38 Janet Mock Quotes from Transgender Rights Activist

Janet Mock is a trailblazing writer, director and advocate who made history as the first transgender woman of color to write and direct a TV episode and signed a groundbreaking deal with Netflix.

Mock realized her true identity early and underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand.

After earning degrees in Fashion Merchandising and Journalism she shared her journey in a Marie Claire article and her bestselling memoir “Redefining Realness.”

Janet Mock Quotes

Mock influential in media and LGBTQ+ rights wrote and directed for the TV series “Pose” and was a speaker at the 2017 Women’s March.

She continues to inspire with her work and advocacy.

I have compiled a list of the best quotes by Janet Mock in this article.


Top 5 Janet Mock Quotes

Our visibility shouldn’t be subject to such extreme circumstances. ~ Janet Mock.

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Be stingy with your time and spend it in spaces that fill you up. ~ Janet Mock.

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Why tell your story if you’re not going to tell it in its entirety? ~ Janet Mock.

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Kindness and compassion are sisters but not twins. One you can buy, the other is priceless. ~ Janet Mock.

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She was not something to be tolerated. She was accepted as fact. ~ Janet Mock.

Inspiring Janet Mock Quotes

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Trans women of color dangerously fall in between the cracks of racial justice, feminist and LGBT movements. ~ Janet Mock.

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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.

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.

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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.

We have to organize. We have to build up coalitions across all of these people who are considered “the other.” If we all banded together and built coalitions that were truly intersectional, we would be in power. I believe in the power of the people. ~ Janet Mock.

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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.

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.

Famous Janet Mock Quotes

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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.

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.

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.

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Desire, and the ways in which men perform their masculinity and feel as if they can take up space and say anything about your body, have always been a dangerous space for me. ~ Janet Mock.

Inspiring Janet Mock Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Powerful Janet Mock Quotes

Living by other people’s definitions and perceptions shrinks us to shells of ourselves, rather than complex people embodying multiple identities. ~ Janet Mock.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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The crux of our conflict lay in the fact that we each couldn’t be who we wanted the other to be. ~ Janet Mock.

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.

Best Janet Mock Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


So these were the 38 top quotes about Janet Mock.

If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Ai Weiwei quotes and Samuel Morse quotes.

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Chandan Negi
Chandan Negi

I’m the Founder of Internet Pillar - I love sharing quotes and motivational content to inspire and motivate people - #quotes #motivation #internetpillar