#GirlsLikeUs

#GirlsLikeUs. The first time that I saw this hashtag, I glazed over it. Then, I saw it time and time again and just had to take notice. Personally, I think that was the intent of the creator, Janet Mock. A writer, an advocate, and the New York Times bestselling author of Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, Janet is provocative and consistently challenges the status quo.

After publicly proclaiming her identity as a trans woman in a 2011 profile in Marie Claire magazine, Janet focused her efforts on speaking about the struggles, triumphs and portrayals of girls and women like herself. In 2012, she launched #GirlsLikeUs, a movement that encourages trans women to live visibly. She currently writes and speaks about her experience of living at the intersections of identities; being a woman, being a woman of color, and being of trans experience.

In February, Janet Mock appeared on “The Piers Morgan Show,” where they went back and forth about Janet’s own identity. Piers Morgan, like many individuals, thinks in the binary in terms of gender and sex; for example, that one is born a boy, is masculine, and will grow up as a man. Individuals of trans experience, like Janet, challenge the binary and the fundamental social construct that we each learn from an early age. Piers Morgan referred to Janet as having been “born a boy” and she explained that like all of us, she was born a baby and someone else assigned her sex as “male” at birth. Simple explanation: when a child is born, they aren’t born with a gender, but we ascribe a gender to them based on their genitals and then set expectations for their behavior based solely on their genitals, not who they are as a person.

With just this simple change in language, Janet Mock has affirmed her identity and the identity of millions of trans individuals throughout the world. Piers Morgan failed to understand what Janet Mock was saying and eventually she told him to, “get it the f**k together.”