihi, she was Filipino. I adored her. We spoke on the phone regularly as friends, and then all of a sudden I was her “boyfriend,” something instigated and encouraged by our peers, since we hung out so much. I reluctantly went along with it, carrying the title for those two weeks because she made me appear normal. I didn’t want to stick out like Wendi, who would enter my every day during the second half of seventh grade, when we had band class together.

  I played tuba, she the flute and piccolo. I was envious of her compact, feminine instrument. We both were first chair of our sections, she swaying noticeably to her own sound. Early in the spring semester, Wendi sat near me one day as the room emptied and I wiped the saliva out of my mouthpiece. Her closeness made me nervous, just like the first time she asked whether I was mahu, because I worried others would think we were friends. I knew I could be called out by association, but something about that day made me not care.

  “I’m going to the gym to play volleyball,” she said. “Like come?”

  It was another invitation to connect; she was subtle this time. I think she knew it would take baby steps for me to be as out there as she was, and I knew that denying her would mean denying myself. I nodded discreetly, and volleyball became the foundation of our relationship. On the hot cement courts behind our school, Wendi taught me to bump, set, and spike, which was a feat, because I was about four inches shorter than she was at the time. I approached the ball with confidence and sass despite my height, and I even hit the ball with my head snapping at the exact moment my open palm hit the ball, just like Wendi. It was a flamboyant habit that my high school coach would later drill me to unlearn.

  Wendi and I grew inseparable through middle school, a bond that would link us for the rest of our lives. Through association, my classmates learned that I was like Wendi—who hadn’t yet adopted any labels to describe her shifting self. I was fortunate to meet someone just like me at such a young age. It was empowering to see myself reflected in her, and I rapidly shifted in her presence. I began dressing like her, shopping at Savers, the thrift store at Dillingham Plaza, scoring soccer shorts and vintage T-shirts. Wendi shopped with a stapler and staple remover to swap price tags according to the day’s color-coded half-off specials. If blue tags w
ere half off, we’d shop for what we wanted, then hunt for garments with blue tags, removing them with the staple remover and restapling the tags to our garments. “Sickening, yeah?” Wendi would snap as we giddily skipped out of the thrift store, swinging our white plastic bags filled with donated clothes for just under twenty dollars.

  We became a regular sight on Gulick Avenue, prancing up and down that main road in Kalihi from her two-bedroom apartment, where she lived with her grandparents, to my house on Owawa Street. What strikes me now is that no one in my family raised an eyebrow when Wendi came to our house. Mom didn’t pull me aside and have a talk with me about my friend. Cori never teased me or Wendi. Chad and Jeff were nothing but cordial, gamely sleeping in the living room so Wendi and I could have the room all to ourselves. Wendi quickly became a regular, welcomed presence in my house. A part of me believes that I brought her around at a time when I was reluctant to vocalize who I was. Her presence allowed me to show another layer of my identity to my family. Their nonchalance helped rebut my fears of rejection.

  My baby brother, Jeff, who was only seven at the time, later confessed that he was “confused” by Wendi’s flamboyance and even more “confused” by my evolution. “You were always different,” he later told me, citing that when he heard he had two older brothers, he thought Mom had misspoken because he’d seen a boy and a girl with wild curly hair get off the plane.