Redefining Realness

The first date was going well. Too well. Janet Mock sat across from Aaron in a Brazilian restaurant in the West Village, her head resting against his chest. He smelled like sweat and cilantro. She thought about telling him everything right then. The words caught in her throat.

She had met Aaron a few days earlier at a bar called La Caverna. The place smelled like desperation and hope mixed together—women out with their girlfriends, hunting for men. Mock had been dancing, feeling the beauty of her body's movement, when she spotted him across the floor. He stopped her mid-twirl. Dark skin the color of sweet toffee. Wavy black hair. A smirk that suggested he knew something she didn't.

They flirted. He asked her to take a walk. She hesitated—she didn't even know his name yet. He grinned and offered a trade: his name for a walk. They ended up at a coffee shop, sharing a cinnamon roll, talking for hours. Aaron told her about growing up in rural North Dakota on his grandparents' wheat farm. About moving to Maine. About his dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Mock listened, amazed at how easily he opened up. She wondered if it really was that simple to tell your story.

But she couldn't. Not yet.

On their second date, at the New Museum, Aaron took her hand in the stairwell. "We should kiss," he said. Mock felt exposed. The stairwell was too bright, too open, too early. She looked around to see who might be watching. Aaron laughed at her hesitation. When they finally kissed, they fit together perfectly. He joked that now he could concentrate on what she was saying. She thought he was too good to be true.

They walked through the city afterward, asking each other questions back and forth. Aaron admitted he was afraid of her—afraid because he could already see himself in a relationship with her, which would break his commitment to taking a year off from dating. Mock told him she was afraid of intimacy. What she wanted to say was: "I'm afraid you won't love me once you know me."

This is the opening scene of Janet Mock's 2014 memoir, Redefining Realness. It's a book that chronicles her journey from an unhappy child who felt trapped in the wrong body to a fiercely independent young woman. But more than that, it's a story about the difference between being seen and being truly known.

Mock had spent most of her life being seen. She was beautiful, and she knew it. Men noticed her. They wanted her. She had learned to use her appearance as armor, as a way to keep people at a distance. Being seen meant safety. Being known meant vulnerability. And vulnerability had always led to pain.

The memoir is structured around two timelines. There's the hopeful present of 2009, where Mock is falling in love with Aaron and desperate to tell him the truth about who she is. And there's the difficult past—her childhood in Hawaii and California, the sexual abuse she suffered, her exploration of her gender identity, her years of sex work, and her journey to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery at just eighteen years old.

These two timelines serve a purpose. The 2009 vignettes show us what Mock is fighting toward: emotional intimacy, love, the chance to be recognized in totality. The past shows us everything she had to overcome to get there.

The central conflict of the book is this tension between visibility and intimacy. Mock had spent years learning how to pass—how to be seen as a woman, how to blend in, how to go undetected. She had learned that her beauty could open doors and protect her from violence. But the same armor that kept her safe also kept people out. She could be seen as a pretty girl, but she couldn't be known as a whole person—a person with a history, with pain, with secrets.

Now here was Aaron, asking her questions, wanting to know her. He told her the story of his eyebrow scar, something he had never shared with anyone before. Mock felt privileged to hear it. But she also felt terrified. If she let herself be known, she might lose him. She started crying.

A week later, she realized she had to tell him. She had been presenting him with a distorted version of herself. He had something to lose too, even if he didn't know it yet. She went to his apartment, ready to finally speak the truth.

This is where the memoir begins—in that moment of terror and hope, with Mock standing at the threshold of being truly known. The rest of the book is the story of how she got there.

How does a person learn to trust after years of betrayal? How do you let someone see all of you when you've spent your whole life hiding parts of yourself for survival? And what happens when the truth finally comes out?