One of reasons I couldn't come out as early as I think I wanted to was having a death penalty case always weighed upon me I felt like I can't do transition, you know transgender transition is too in your face. It's not like coming out gay and actually go in front of that jury and look exactly the same as I did before. It doesn't work like that when you transition, so I was always paranoid about that. Just like you probably paranoid and I imagined that all LGBT people during my era were paranoid about being outed and identified and targeted.
It was something that was just going to happen once you came out whether voluntarily or involuntarily so you might as well do it voluntarily. If you have the opportunity, you might as well do it on your own terms. So doing death cases though kept me for many years from transitioning, I probably would’ve done it maybe 10 years earlier maybe 20 years of we’ll see there was a period of time in the 90s when I remember thinking I needed to transition. I can't live like this anymore, I can't be the phony that I've gotten good at being.
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum; Japanese American Bar Association
Interviewee Bio
Mia Yamamoto is a Sansei transgender attorney and civil rights activist. She was born in the Poston concentration camp in Arizona in 1943 where her parents were incarcerated. She joined the Army and served in the Vietnam War. Inspired by her father's courage to speak out against the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, she attended the University of California Los Angeles's School of Law and has been a leader in the field of social justice, including working with the Japanese American Bar Association. (March 2021)