Everyone knew Geena Rocero was a model, but they had no idea she was transgender—and had taken hormones and had surgery to be the gorgeous woman they admired. In a Glamour exclusive, she tells Susan Dominus why she risked her dream career to go public.
Geena Rocero struggled to calm herself in her Vancouver hotel room. It was March 19, the day she would be giving a talk at TED, the highly influential conference series of world thought leaders. As a model, Rocero, 30, was used to being in the spotlight, but this particular performance was like none she had ever given. She went over her speech; she obsessed about whether to wear her black YSL pumps or her strappy tangerine heels; she meditated. "What I'm about to do will change my life," she reminded herself.
Finally, it was time. In the pumps and a simple fitted dress, she walked onstage before an audience of several hundred powerhouses, including celebrities like Will Smith and Google cofounder Larry Page. "I felt like I was freeing myself to be fully as I am," she recalls. "No turning back."
Rocero started to speak about the challenge of living a life true to one's inner self. At the two-minute mark, she flashed a picture on the screen: an image of what appeared to be a little boy staring somewhat defiantly at the camera. "I was assigned 'boy' at birth, based on...my genitalia," she told the hushed audience. The beautiful woman they were looking at and the child in the photograph were the same person.
It was the first time Rocero had publicly revealed she was transgender. She'd had sex reassignment surgery at age 19, a major milestone in her life that she'd kept to herself, never sharing it with the vast majority of friends and colleagues she'd met in New York City. Over the years, as she built her career in modeling, she lived in fear that she would one day wake up to a salacious item about herself in the gossip pages: "Geena Rocero is not a woman." Not only could it cost her her career, but it would also reinforce what she saw as an ignorant misconception about transgender women—that they aren't real women. Now, at TED, in the most visible way possible, Rocero was explaining her decision to step forward: "I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror." And that day, there would be no shame. The audience cheered her announcement; she received a thundering standing ovation, and her talk would go on to generate 2 million views online.
When the news reached her agent at Next Management, Ron Gerard, he was stunned to hear the truth about the model he represented. "I had no idea," says Gerard. "It was like—boom!" But despite his shock, Gerard was supportive: "I give her a lot of credit for doing what she's done and taking a stand." Gary Bertalovitz, an agent at Images Management who had worked with Rocero earlier in her career, was equally surprised. "I didn't know, but it doesn't change anything," he says. "It's still Geena—she's a great girl." Any fear Rocero had about losing work or the respect of her colleagues was finally put to rest. She wasn't being dismissed; she was being applauded.
It was a reception she never could have imagined nine years ago, when she began modeling. Nor could she have envisioned that in 2014, transgender women and men would be making the cover of Time magazine, headlining popular shows like Glee and Orange Is the New Black, starring in ads for Barneys and Marriott—and even being embraced as coworkers and Girl Scouts and homecoming queens. A majority—89 percent—of Americans now believe transgender people deserve the same rights and legal protections as others, according to a recent study.
But, for Rocero, to get to this moment has been a long, brave journey.
"I AM A GIRL"
As a child growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Manila, the Philippines, Rocero loved playing with her Barbie dolls and sewing clothes for them. "I always knew I felt something different," she says. She was five the day she vividly remembers letting her mother know that the way the world perceived her—as a boy—was not how she felt inside. As she walked around with a T-shirt on her head, the cloth trailing behind her, she declared: "This is my hair. I am a girl." Her mother, Rocero says, simply replied, "OK." At age eight, she recalls dashing along with other neighborhood children to a transgender beauty pageant in their town. It was not an unusual event: In the Philippines the transgender community has a lengthy cultural history. Watching a Phoebe Cates impersonator with shiny hair and a high-cut pink floral bathing suit walk across the stage, Rocero had a vision for her future: "I can be a woman, and I want to be that kind of woman—beautiful, confident, celebrated," she remembers thinking.
In junior high she started taking small steps to express her sense of herself as female. "I had to wear a boy's uniform—it was a Catholic school—but I'd have it altered to make the waist tiny and the slacks fitted and a pocket like the girls had," she recalls. By high school she wore butterfly barrettes and her sister's Mary Jane shoes. It helped that her mother and father—"a really macho guy," Rocero says—fully accepted her. Rhomalyn, her older sister, remembers seeing their father, strong and stern, proudly walking through the school to a parent-teacher conference, side by side with Geena—who wore a girl's striped shirt and heels and carried a purse. "That was a big thing for my dad," Rhomalyn says. "It made me really proud of him."
Outside school, people could be cruel; even with the pageants, not everyone respected transgender people. Often bus drivers wheeled past Rocero screaming, "Baklaaaa!"—meaning "gay," but more like "faggot" when said that way. "It was painful, and I'd be scared," she recalls. The slur wasn't even accurate. "I did not feel gay," she says. "I just felt I was a girl."
Her life took a dramatic turn around age 15, when she was encouraged to compete in one of the most prestigious transgender pageants in the country and won the long-gown category. By then, her mother was teaching in San Francisco to help support the family. Rocero sent her a photo in her sash, not knowing how she'd react. "A few days later, I still remember the phone ringing and someone screaming, 'It's your mom!''' she recalls. "I ran over and picked up, and she said, 'You look so beautiful!' I just raised my arm, 'Yes!'"
That pageant victory was the first of many. And unbeknownst to her parents, Rocero started using her winnings to buy hormones to help her grow breasts and smooth out her skin. She felt she was taking control, but it was also terrifying. "I knew of people who had died from those hormones because of wrong dosages and allergic reactions," she says.
By 17, although Rocero had become a pageant celebrity, she decided to move to San Francisco, where her mother told her she could get a driver's license as a female. That wasn't possible in the Philippines, and it meant a great deal to Rocero to have an official document stating what she'd always felt about herself. "Getting that license, to me," she says, "was a license to live." Soon after, she fulfilled her lifelong dream: sex reassignment surgery. Although she could barely walk for a month afterward, she was thrilled with the results. "I loved it," she says. "I am perfect down there. And I felt so much more in tune with my spiritual self. I finally felt connected to my body."
"WHAT IF PEOPLE FOUND OUT?"
In San Francisco, Rocero was working at a Macy's makeup counter when a customer told her, "You should go to New York and be a model." Rocero thought about it: She was 21, she had her female ID, and if she went somewhere new, she could start fresh and experience life as a woman—not a woman with a particular label.
She arrived in New York and quickly found work as a hostess at Libation, a downtown lounge. While she wasn't hiding anything—"If someone had asked, I would have told them," she says—she wasn't volunteering information either. "It wasn't about passing as a woman, about 'nobody can tell,'" she explains. "It was about expressing my unique femininity." But soon she would feel more constrained.
Only two weeks after starting at Libation, she was discovered there by Barnaby Draper, a fashion photographer who has worked with celebrities from Diddy to Victoria Beckham. He never guessed she was transgender. "At that point in my career, I was seeing millions of models," he says, "and I had no idea." Within months, Rocero began to get steady work—modeling in catalogs for Macy's, shoots for Hanes, even a John Legend video. With perfect proportions, Rocero specialized in lingerie—to her that was the ultimate validation of her femininity. But the more successful she got, the more she felt she had to lose if someone learned about her past. Sometimes when a photographer zeroed in on her bikini line, her heart would race. "There was always that fear: What if people found out? They'd think I'd duped them, and maybe I'd lose my regular clients. It could ruin my career. I carried the paranoia with me every day."
And there were whispers about her. Adrian Buckmaster, who photographed her in a wedding gown for the bridal company Demetrios, mentioned to a wardrobe stylist how attracted he was to Rocero. "I think she has a secret," the stylist replied, which Buckmaster knew was code in certain circles for being transgender. He hadn't meant he wanted to date Rocero—just that she was so stunning. "But it didn't matter to me," he says. "I was still very attracted to her. If she's beautiful, she's beautiful."
"I WAS AT THE POINT OF A BREAKDOWN"
Rocero loved the way the surgery empowered her sexually and found she could orgasm as a woman. "It was like a rebirth," she says. "I never enjoyed having sex before, and all of a sudden it felt good. I was much more in touch with my sensuality, and I went crazy exploring it." But the facts of her past made for challenging conversations. One young man responded to her unexpected revelation by driving her home, entirely silent, only to say, as he dropped her off, "So that's why your knees are so big." After Rocero fell in love, she kept her story to herself for a year. Ultimately, though, the stress of constantly editing her life for her boyfriend proved too much. "One day he asked if I was ever a Girl Scout," she recalls. "But I was a Boy Scout." It was yet one more detail she had to gloss over, and, for some reason, the final straw. She felt sick and ran into the bathroom. "My head was spinning, and everything was going dark, like I was about to faint," she says. "I was at the point of a breakdown. I knew I had to tell him, but I was so worried that he'd reject me."
Finally she worked up the nerve: "Honey, you need to sit down," she said, and then told him everything. He didn't say a word; he just hugged her tight, she recalls. "He said, 'Thank you for the courage. That's the most inspiring story. And I love you for who you are.'" They stayed together for several months, splitting, says Rocero, only because they were at different phases in their lives.
Rocero's growing honesty began to lead her toward activism. In her late twenties she started working for Summit Series, a conference for speakers and innovators. At the same time she became increasingly drawn to the transgender community. But her turning point came on her thirtieth birthday, on a beach in Tulum with her then boyfriend. "What does 30 mean to you?" he asked, as they took a break from dancing on the sand. She looked at him and said, "I don't give a damn anymore. I'm ready to share my full journey as a woman." After her trip a Summit speaker to whom she confided that goal nominated her for TED, and five months later she was on stage giving her talk.
She's still struck by the outpouring of responses. One friend revealed she was bisexual; a trans man thanked her for the strength to reconnect with his family after 10 years. Another wrote on Tumblr: "Your TED Talk was amazing. My trans sister committed suicide last week." Powerful stuff, Rocero says. "It validated all the risks I had taken. I knew I was on the right path."
Today the model spends most of her time on Gender Proud, an organization she cofounded to make sure people around the world can change their gender on legal documents, and to address the violence and discrimination that still affects them. "I want everyone to understand that transgender women are women," she says. At the organization's launch party in New York on April 9, Rocero was feted—"Come out for Geena's coming-out," the invite read. Friends, colleagues, and activists gathered to celebrate. Around midnight Colman Chamberlain of the Nike Foundation approached her. "All these people showed up to support you because of what you stand for," he said. Rocero teared up, thinking about everything she had gone through to get to that moment and how glad she was that she had taken the leap—one that people were so ready to embrace. She simply hugged him, then went back to dancing with even more joy than before. "Finally," she says, "I felt so free."
