Janet Mock is a writer, actress, television host, director, producer, and transgender rights activist. She is known for her New York Times bestseller book Redefining Realness (2014) and Surpassing Certainty (2017).
As a transgender rights activist, she has openly shared her experiences through interviews, editorials, and her own podcast. Learn more about her below!
Janet Mock Married Life With Ex-husband Aaron Tredwell
Janet Mock started dating a photographer, Aaron Tredwell, in 2009. They got engaged in December 2014 and then tied the knot near November 2015 in Oahu, Hawaii.
Their story began on the dance floor of a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during 2009. They had a little bump moment, and Mock felt like a girl on the screen of rom-com. After their meeting, Aaron called out to Janet for a cup of coffee. Then they had a little more date together. After their third or fourth date, Janet anxiously sat across Aaron in his apartment and opened about her girlhood and coming of age as a young trans woman.
Aaron lending his generous ear, listened to her and hugged her after Janet had nothing left to say. Then dating for five years, Aaron finally proposed with no hesitation, slipping an oval diamond engagement ring with a rose-gold band on her finger. As Janet accepted his proposal, she felt like never before. She had this happy and unsure feeling of getting married. So she talked out these felt with brides in her life and planned out for the wedding day.
The couple got married near the ocean of Janet’s hometown of Oahu, Hawaii, declaring their commitment to the attendants. This was an impossible dream come true for the trans woman Janet.
In February 2019, the story of a trans woman navigated love with a happy ending. With the coming up of first news from TheBlast, Janet officially filed for divorce from Aaron Tredwell after three years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences. Mock shared her words on this to Out, saying, "Aaron and I have decided to part. I’m grateful for the years we shared and will look back on them fondly. I appreciate your well wishes as we continue onward separately with enduring reverence.”
Her decision to divorce was not just on a whim. She opened up about her feelings that led her to the end of a marriage with madamenoire.com, including wanting to move on from the pressure of a positive example of a trans woman in a healthy relationship. This was her long-running thought since her marriage, that unsure feeling she first felt before her marriage.
She said she found herself reevaluating from a question of Pose star Angel Bismark Curiel, whom she directs on the FX series. With curiosity in mind to know about the one whom he loved, Angel asked, ‘Are you happy in your relationship?’ but Janet, on a whim, answered positively, and this gave a little push to understand her own feelings in her marriage. And after sorting it out, she then concluded to divorce.
Janet Mock with her boyfriend Angel Bismark Curiel (©: Instagram/Janet Mock)
It also led Mock to start dating Angel. The couple went public in 2019 after leaving out the hints of their romantic links previously. Mock also showed up to the Out interview wearing diamond earrings gifted by her new beau and told Willis, “You have to be vulnerable in that way all the time, and unafraid,” she added, “That’s something that I’ve learned through this relationship.” They seemed to be in quite a happy relationship.
Net Worth Of Janet Mock, And Her Career
Janet Mock is an American writer, television host, director, producer, and transgender rights activist who has an estimated net worth of $3 million.
At the beginning of her professional career, Mock started as a staff editor for the website of People magazine and later as a web editor for five years. In 2011, an article was published in Marie Claire magazine about Janet revealing her coming of age as a trans woman. She was also featured in a 2011 documentary called Dressed.
In 2012, Mock quit People magazine to write a memoir about her early years. She signed a book deal with Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. She delivered the Lavender Commencement keynote speech to LGBT students at the University of Southern California. She also started the #GirlsLikeUs Twitter campaign and served as a co-chair, nominee, and host of the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards.
In 2013, she became a member of the board of directors at the Arcus Foundation to support LGBT rights. On June 27, 2013, she was featured in the HBO LGBT documentary The OUT List.
In February 2014, Mock released her first book, Redefining Realness: Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, which was listed as a New York Times Bestseller. The book received the Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association a year later. It was also nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and was awarded a Book Prize by The Women’s Way.
In the same year, 2014, Mock was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for Super Soul Sunday and has been interviewed by countless media outlets. She has also been honored by the Ms. Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Feminist Press, GLSEN, Shorty Awards, and the Slyvia Rivera Law Project. In addition, her name has been featured on multiple lists, including TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list, Variety magazine’s Power of Women list, Ebony magazine’s Ebony 100, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, and Oprah magazine’s SuperSoul100.
Mock continued to work in print and created the Beauty Beyond Binaries column for Allure magazine. She also collaborated with Pineapple Street Media to start the interview podcast series Never Before. She has been contributing editor for Marie Claire and a guest host on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC.
She also hosted her talk show So POPular! for Shift. She has also reported live from the red carpet of the White House Correspondents Dinner. She hosted the TakePart Live show for the website TakePart and the Global Citizen Festival.
In 2015, Mock delivered the commencement address at Pitzer College. The following year, she wrote the cover story for The Advocate, titled Why DeRay Mckesson Matters, and the feature Nicki Minaj Is Here to Slay for the November edition of Marie Claire.
She served as the producer of the HBO documentary The Trans List, aired on 5 December 2016. She also made appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, and The Nightly Show.
In March 2016, Mock’s memoir’s continuation, titled Surpassing Certainty, was released. Mock wrote, directed, and produced the FZ drama Pose, which premiered on 3 June 2016, which led her to become the first trans woman of color to write a TV series.
In 2019, Mock signed a historic deal with Netflix, making her the first trans person to sign a production pact with a major studio. With this, she acquired the right to her TV series and a notable online entertainment platform.
That same year, she received Harvard University’s Artist of the Year Award. She was named one of The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Power 100 and included on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list.
Janet has been honored with 9 nominations, and 3 wins, including 1 Primetime Emmy nomination as of now through her works in her professional career. She won an Honoree award in Essence Black Women in Hollywood (2020), and two of her wins are from her work in the series Pose (2018) for Outstanding Writing, Drama Series, and Outstanding Directing Drama Series in the 2020 Black Reel Awards for Television.
Who Is Janet Mock? Gender Transformation
Janet Mock was born on 10 March 1983 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, as a man bearing Charles Mock's name. She was born to an African-American father, Charlie Mock III, and Hawaiian-Portuguese mother, Elizabeth Barrett. She has a younger sibling. The two siblings mostly grew up in Hawaii and briefly stayed in Oakland, California, and Dallas.
Mock mentioned in her memoir that she knew from a tender age that she was a girl in a boy’s body. She experienced her first hormonal transition when she was about to complete her freshman year of high school.
At the age of 18, during her first year of college, Janet underwent a sex change operation in Thailand, which cost her around $7000. Her friend and a fellow high-school volleyball player Wendi supported her by even funding her medical expenses by working as a prostitute. After her complete transformation, she took the first name Janet in the memory of the late Janet Jackson.
She graduated with a BA in fashion merchandising from the University of Hawaii in Manoa in 2004. She then achieved an MA in journalism from New York University (NYU) in 2006. She was hired by ‘People’ magazine and worked for their website after she graduated from NYU.
The 38-year-old transgender rights activist stands at the height of 5 ft 6 in or 167.5 cm.