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.
If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it's Kim Kardashian West.
If we want to enlighten people or give them new thoughts and ideas, we have to be willing to do the work of educating them.
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 know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders.
It is the world's limitations and the myths that we internalize about ourselves that pushes us to diminish our power and ignore it.
My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.
Throughout the day, I like to spritz my face with a rose water for extra moisture.
Any woman's right to self-identify is a personal freedom I fight for, and those women who claim trans women are not women are perpetuators of gender-based oppression, and all feminists should be upset and moved to action against this.
We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.
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.
I hope being honest about my experiences and contextualizing them empowers young women to step into their truths, tell their own stories, and live visibly.
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 think millennials are the most woke generation because they understand that differences are just in the fabric of who we are.
We cannot and should not be reduced to just one sliver of ourselves, as it skews the truth of our lived experiences.
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.
In seventh grade, I met my best friend Wendi, who is a trans woman.
Stern and critical, my father couldn't accept how feminine and dainty I was in comparison to my rough-and-tumble brother.
For so much of my life, I lived feeling as if, if I spoke, if I said something, I would lose everything. I would be pushed out. No one will want me. No one will love me. No one would want to be friends with me. It took me decades to get to a space of saying, 'This is my truth. This is who I am, and I don't care if you like me or you don't like me.'
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.
