After appearing Tuesday on CNN's Piers
Morgan Live, transgender advocate Janet Mock claimed that
producers “sensationalized” her story.
Mock appeared on the program to pitch
her book Redefining
Realness.
Mock
told BuzzFeed that Piers Morgan was “trying to do
info-tainment.”
“He doesn't really want to talk about
trans issues, he wants to sensationalize my life and not really talk
about the work that I do and what the purpose of me writing this book
was about,” Mock said.
As the interview aired, the show's
Twitter account messaged: “How would you feel if you found out that
the woman you are dating was formerly a man?”
The show was also tagged with the
caption “Janet Mock – Was a boy until age 18.” (The interview
is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
“They're not talking about my
advocacy or anything like that, it's just about this most
sensationalized … meme of discussion of trans women's lives: 'We're
not real women, so therefore if we're in relationships with men,
we're deceiving them.' So, it just feeds into those same kinds of
myths and fears that they spread around, which leads to further
violence of trans women's bodies and identities,” Mock said.
“What they're saying is, 'Only until
I got the surgery [at age 18], then I was a woman,” she added.
In a series of tweets, Morgan denied
that he was transphobic.
“A lot of very irate people accusing
me of 'transphobia' because I devoted a third of my show to
@JanetMock's inspiring story. Weird,” he messaged. “I've never
been subjected to the kind of nonsense that @JanetMock and her
supporters are accusing me of now … wish I'd never booked her.”