Christ, Piers Morgan: Janet Mock Was Never a Boy (And Neither Was I)

Mock spoke about her own experiences as a six year old and how her parents recognised how much pain she was in from an early age. Her pain came from being shoved into an identity which was not hers. She spoke about how her actions at 18 years old were simply an expression of adult agency which she could not previously express due to the restrictions we place on children. However, her gender identity did not suddenly come into existence when her sex reassignment surgery happened. It was already there. It always had been. Gesturing strongly to indicate tone, Mock explained:

This did not happen when I went to Thailand to have “surgery.” It started when I was six years old and my parents saw me for who I was and allowed me to live my life. That’s a lot of nuance and it’s hard to communicate that in 30 seconds or even in a 140 character tweet.

This topic is deeply personal to me because it is a source of invalidation I live with every day. And Mock’s story, her narrative… It is my own narrative. I came to an understanding of my own categorisation, a conscious awareness of my gender construction, at around six years old. My mother says she became aware of my gender variance even earlier—at three years old, I was already clearly identifying myself with groups of little girls or adult women. My best friend was a little girl from the apartment building next door named Stacey. It was fairly evident that I saw little difference between my friend and myself. We were the same.

I remember distinctly how upset I became at gender-segregated activities in kindergarten and elementary school. I was always put in the wrong group. I went to a Catholic elementary school for most of my formative years and I also briefly went to a Catholic junior high school. I did not even experience the freedom of nongendered clothing consistently until high school. During my school years, I never expressed that I was a girl, but nor did I express that I was a boy. The former was too dangerous, and the latter was a lie. However, like Mock, my personal choices broadcasted my gender identity clearly, and I paid a price for it in near constant teasing and violence. My best friend was a girl named Roseanne. A short haired tomboyish girl by nature, she was everything I wanted to be: she participated in sports, she’d roughhouse with the boys, but she would also be perfectly at home in her first communion dress or playing schoolyard games usually associated with the girls. She could do it all… And have her gender, girl, recognised for what it was.

I used to cry myself to sleep at night, wishing I was female assigned at birth, not because I saw that as the proof that I would be a girl, but because I was completely confused as to why a fact so obvious to me seemed completely lost on the rest of the world. Maybe if I matched the physical “requirements,” I would finally be believed. I tried my best to assert my identity, a mix of traits like my friend Roseanne, but I could not mix and match without punishment by peers and authority figures.

Despite my mother’s attempts to talk me out of it, I wore pink shoes to school. I paid a price in violence. I joined ballet, the only male child to do so. I paid a price in violence. I loved My Little Pony and GI JOE (I used to have the latter ride the former into mock battles), because I did not see a problem with being a girl who loved both. I paid a price in violence. Despite my ballet group being all female (except for me), when I asked to audition for the role of Belle in our performance of Beauty and the Beast, I was told I could not—because I was a “boy.” Nevermind that as the only male assigned child in the group, all of the male parts (except mine, Cogsworth) were being played by other girls—but they were, of course, female assigned at birth and recognised as girls. I was not. Any time I tried to assert any aspect associated with femininity, I paid a price in violence.

Playgrounds and hallways were dangerous from the age of six up to the time I graduated from high school. My gender variant behavior was well known, because like Mock, it just never occurred to me to be anyone but myself. The violence I faced left permanent, physical scars. In the seventh grade I was once picked up and dropped on my chin on a tiled hallway. I still carry the scar from that incident. It’s small but recognisable if pointed out to others. Other scars exist elsewhere. Many scars are not physical at all, but exist solely on my psyche. Mental scars I still struggle with today.

The violence dropped off during my three years of public high school, but the psychological aspect of harassment increased, becoming more sophisticated as my peers and I moved into young adulthood. I knew I couldn’t be open about my gender identity, but I had to express it somehow. I had a tendency to look at creative writing, theatre, and speech classes as a way to write about myself as “Kat.” However, this brought me into direct conflict with authority figures who viewed me as mentally unstable and a threat. I was faced with authority figures who believed false allegations about me from other students. My high school principal, who has never apologised, despite seeing me a few times over the years, once informed my step-father that I was a “Columbine waiting to happen,” based solely on the violence and harassment I received for daring to express who I was in creative writing exercises. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that a trans girl has never carried out a mass shooting. I did not hate others—I fought consistently with hating myself.

Nor did it end when I finished high school. We won’t even go into my experiences in the Navy as a midshipman or the sexual assault I suffered at the hands of my shipmates due directly to homophobic reactions to my femininity out of uniform and off-duty. This is still too painful for me to discuss in detail.

When someone says that I “was a boy” or “used to be a man” or says this about any other binary trans women with similar narratives, they invalidate everything about my lived experiences. How are my lived experiences those of a boy? They are not. Boys do not cry themselves to sleep wishing they were female assigned at birth. Boys do not internalise messages about and directed at girls and women as part of female socialisation. Boys do not have parents who recognise their gender as “girl” at a young age. My experiences are the experiences of a trans girl. A girl who constructed her identity early in life. A girl who wanted to be able to pick and choose how she would express her interests and her gender safely. A girl who lived her childhood and adolescence unbelieved, harassed, physically assaulted, and as a young woman was sexually assaulted by young men she should have been able to trust above all others: her brothers in arms.

Reducing the lives of trans women to the “before, during, after” chunks flatly denies the broad journeys we have. When Piers Morgan described Janet Mock as a boy before the age of 18, he denied her journey—the subject of her book. When he asked twitter what his followers would do if they learned a significant other “was formerly a man,” he denied her lived experiences.

This is unacceptable from anyone. It is deplorable from a so-called “ally.”