Quotes from Janet Mock

We are all part of a larger collective looking to create a more beautiful and just world.

When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.

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 know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders.

I walk in the world as a woman because I am a woman, and people should take me as that. I'm not passing as anything that I'm not. I'm just being myself.

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.

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.

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.

I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.

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.

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.

If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it's Kim Kardashian West.

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.

We must resist the pressures of others to soundbite our complicated, nuanced experiences.

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.

Women are so policed and devalued and dehumanized when it comes to the work they do.

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.

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.

I don't have to explain anything to trans women. Trans women know exactly what's going on.

Throughout the day, I like to spritz my face with a rose water for extra moisture.

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.

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.

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.

I often feel failed by feminism.