Filipino model is proud to be a transgender

Fashion model Geena Rocero has proudly come out as a transgender woman in a moving and personal talk.

Born as a male in the Philippines, Geena struggled with gender identity until being discovered by a transgender pageant queen.

After undergoing gender re-assignment surgery, she moved to the US and was liberated by her new official identity as a female.

Working as a model for over a decade without revealing her gender history, she is now a proud transgender activist.

Born in Manila, Rocero moved to New York in 2005 to pursue modelling. She signed up with Next Models, worked with Rimmel Cosmetics, Hanes and many other brands, but her fellow models and her agent didn’t know about a big part of her identity.

“For the last nine years, some of my neighbours, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent did not know about my history,” she explained.

“This is called a revelation. Here is mine. I was a boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia.

“I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines, I would always wear a t-shirt on my head, and my mom asked me, ‘why do you always wear a t-shirt on your head?’ and I said, ‘mom, this is my hair, I’m a girl. I knew then how to self identify.”

Rocero goes on to explain that gender is “fluid, complex, mysterious” and that humiliation in her home country over the fact that she couldn’t change her official gender marker is what ultimately led her to move to

the United States.

“A personal turning point came in 2005, a year before I became a U.S. citizen, when I was travelling through Tokyo,” the 33-year-old model told CNN. “Back then, I still had my Philippine passport and my former male gender marker, but I presented [myself] as a woman. I was taken into the immigration office at the airport and questioned for hours about my identity. I have friends in the Philippines where there is no law that allows them to change their name and marker — that have these experiences every time they travel. It’s dehumanising.

Rocero has decided to come out as transgender in such a public forum partly because she’s just launched Gender Proud, an organisation that aims to stop people being humiliated in the way Rocero was when questioned at the airport. (9News)