by Janet Mock
“What’s the use of me having money if I can’t help someone I love?”
His question lingered over breakfast. This was the dream of thousands of girls everywhere: for a man to love you, care for you, provide for you. It was the rescue, like Richard Gere climbing Julia Roberts’s fire escape in Pretty Woman. Sam was the embodiment of that dream, a husband or sugar daddy who was attractive enough and generous with his wealth. I knew women like Kahlúa and many others who had fulfilled that dream of having a man provide for them, giving them surgeries and resources. I could not try on their dreams; they didn’t fit me. To accept Sam’s charity would involve the ultimate compromise of appropriating someone else’s dream.
I realize this sounds contradictory, coming from the same girl who offered her body to men for half hours at a time. But I wasn’t for sale in that way. Never was. I couldn’t imagine looking between my legs and thinking of Sam’s pity disguised as love for the rest of my life. I wanted to be able to say I did it myself, on my terms, my way. To accept Sam’s gift would be to lie, and I had never lied to him or myself. I couldn’t accept his gift because I knew he thought he loved me. It was a one-way affection I’d profited from for years. Sam was aware that I was hustling every night to raise the money for my surgery, and only now, as I was so close to reaching my goal, just twenty-five hundred dollars away, he had extended charity. Acceptance of his offer would cost too much. It would involve my freedom under the unspoken understanding that I would then be his woman.
I declined Sam’s offer just a few weeks before I lifted off to Bangkok. I had finals coming up, though flash cards and all-nighters weren’t really on my mind. I was sacrificing pieces of myself nightly for the bigger picture: to exist in a body that represented me more fully. Using my body was easy initially. I owned it and used it to benefit me. I was born with it and had to live, love, and suffer in this world with it. It was mine to sleep with, profit from, and modify. I grew up in a world where the sex trade, like the modifications we all went through, was part of the pact, a part of the journey we had to go through as trans women.
There’s a level of competence and mastery involved in being good at hustling, and the constant attention from dates falsely boosts your self-esteem. The tragedy is when girls believe all they are good at is being some man’s plaything. When your self-identity and self-worth are tied up in how much money you can make and how many men want you, it can be scary not to rely on that identity; it can be hard to let it go and not know how to define your worth for yourself. Unlearning all I had been taught about who I was, what I could imagine for myself, what I felt was possible, and my tenets on love and sex and trust have been my biggest lessons. I’m still learning.
Sitting in Sam’s kitchen, I paused and experienced one of those check-in moments with myself. I sat there and thought, You know you’re a prostitute, right? That you sought comfort in a regular after being attacked by another date, and now this date is proclaiming his love for you, his go-to fetish come true. I waited for some sense of shock, for some well of emotion. This wasn’t the trans version of Pretty Woman. No one was going to climb my fire escape and rescue me. Nothing but a solution came. Not a good one, but it was a way out.
“How much do you pay those girls who pose for you?” I asked.
“That’s not for you, Janet,” he said with a skeptical look. “You can’t take it back once it’s out there.”
Chapter Sixteen
I cringe at one thing when I look back on my adolescence. Reliving this decision, made over a dozen years ago, has been the most difficult part of my writing. I’ve thought honestly about softening it, maybe even erasing it from my history. My ego convinced me several times that I could deny it ever happened. But I know that excluding it from this chronicle of my life would be cowardly. It would mean I was actively erasing a part of my journey. Why tell your story if you’re not going to tell it in its entirety?
My decisions are my decisions, my choices my choices, and I must stand by the bad ones as much as I applaud my good ones. Collectively, they’re an active archive of my strength and my vulnerability.
I wish I valued myself enough to tell myself that there are in fact things you don’t have to do to survive. You can say no, but that’s the thing about vulnerability. I didn’t know then that I was at my weakest, my most exposed. I was too much of a survivor to admit it. I was busy fighting and didn’t have the luxury of weighing options and considering consequences. Instead, I quickly made the best possible decision available to me at the time and found relief in having found a solution, something that would move me closer to my goal. I was fully in the moment of making progress, and it wasn’t until I evolved beyond survival that I realized what I’d done. No matter how vulnerable, how young, how exposed I was, I still can’t reverse this decision.
When I met Sam’s friend Felix at the sex toy shop on Nimitz Highway, I picked out a black camisole and thong hanging on a white plastic hanger. Felix, a pudgy, chinless man with sparse blond hair covering his forehead, questioned my choice, dangling a white lingerie and garter set in front of me. It was wrapped in plastic, sterile, never worn. “How’s this?” he asked in his jolly British accent.
“Cute,” I said, shrugging. I couldn’t care less about wardrobe; I had never worn lingerie before.
“Cool, we’ll get this, and you pick out another outfit,” he said. “Black is boring.”
Felix’s choice was sweet, innocent, virginal. I picked a Brazilian-cut bathing suit, which was more grown-up, like the seductress I felt men wanted in their beds. At the counter, Felix paid in cash, throwing a small pink dildo into the bag.
We drove his red convertible Jaguar, with a personalized license plate that boasted the name of his company, to a gorgeous house on the hilltops of Hawaii Kai.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked as he placed his keys on a side table in his living room.
“I’m fine, actually,” I said.
“Cool. Mind taking this, though?” he asked, handing me a bottle of water and a diamond-shaped blue pill. The Viagra was another nod toward his professionalism. He’d obviously encountered girls who couldn’t get erect because of estrogen.
I took the little blue pill in Felix’s bathroom, standing barefoot on his beige-and-blue-tile floor. It was the prettiest bathroom I had seen, with a claw-foot tub framed by a glass wall with embossed leaves, something straight out of MTV’s Cribs, and a separate shower. With the white teddy, thong, and garters on, I leaned over his sink, the cold marble meeting my barely covered belly, and lacquered my lips with a generous coat of MAC’s Prrr Lipglass. I looked at myself in the mirror, as I’d always done when I got ready, and paused, hearing Sam’s words: “You can’t take this back.”
As on those dozens of nights when I got ready for Merchant Street, this was no different. No wave of emotion, no ache in my belly telling me to get dressed and go home. Nothing came. I flipped my blond braids to one side of my face, smacked my lips, and smiled.
I took a seat in a chair opposite Felix and his camera, which stood on a tripod. The leather chair was whiskey-colored, a few browns darker than I was, contrasting my skin, barely covered in the skimpy, sweet lingerie. The cheap lace scratched the backs of my thighs. When the red light lit, I looked straight into Felix’s camera and said my name and that I was eighteen. I resembled a teenage virgin bride on her wedding night.
“What are you going to give to us?” Felix asked, with his face shielded from the camera.
“Everything,” I said cheekily, placing two fingers in my mouth while rubbing my nipples with my other hand.
“Is that a promise?”
“Oh yeah, most definitely,” I purred, my glossed lips and legs spread wide-open.
“Why don’t you stand up and show everybody your body.”
I went on to pose in my lingerie, play with myself using my new toy, and blow Felix. We then moved to his bedroom, where he had sex with me, still unseen by the camera as I lay exposed.
�
��Baby, that was so fucking good,” he said, his chubby-cheeked face sweaty and red. With his cum still on my chest, he proposed that we schedule another shoot, rounding out my fee to fifteen hundred. Accepting his offer was a no-brainer. It was the most money I would ever make at one time.
In Felix’s shower, I washed all remnants of him off of me. As I scrubbed my body, a sense of accomplishment washed over me, rivaling the scent of Irish Spring. I was just weeks away from flying to Bangkok, where I’d be changed forever. Dry and in my own clothes, I looked at Felix gratefully as he handed me $750 for the shoot, which I nestled in the side pocket of my handbag. I showed him my ID, proving I was the age of consent, eighteen, to appear in this shoot, and didn’t think twice about signing away the rights to my image.
Later that month, as promised, I returned to Felix’s for the second shoot, where I earned the remaining $750. A weight was lifted from my shoulders. My surgery was paid in full. No one could take the money out of my checking account. All I had to do was board that flight to Bangkok. I know now that the weight didn’t disappear. It was just replaced by another load, something I’m unpacking now. I’ve had to share that weight with Chad, with my mother, with Aaron. And each time I’ve revisited this decision, I’ve had to face myself.
All the compromises I had made created a crescendo of energy that led me to ultimately dishonor myself, to desperately create a situation where I was in front of a camera, smiling coyly. I’ve never watched the video in its entirety, but in the short clips I’ve seen, I can’t look past the image of a little kid who is trying her best to be sultry. I thought I was in control of that moment. I thought I was so adult. What strikes me isn’t the rawness of the shoot but my youth. My voice is undeveloped, high-pitched. I see how bad I am at being sexy. I see my impatience, how I desperately wanted Felix to come so I could get my money. I see Thailand and the proximity of a fulfilled dream in my eyes. I see that I’m still becoming comfortable with myself, and there I lay in a leather chair, sharing my half-formed self with this stranger, his camera, and the objectifying male gaze, immortalizing the one part of my body that brought me so much anguish. I put it out there for the entire world to see.
I didn’t foresee the growing reach of the Internet, which now enables millions of people to download my image for a small fee and share it with thousands of others. As I write this, I think about those who will be able to access these images, screengrab them, and repost them for others to see. I didn’t think about the fact that when you put something out there, you can’t get it back. Sam had warned me. All I knew for sure at the time was that no one was going to do anything for me. So I did everything in my limited power to get what I needed in order to attain my not-so-simple dream. Limited resources, being backed into a corner, being told that you can do anything when nothing is really given to you, all breed desperation.
What I cringe at is not the act of sex or my young, undeveloped body. I’m not ashamed of my form as much as I was when I was a teenager. I can recognize the beauty of that girl. I can see what makes her beautiful, but what makes her tragic is the desperation. Immortalizing my desperation for the world to see, that hunger, that starvation, are what makes me ache now.
I initially wanted to paint Felix as the villain who wooed me, urged me to do something, taking advantage of my youth, my lack of resources, my desperate situation. But I can’t put all of that responsibility on him. He profited from the facts that I was poor, desperate, immature, impatient, that I didn’t have the foresight to know that the Internet would become a platform for pornography, most of which objectifies women’s bodies for the male gaze and pleasure. At the same time, I profited throughout adolescence on my beauty and my body. I used what I had at the time to get what I needed.
No one can destroy their past. You can try your best to cover it up, edit it, run away from it, but the truth will always follow you. Those parts of yourself that you desperately want to hide and destroy will gain power over you. The best thing to do is face them and own them, because they are forever a part of you. In writing this, I am facing the consequences of a decision I made as a teenager, a decision that afforded me the resources to exist, live, and dream in my body. I compromised my integrity by exposing the one thing I hated most about myself: my unconquerable desperation.
Chapter Seventeen
People often describe the journey of transsexual people as a passage through the sexes, from manhood to womanhood, from male to female, from boy to girl. That simplifies a complicated journey of self-discovery that goes way beyond gender and genitalia. My passage was an evolution from me to closer-to-me-ness. It’s a journey of self-revelation. Undergoing hormone therapy and genital reconstruction surgery and traveling sixty-six hundred miles from Hawaii to Thailand are the titillating details that cis people love to hear. They’re deeply personal steps I took to become closer to me, and I choose to share them. I didn’t hustle those streets and fight the maturation of my body merely to get a vagina. I sought something grander than the changing of genitalia. I was seeking reconciliation with myself.
Arriving in Bangkok on the night of December 19, 2001, with sixty-five hundred dollars in cash as my only travel companion, I was aware that I was so near my lifelong goal, yet so far from home. I was alone and eighteen in a distant pocket of Asia. My first thought was bittersweet: I made it on my own. It was apt, though, that I was alone in a foreign country. In reflection, it’s symbolic of my solitary journey to accept, adapt, and adore myself, an expedition that would be deemed just as foreign as Southeast Asia was to me my first evening in Thailand.
The custom lines at Don Mueang Airport were all kinds of wet hotness. Steamy heat moistened my face in a way that Hawaii’s humidity never did. With my new passport stamped, I pushed through a crowd of men looking for their next fare, past the bustling baggage claim area. I saw a white card with my name on it, held in the air above two smiling Thai women, both just above five feet with matching dark, chin-length hair. One wore a vibrant purple and orange wrap, colors that reminded me of Grandma Pearl’s garden. When I approached the women, they were delighted to see me, as if I were an old friend. The woman in the wrap introduced herself as Jane. She was the surgical nurse and office manager for Dr. C.’ s clinic and spoke fluent English. The other woman, Fern, was all smiles and nods and tasks, grabbing my bags and taking on the streets of Bangkok from behind the wheel. She didn’t utter a word as we drove about an hour to the doctor’s office, where I was scheduled to have my presurgical consultation that evening.
From the leather backseat of the sedan, the unplanned juxtaposition of wealth and poverty struck me. I noticed sparkling glass high-rises and luxury car dealerships adjacent to tarp-covered, tin-roofed homes and people eating street meat under twinkling neon signs advertising “Girls! Cocktails! Good Times!” Fern, her fellow motorists, and pedaling pedicab drivers ignored the lines painted on the road, merging at a rapid pace in the dimly lit darkness. I dug my palms into the champagne-colored leather seats, trying to maintain some semblance of control.
I was nauseous when Dr. C. held both my hands in his and kissed me on the cheek. He looked even more boyish than the photo on his website, with a kind face and an unfaltering smile. He called me Miss Janet, and his sweetness eased what little anxiety I had about placing my life in the hands of a stranger. We had communicated through a series of e-mails over the past four months, and I knew instantly, from the kindness of his staff, the cleanliness of his clinic, and the genuine respect and empathy he exhibited, that I had chosen the right person. I lucked out to have been treated by Dr. R. and Dr. C. I’ve since learned that it is rare for trans people to have access to medical professionals who are skilled, respectful, and sensitive.
With Jane standing close by, I sat on a paper-covered exam table in a thin pink medical dress. Dr. C. took my blood pressure and monitored my heart and lungs with a stethoscope. He then asked if I would mind lifting my dress. I nodded, slowly gathering the hem of the garment to my stomach.
“How many inches do you expect?” I asked.
“I can promise seven inches, but I know we can get eight, maybe even more with good dilation when you go home,” Dr. C. said. He went on to explain the details of what would happen during the following morning’s procedure, which would involve him refashioning the skin, nerves, and tissue of my genitals (except erectile tissue and testicles) into a vagina of my very own.
“Will I be able to have an orgasm?” I asked.
“Yes, the majority of my patients in time achieve good orgasm.” He pulled the hem of my dress back to my knees.
Jane handed me a consent form that reiterated the details of the surgery, listed the cost and one-week recovery stay at the surgery center, and the long list of possible complications, including death. I paused for a beat over that five-letter word and realized that I could die alone in a country many miles from those I loved. I reflected on the fact that I never asked my mother or father if they were okay with this, that I barely said a proper good-bye to Chad, Wendi, or Jeff, that I boarded the plane never thinking, not once, that I wouldn’t be on the return flight home.
I didn’t dwell on the risks because there was no other alternative for me. This surgery in this foreign country was the step I’d known I had to take ever since I was old enough to know it was a possibility. Death was guaranteed for all of us, and I was young and naive enough to believe that I had more living to do. So I signed my life away, handing Jane the consent form. She added it to my file, which included my blood tests, chest X-rays, and endocrinologist’s letter, verifying that I had been living as a woman and under his care for hormone therapy since I was fifteen.
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said as I handed Jane sixty-three hundred dollars in cash, the outstanding balance for my surgery.