Life Stories #64: Janet Mock

When she was a child, everybody had a firm idea about who Janet Mock was--and their idea didn't include womanhood. In Redefining Realness, Mock talks about what it took to become the woman she knew herself to be, overcoming a childhood of poverty, sexual abuse, and drug-addicted parents, through her adolescent involvement in the sex work industry (where she also first met other women who understood her situation) and onto the failures of certain mainstream media outlets to grasp what's at stake when trans people try to tell their stories. (Oh, we talk about the CNN interview... but the points she makes are much broader than that one incident.)