GeenaRocero1

 

International Transgender Day of Visibility activist Geena Rocero decided to tell the world she wasn’t born a woman but a man. The activist recently appeared in the Weeknd’s  “The Knowing” video. The video gave Geena some notoriety within the hip-hop an rap scene for her beauty.

According to the activist she was’t born a boy, instead she was assigned to be a boy at birth. And further saying understating the two is very crucial to the way society sees things and how they should move forward when talking about transgender individuals.

Geena says one of  her early memories at five years was tying t-shirts over her head and her mother would ask, “Why do you always wear a T-shirt on your head?” I responded, “It’s not a T-shirt, Mom — this is my hair.”

Growing up the Philippines, Geena would be involved in transgender beauty pageants from the age of 15 because in Asian culture the gender crossing lines were a part of the culture for thousands of years.

Things became difficult back in 2005 when Geena traveled to the United States and while traveling her passport had her as a male but in person was present as a woman. She was then taken to immigration office at the airport and questioned about who she was for hours. As she puts it “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 dehumanizing”.

It’s not until moving to the United States she had the chance to change her name and have the chance to be model and appear in videos like The Weeknd.

April 3, 2014  
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