Janet Mock, the writer, television presenter, and activist, grew up in Honolulu and Dallas, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, between the homes of her mother and father. At twelve, resettled in Hawaii, she fell into the protective company of a glamorous cadre of transgender friends and mentors; her seventh-grade hula teacher was a māhū, a native Hawaiian term, Mock explains, for people who live outside of the gender binary. “In Hawaii, I didn’t have to look to ‘Law & Order’ or ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ or ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to see trans people represented,” she told Hilton Als, last fall, in an interview at the New Yorker Festival. “They were part of my everyday.” In her memoirs, “Redefining Realness” and “Surpassing Certainty,” and in her television work, journalism, and advocacy, Mock conjures that richness of representation—tracing the contours of her own life while laying the ground for the stories of other trans and gender-nonconforming people, of creativity and resilience born of necessity. Since leaving Hawaii for N.Y.U. and working as an editor at People, she has appeared on countless TV programs, has served as a producer, writer, and director on the show “Pose,” and has written the foreword to a book of Mark Seliger’s photographs documenting the trans community of Christopher Street.

“In a culture of false idols, or at least loud and dangerous and hollow ones, Mock is a true and real heroine of our times,” Als said, in October, introducing her to the festival audience. “Serious and quiet and witty when it comes to telling it like it is, certainly, and when telling us what it was like to become herself.” In the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Mock spoke with Als about her youth, the challenges of reporting on one’s own life, and about the monumental gifts she gave herself in her struggle to find freedom in her body.

I thought I would start by declaring that there are two Hawaiians who have changed my life: you and Bette Midler. Any state that can produce the two of you is O.K. by me. Can you tell us a little bit about your first years in Hawaii?

My dad is a black man from Texas. He joined the Navy, and his first duty station was in Hawaii, where he met my mom, who was working in civilian service on Pearl Harbor naval base. She’s a native Hawaiian. They got married, had me and my brother, Chad, and there was a semblance of marital bliss in the beginning.

My father loves himself, and he loves women, so he went out and sought pleasure in the way that he wanted to outside of the commitments he made to my mom, which broke her heart. The only memories I have of them being in the same room is—and I write about it in my first book—my mom’s attempted cry for help by slashing her wrists. So that sort of dysfunction was normalcy for me growing up.

There’s an extraordinary section in your first book where your father takes you to Texas, and you’re exposed to a kind of Christian fundamentalism. What was that like for you, especially since you were already feeling gender difference in the world?

Well, my father definitely took on the role of: “I’m your father, and you are my son, and, therefore, it’s my responsibility to correct you. So, all of your feminine ways, I need to berate them out of you, police them out of you.” His job was to contain me.

When my mother and father split up, the first thing my mom did was send her two sons, my brother and me, to go live with our father.

Did she feel that she was investing in your future masculinity by doing that?

Kind of. I think so.

She had it all wrong.

But I also think that she was looking for a new life and a new start.

And that was very wrenching for you, because you were very close with and loved your mother.

I loved my mother. I was obsessed with my mother.

That period of time in Texas with his family, your grandmother, and so on, what was it like culturally for you? Because you were really Hawaiian by then. What was it like to go to the Deep South?

All I think about is my grandmother, Shellie Jean Gibson, and the gifts that she gave me. She became a savior in the fact that she created space for me to sit in the kitchen and eavesdrop on grown folks’ business, which was largely my auntie, Linda Gail, doing people’s hair, and my auntie Joyce, just kind of playing the mediator, and my grandmother, who was always very light on words, but whenever she spoke she had a gravity and a sageness to her that was particularly loving.

Yes.

And so to be around those women, for me, was this sacred space. And there were certain times when my father would catch me too comfortable in that space. I remember once when I baked a cake, and it burned, he used it as a point to chastise me publicly in front of the entire family to say, basically, “This silly faggot, this little sissy in my home, look what you get.”

I remember being just constantly yelled at and then put in a corner and made to feel small and meek. And my father remembers me being so much more combative. I don’t remember ever talking back to my father, but he remembers me talking back and battling him constantly. And I don’t know if it was just because of my actions, that the things that I did just spoke so loudly to him, no matter how small they were. But he saw that as a form of argument in those times.

In your book, there’s a scene where he cuts your hair. His feeling is that you deserve this; that you have been defiant, and so he’s going to show you that he has the upper hand. Did those moments with your father push you to a closer realization of who you were, or was it something that made you want to deny who you were?

I don’t think it ever made me want to deny who I was. I think it just made it easier for me to figure out the space in which I needed to pretend, or to shield parts of myself from him.

And what were you pretending?

Pretending, or at least not acting as quote-unquote flamboyant as I wanted to; not being as loud so as to not call attention to myself in his presence.

How did it work out that you went back to your mother after a time?

I think my godfather, who was my father’s Navy buddy, came to visit us and saw how we were living. And he contacted my mother, and my auntie Joyce did, as well. She found her in the phone book—I know, very old-school.

And they called her up. And I remember O.J. was being chased in the Bronco. The moment when I talked to my mom and I was on the phone with her, as this madness was going on on television, and everyone else was paying attention to this, but the greatest headline in my life was that my mom was reconnected and talking to me and saying, “I’m going to come and send for you all.”