Top 35 Janet Mock Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

— Janet Mock

2. “It is not a woman’s duty to disclose that she’s trans to every person she meets. This is not safe for a myriad of reasons. We must shift the burden of coming out from trans women, and accusing them of hiding or lying, and focus on why it is unsafe for women to be trans.”

— Janet Mock

3. “Be stingy with your time and spend it in spaces that fill you up.”

— Janet Mock

4. “My hope is that feminist, racial justice, reproductive rights and LGBT movements build a coalition that centers on the lives of women who lead intersectional lives and too often fall in between the cracks of these narrow mission statements.”

— Janet Mock

5. “We have different experiences, but trans women have experiences that do parallel with the whole fabric of what womanhood is. Embracing trans women, listening to their stories, enriches what womanhood is. It expands it and makes it even better.”

— Janet Mock

6. “Trans women of color dangerously fall in between the cracks of racial justice, feminist and LGbt movements.”

— Janet Mock

7. “To embody “realness,” rather than performing and competing “realness,” enables trans women to enter spaces with a lower risk of being rebutted or questioned, policed or attacked. “Realness” is a pathway to survival, and the heaviness of these truths were a lot for a thirteen-year-old to carry, especially one still trying to figure out who she was.”

— Janet Mock

8. “Those parts of yourself that you desperately want to hide and destroy will gain power over you. The best thing to do is face and own them, because they are forever a part of you.”

— Janet Mock

9. “What keeps me going is that quest for just being able to be present and be myself. Not for people, but for me.”

— Janet Mock

10. “No one can heal you. You must learn to be your own company, your own cure. You cannot retreat into someone else for fulfillment.”

— Janet Mock

11. “I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being real with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you.”

— Janet Mock

12. “Redefining Realness is my attempt to extend that nakedness and vulnerability to you. It is about those parts of ourselves that we silence every day; those parts that we all store away in boxes deep within, where they gather the dust of shame that clouds us. In this book, I aim to open those boxes, display their contents, and be accountable to my truth.”

— Janet Mock

13. “Kindness and compassion are sisters but not twins. One you can buy, the other is priceless.”

— Janet Mock

14. “According to the media, trans women were subject to pain and punch lines. Instead of proclaiming that I was not a plot device to be laughed at, I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes.”

— Janet Mock

15. “I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world. The expectations my father had of me had nothing to do with me and all to do with how he understood masculinity, what it meant to be a man, a strong black man. My father welcomed two sons into the world, and one was feminine and needed fixing.”

— Janet Mock

16. “This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It’s a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans, and strips trans women of their humanity.”

— Janet Mock

17. “He’s trying to do info-tainment. He doesn’t really want to talk about trans issues, he wants to sensationalize my life and not really talk about the work that I do and what the purpose of me writing this book was about.”

— Janet Mock

18. “Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing “the most”, meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick, and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction. But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments; they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity. My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose.”

— Janet Mock

19. “Words have the power to encourage and inspire but also to demean and dehumanize. I know now that epithets are meant to shame us into not being ourselves, to encourage us to perform lies and to be silent about our truths.”

— Janet Mock

20. “My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like “intersectionality” and “equality”, “oppression”, and “discrimination”. They didn’t discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.”

— Janet Mock

21. “Life is uncomfortable,′ Wendi said, rolling her eyes as she remained focused on the dark streets ahead of us. ‘You have to get used to it or you’re going to live your life trying to make people comfortable.”

— Janet Mock

22. “Why tell your story if you’re not going to tell it in its entirety?”

— Janet Mock

23. “What I want people to realize is that “transitioning” is not the end of the journey. Yes, it’s an integral part of revealing who we are to ourselves and the world, but there’s much life afterward. These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos.”

— Janet Mock

24. “Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!”

— Janet Mock

25. “Your disrespect for me is apparent. You never respected me when I think about it and you never liked me. But I’m the parent and you’re the child and it is not your job to love me the way I love you. My love for you is unconditional and no matter what you decide in your life I will love you. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, but I will always love you. Love, Dad.”

— Janet Mock

26. “Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.”

— Janet Mock

27. “The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers – to say nothing of one’s children – to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that. – JAMES BALDWIN.”

— Janet Mock

28. “I can’t help but marvel at the resiliency of trans people who sacrifice so much to be seen and accepted as they are. Despite those sacrifices, trans people are still wrongly viewed as being confused. It takes determination and clear, thought-out conviction, not confusion, to give up many of the privileges that Genie did to be visibly herself, though her experiences varied from my own.”

— Janet Mock

29. “The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others.”

— Janet Mock

30. “It’s through my personal decision to be visible that I finally see myself. There’s nothing more powerful than truly being and loving yourself.”

— Janet Mock

31. “Our visibility shouldn’t be subject to such extreme circumstances.”

— Janet Mock

32. “We have continuity in our bodies, which hold experiences that never leave us, experiences our bodies conceal so we can keep going. They hold tightly to them – until we have confidence to trust our bodies again, to loosen their grasp.”

— Janet Mock

33. “If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing; she is merely being.”

— Janet Mock

34. “Living by other people’s definitions and perceptions shrinks us to shells of ourselves, rather than complex people embodying multiple identities.”

— Janet Mock

35. “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.”

— Janet Mock

36. “She was not something to be tolerated. She was accepted as fact.”

— Janet Mock

37. “Telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act.”

— Janet Mock