There's nothing more mundane than sitting across from a celebrity in a sterile gray conference room. But when the star sitting across from you is Taraji Penda Henson, you are being treated to a master class in the art of the hustle.
— Janet Mock
Our culture often demeans and devalues the work, the pleasures, and the contributions of women and feminine people. This is, in part, why beauty culture is dismissed as unimportant and frivolous.
There's power in naming yourself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are. Wielding this power is often a difficult step for many transgender people because it's also a very visible one.
I learned to hide aspects of my personality. Playing with girls was fine, for example, but playing with their Barbies was something I could do only behind closed doors.
To say that I loved school would be an understatement. It was my oasis, my sanctuary.
When I was a high school freshman in Honolulu, I would sit with my girlfriends on the bleachers of the school amphitheater every morning. We'd meet in the same spot and chat for an hour before homeroom began.
Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.
When I was a toddler, my father cut hair in the townhouse we had shared together in Long Beach, California, where Dad was stationed with the U.S. Navy. The buzz of clippers consistently hummed as he gave fades to his coworkers, my uncles, and my brother, but his clippers were never oiled and plugged in for my head.
Throughout elementary and middle school, I was used to hearing other words: Smart. Studious. Well-spoken. Well-read. They became pillars of my self-confidence, enabling me to build myself up on what I contributed rather than what I looked like.
I was born outraged. I was born without, knowing my people were not counted, not included, not centered. I struggled through low-resourced schools, communities, and housing projects.
I would advise any 17-year-old to surround yourself with people who listen to you, nod when you speak, and smile when you enter spaces.
A staple in my makeup bag is Black Opal's True Color Skin Perfecting Stick Foundation, which offers a range of colors with many undertones.
What helps me when someone puts me down or aims to offend me is to not take what they say personally. I try my best to not internalize their comments.
It was through my hashtag #girlslikeus where I connected with other trans women on Twitter and Tumblr. We had challenging conversations, courageous personal revelations, and shared insights and experiences, and just had fun. The hashtag tethered me to many women in my community in impactful, lasting ways.
I think about Ellen DeGeneres, seeing her every single day on a show. Her identity is there every day, but what leads the way is her talent and how much you like her.
If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it's Kim Kardashian West.
By the time I was a sophomore in high school, it had become routine for me to be sent home for wearing dresses. My mere presence in a skirt became an act of protest that would get me called out of class and into the vice principal's office.
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.
I was obsessed with 'The Velvet Rope' for a year straight, letting Janet Jackson's confessional lyrics lull me to sleep and comfort me when I felt lost. I felt that the album was the vehicle onto which Janet finally expressed her full self.
Once, when I was 5 years old, a little girl who lived next door to my grandmother dared me to put on a muumuu and run across a nearby parking lot. So I did. I threw it on, hiked it up in one hand, and ran like hell. It felt amazing to be in a dress. But suddenly my grandmother appeared, a look of horror on her face.
I was in the seventh grade when I first began to identify as trans and express my gender identity as a girl. My social transition began with growing my hair and wearing clothes and makeup that made me feel like Destiny's Fourth Child.
I was six years old when 'The Little Mermaid' was released in 1989 and was immediately struck by the fiery-maned, melodic-voiced, tail-swinging mermaid protagonist. She spoke to me on levels deeper than her father's oceanic kingdom.
For many, hair is just hair. It's something you grow, shape, adapt, adorn, and cut. But my hair has always been so much more than what's on my head. It's a marker of how free I felt in my body, how comfortable I was with myself, and how much agency I had to control my body and express myself with it.
Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.
I knew very early on that I was not pretty. No one ever called me pretty. It was not the go-to adjective people used to describe me.
I want - no, I need - to see images of black girls and femmes twerking, slaying and primping, just as much as I need to see Symone Sanders bopping her head and Representative Maxine Waters reclaiming her time.
When I was younger, I wish I would have been told more often that I was right and nothing was wrong with me, that I was deserving of everything this world has to offer, and that my visions for my future were worthy of pursuit.
When I feel that burden of representation in public spaces, it helps to recognize that it's a duty - a job, really. As with any job that you want to do well, you have to ensure that first and foremost you are energized and in the right head space to take on that task.
We are all part of a larger collective looking to create a more beautiful and just world.
As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.
I was a mixed black girl existing in a westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible.
Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves.
Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.
My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose.
Stern and critical, my father couldn't accept how feminine and dainty I was in comparison to my rough-and-tumble brother.
When I was 12, my brother and I moved back to Honolulu to live with our mother. Hawaii felt like another universe, and reflecting on it, I am struck by how much more open and accepting it was.
I know how messy things can get when adults overstep their boundaries and insert themselves - their politics, their fears, their prejudices, their ignorance - into the lives of young people.
I don't chase beauty trends.
My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.
'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.
I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.
My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary.
We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.
I know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders.
The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.
Media gatekeepers - editors, publishers, film studios and the like - need to begin investing in talent behind the scenes, developing and resourcing marginalized voices to tell their own stories. At the end of the day, it's about the story and what will enable the audience to truly see, understand, and know the life and times of the subject.
I want to create the content I didn't have while growing up.
We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.
