Author. Journalist. TV presenter. These are just a few of the professional caps Janet Mock has worn since her first big break writing for Playboy magazine. An outspoken activist, she is also a trans woman of colour in Trump’s America who .
Mock is all of these things and proud, and as much as they are an integral part of who she is, she is also so much more than any one of them. As complex and as occasionally messy as any of us, Mock has shared her journey far more publicly than most. There have been profiles in the New York Times, cover shoots for OUT magazine, on-camera interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Seth Myers and Trevor Noah. She has also penned two memoirs – Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty – and is still in her early thirties. With so much to say, that’s not so surprising.
But here’s the thing; Mock still walks a perilous tightrope in her head over the ‘spokesperson’ label. “That’s one of the most difficult things about being a writer from a marginalised community, that you then get pigeonholed not just as a single person with a single experience, but your marginalised experience, because it’s so rarely heard, becomes seen as representative of an entire community,” she says.
“On one level I feel grateful that I can do that work and lend a voice and a lens to talking about these really complicated lives of my really complicated community, yet at the same time I feel like as I’m doing that, I’ve also been silencing these communities, because my single experience becomes the quote unquote ‘known norm’.”
A deeply insightful and considered voice, Mock has grappled with the complexity of being a charismatic public figure looked to for an expert opinion but resisting any claim to the final word by acknowledging this dilemma up front. “For me it’s always making sure that I speak to that, and that I point to the privilege of my being heard as I am doing this work,” she says as we chat on the phone before her appearances at the and Sydney’s .
Mock relishes festival appearances like this - alongside other authors, advocates and creative thinkers - as a far more conducive platform for navigating the swirling eddies of identity.
Television interviews can prove more challenging, particularly when Mock’s confronted with intrusively intimate lines of questioning. “I have to prepare myself mentally,” she acknowledges. “I have to know that sometimes I’m going to have to navigate the ignorant or unknowing if some well-meaning person asks me an inappropriate question. Part of my job is to not only take their question on, but to also navigate course-correcting them without making them feel as if they made a tragic mistake. And so for me it’s a lot of grace under pressure.”
Luckily, Mock is abundantly graceful. She’s become adept at decompressing with her journal writing, hanging out in community spaces without working and occasionally indulging in trashy TV. She has also learned to take a time out from social media when needed.
“Social media is the worst place to try to communicate nuance,” she laughs. “It’s all about the sound-bite. Trying to convey complexity about a very diverse set of people’s lives within 140 characters or the caption of an Instagram photo flattens the experience.”
That’s not to say social media has no place. “When I first stepped forward, it was so great because what social media enabled me to do was to connect to so many other queer and trans people who had not been heard from and to find community. In that sense it has been great, but I think what has happened lately, specifically with the rise of Trump and his rhetoric, is that there’s also people who are not wanting to hear our voices, our experiences, and it can become a very combative space.”
Above all else, Mock sees herself as a story-teller, and there’s something rewarding about the festival experience and the immediacy of speaking to a room full of willing listeners, even if they are not always in agreement. “You see the person, you see their expressions. Even if they are different from you - a different colour, different background, experience, gender identity, sexual orientation - there’s something about the human, lived experience of being in the same space that breaks us all open and enables us to listen to each other and provide feedback.”
Redefining Realness offers an intimate insight into Mock’s youth, her very early identification as a girl and her transitioning as a teenager. Surpassing Certainty covers her twenties and a period where Mock chose to keep that identity to herself. Now in her early thirties, the storyteller in her is constantly reassessing these narratives and encouraging others to do the same.
“When I’m able to sit there and share my unvarnished, messy truth, other people are getting cracked open to be vulnerable too,” Mock says.
Fittingly, the title of her latest memoir comes from the late writer, poet, feminist and activist Audre Lorde’s essay ‘Sister Outsider’, “And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
Glad she can help others to speak up, Mock was in turn inspired by Lorde, by James Baldwin and by trans activists and luminaries Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. “Audre Lord is probably one of the number ones for me, in terms of creating a language and bodies of work through storytelling that has enabled me to strengthen, to feel empowered and to feel as if I can take up more space in the world.”
Janet Mock will appear at the on August 31, and at the Sydney Opera House’s on September 3.
