Top Quotes: “Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation” — Geena Rocero

Introduction

“They were significant not only because they crossed male and female gender lines. To the Spanish, they were astonishing, even threatening, as they were respected leaders and figures of authority. To their native communities they were babaylan or catalonan: religious functionaries and shamans, intermediaries between the visible and invisible worlds to whom even the local ruler (datu) deferred. They placated angry spirits, foretold the future, healed infirmities, and even reconciled warring couples and tribes.

-J. NEIL C. GARCIA, “MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE PHILIPPINES: A SHORT HISTORY,” INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ASIAN STUDIES, 2004”

“I had just turned twenty-one when I got the call that I had been cast in a John Legend music video. It was 2005, almost a decade before Time magazine announced the “Transgender Tipping Point,” and no one — not John, not even my agent — knew my history. They couldn’t know. The modeling world was no place for an out trans woman. Not yet anyway. But I said yes, knowing I would have to hide-again.

Back in the Philippines, where I was born and raised, it would have been impossible for me to keep a low profile. On the other side of the Pacific, I was a celebrity — the most famous transgender beauty queen in a country of over 75 million people. I started performing when I was fifteen, frequently competing on nationally televised pageants, earning the top prize again and again.”

“In 2005 I was rising through the modeling ranks, but no one had dug into my past yet, and I wanted to keep it that way. I might have been out and proud in Asia, but here in America, I had to be in the closet.

You might think it would have been the other way around. The Philippines has a reputation for being a conservative Catholic country — and it is. We have centuries of Spanish rule to thank for that. But as journalist Carmen Guerrero Nakpil famously said, the Philippines spent “300 years in the convent and 50 years in Hollywood.” We embrace spectacle and theatricality with open arms. When I was growing up, Catholicism and trans beauty pageants inspired equal fanaticism. Families would go straight from mass to watching the Super Sireyna trans pageants on TV back at home. No one really saw this as a paradox; it was just part of our unique cultural blend.

If social media had been big back in 2005, I would have been screwed. Someone from the Philippines could have posted a clip of me to YouTube or shared a pageant photo on Instagram, and then everyone would have found out who I was. But in the time before Facebook or Twitter, I could live a dual existence, famous overseas and a nobody in New York. Well, not exactly a nobody. My profile was rising. I was on the cover of magazines, appearing widely in lingerie and fashion advertising. A commercial I had shot the year before for Emerson Radio that was playing in Times Square, and an ad I’d appeared in for Rimmel a few months earlier, as risky as they were, were both lifelong fantasies come true.

When I was dominating pageants in the Philippines, my mentor once showed me newspaper clippings of an international model named Caroline Cossey, better known as Tula, who had appeared in prestigious magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and been photographed for Playboy. Tula was transgender, but no one knew it — not at first anyway. She managed to keep her secret all throughout the 1970s. Her story was a legend in our community, passed down from generation to generation.”

“In 1981 Tula was publicly outed in a British tabloid under the headline JAMES BOND GIRL WAS A BOY. The ensuing uproar — outrage, disgust, contempt — drove her to the brink of suicide.”

The Philippines

“In all, there were six of us — my mother, my father, my two sisters, my brother, and me — living in what was effectively a nine-by-twelve-foot room separated from our neighbors by a flimsy plywood wall. Whenever it rained too hard, the house would flood, and we would have to use wooden dining chairs to elevate our beds.”

“Whenever I heard a motorized tricycle driver get close, I tensed up. The kembot sway of my hips made me a constant target. The revving got louder, and I would pray, Lord, please, don’t let it happen today.

But then I’d hear the shouts, as predictable as they were degrading: “Baaakla! Baaakla!”

A grown man hurling slurs at a child in an elementary school uniform — you’d think he’d be ashamed of himself:

But whenever I made the mistake of looking back at a driver who yelled at me, he’d grin widely, as if it were his big accomplishment for the day, and then he would whisk straight by, wind blowing through his hair, not a care in the world. That sight would send a chill down my spine.

I prayed it would never happen when I was around my family. I’d feel too ashamed of myself — and for them — if they heard what people called me.

“As I swayed gently from side to side, my shirt moved like actual real long hair would, brushing against my shoulders in a powerful moment of recognition.

“It is my long hair,” I whispered to myself. “I’m a girl.””

“My femininity was obvious to her, and her approval, though tacit at first, made my family life so much more accepting than it might otherwise have been.

When we had parties at Tita Bebe’s house, I would cinch and tuck my T-shirt to make it look like a bra, and tie a yellow sarong around my waist, completing my transformation from ten-year-old femme into full-on island goddess. Then Mama would watch me with a blissful look on her face as I performed hula dances for the whole family, balancing on the elevated garden ledge, gently swaying my hips, and letting my body follow my hand gestures from side to side.

I vividly remember watching Mama’s face as I danced to the classic Hawaiian song “Pearly Shells,” my family singing in unison: “My heart tells me that I love you.”

She smiled up at me, humming along to the music, absolutely radiant. Entranced by the song, buoyed by my mother’s gaze, I felt totally loved for who I was.”

“My family’s love could not protect me from the policing and taunting I came to expect in the world outside our home. Still, when Mama was around, I was her good luck charm, and she was my protector.

But I lost that protection when Mama left for America in October 1995, just before I turned twelve. Her uncle had been granted citizenship through service in the U.S. Army in the 1960s, which gave him benefits to petition on behalf of family members who wanted to emigrate. My grandma, grandpa, and aunties had followed him to California in the 1980s, and Mama longed to be with her family. I could tell she wanted to be away from Papa’s unpredictability and nightly rages, too. Going to the States would be a way for her to end the marriage without really ending it.”

“Back in the Philippines, I only started presenting more femme. A friend of mine took me to Mercury Drugs one day after school, after I asked him about the growing boobs that were beginning to poke out from beneath his white uniform shirt. For fifty cents at the pharmacy, he told me, I could get three weeks’ worth of over-the-counter birth control pills. Because of the estrogen in the pills, I started growing boobs of my own within a month.

Soon I would no longer look like the young man Mama might have expected me to become, with growing facial hair and a deepening voice. Instead, my face softened, and my perky hormone boobs showed through my shirt.”

“In the Philippines, transgender pageants are a national sport. We watch them the same way Americans watch football on Sundays, which makes sense if you know our history. Before colonization, we honored gender-fluid identities. Then the Spanish instituted dozens of festivals for Catholic saints. Beauty pageant culture was imported via American colonization in the early 1900s. Put all those influences together, and you’ve got our vibrant trans beauty pageants — a cultural amalgamation built through centuries of war and conquest.

In short, Miss Gay Evangelista wasn’t just a pageant; it was a testament to our national spirit.”

“On the other end of the line, Mama sounded so excited, her tone sweet as she lovingly said, “Dalaga na ang Bojojoy ko ha. Ang Ganda Ganda mo anak.” She was teasing, complimenting, and affirming me at the same time: “Hey, my little baby is now a lady. You look so beautiful.” She had seen the photos.

Unbeknownst to me, Ate Rhomalyn had mailed Mama some photos of me from one of my pageants. In my orange-and-yellow gown, midstrut and smiling, I looked like a grown-up woman — in stark contrast to the little boy Mama had said goodbye to at the airport.”

“I thought back to when I was five years old, prancing: around our living room with my T-shirt wrapped around: my head. She had asked me once, “Why do you always: wear the shirt like that?” and I said, “Mama, this is my hair! I’m a girl’ echoing the conclusion I had come to in front of the mirror.

Mama had smiled back at me. Where would I be now if she hadn’t?”

“Our people are survivors, and we carry our culture with us through conflict and colonization, repurposing, reclaiming, and remaking traditions along the way. Which was how a bunch of trans girls ended up at an air base, ready to strut our stuff for thousands of fans.”

“OVER TIME, TO MY SURPRISE, my macho papa only grew more accepting of his trans daughter. In fact, even before I started joining pageants, he had shown me that I didn’t have to apologize to anyone for being femme.”

“Some of the hair had come from an overcrowded Manila cemetery.

If a family couldn’t keep paying for a plot five years after a loved one was buried, the cemetery would exhume the remains to make more space. The skeletons were transferred into tombs, but the fully intact hair was too valuable to be locked away. Usually the cemetery sold the hair — and Manang Sally was there to buy it.”

“With my bare face fully made up and my long wig securely clipped in, I was no longer the anonymous femme child, but a mythical Horse Barbie, part equine and all fashion.

The name was a reclamation. When I first started joining pageants, I wasn’t really considered beautiful. With my extra-long neck and lips that protruded in profile, fans and jealous entourages liked to tease me by saying, “She looks like a horse.””

“The stigma in the Philippines is overt in film, TV, and advertising, but it comes in subtler forms, too. Watching any celebrity over time, I could follow their journey from a darker complexion to a lighter one, their skin color changing with each billboard.”

“Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don’t have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn’t see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are.

In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through community hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then — and for many today, DIY is still the only option.

My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it’s shrugged off as a sad fact of life. “That’s what happens,” the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us.

I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.”

SF

“Jerry Springer typically liked to bring a trans woman out onstage alongside a man she had slept with, buttering her up at first with compliments about her looks.

Even before I could clock her visually, I knew from the way Springer was talking — and from that devilish twinkle in his eye — what was happening. He was building up to the reveal.

“Have you figured it out yet?” he’d nudge the audience, and then voilà, he’d announce that she was “secretly a man” or that she had “gotten a sex change.” In an explosion of moblike rage, the studio audience, her boyfriend, everyone, would turn on her, booing and jeering and hurling insults. It was gutting to watch it happen to these gorgeous women. They were on national TV, just as I had been in the Philippines, but I certainly never wanted to be on TV like this. This was a fucking circus.

Maury Povich was almost worse because he’d make the audience play literal guessing games in segments like “Glamour Girls or Sexy Studs?” “We’ve invited twelve beauties to our stage today, and some of them were born female, some were born male, and it’s up to me and you to decide who’s who!” he cheekily announced in one episode, then solicited guesses from the audience, even giving out cash to people who got it right. They pointed at the women, most of whom used stage names like Mango and Raven, looking for Adam’s apples and shouting, “That’s a man! That’s a man!” I remember how shame sank into my heart, like a stone to the bottom of a lake, when I saw that segment.

It seemed like no one could be proud of being trans here, not publicly. And if this was how trans women were treated in American entertainment, I didn’t want any part of it.”

“Back when I used Etta’s prepackaged bleaching powder, I would apply it to my whole body. The noxious stuff came in a red box with a white hourglass figure of a woman emblazoned on the side — a figure who seemed to promise that I could be beautiful, too, once I was as light as her.

Every day for a week, Tigerlily and I would mix the powder and liquid chemical solution until it had a thick, pastelike texture. She helped me apply it evenly as I stood, limbs extended, in her living room. Thirty minutes in, the paste would start solidifying. Then, as the chemical seeped deeper into my skin, an acrid smell would fill the room. My body would itch, first in patches, then everywhere, but I couldn’t scratch it off. No, I had to let it sink in. It felt like the whitening powder was burning away the top layer of my skin.

At the hour mark, the pastelike texture became more like a hardened mold. By then the itching became full-on burning, and I would run to the shower, leaving little trails of bleaching powder behind me on the floor.”

“If I had come out — or been outed — in 2005, there would not be a book in your hands right now. The stakes of staying stealth in the industry were that high.”

NYC

“Because she was so Americanized, she barely understood queer Tagalog, which I knew well. I was the first to teach her Swardspeak, a coded queer slang that blends several languages — Tagalog, Spanish, English, and Taglish — with brands and celebrity names, blending them all like a halo-halo. American colonization had left an indelible mark on our lingo, so in return we conquered English by infusing our witty, twangy Tagalog with an array of pop culture references.

If Ericka’s date for the night was late because it was raining out, we’d say, “Julanis Morrissette,” mixing the popular singer’s name with the Tagalog word for “rain.”

“Oh my God, Barbra Streisand” was our snide comment to a person who just cockblocked us. In Tagalog, bará means “to block,” and only a diva’s name could capture the drama of missing our last chance to go home with somebody. Whenever a guy didn’t deliver on his promise to buy us drinks at the club, I’d point him out to Ericka and say, “Beware, he’s Oprah Winfrey,” because her first name sounds like the Tagalog word pramis.

It made me feel even more like a spy to share a secret language. Ericka could ask me how much I had paid for my chic slinky club dress, and when I told her, “Oh, it’s Mariah Carey,” only she knew I meant it was mura, aka cheap as hell.”

“Of all the words I discovered, the most powerful revelation was the ubiquitous Tagalog gender-neutral pronoun siya. We don’t have “he” or she” in our language. Instead, the pronouns in almost all the Austronesian language families, spoken by close to 400 million people — the fifth-largest language group — are gender-neutral. We have no word for “husband” or “wife.” We have the word asawa, which means “partner.” Our pre-colonial culture was an egalitarian society, where gender didn’t dictate your social status — until Catholicism forced us into a destructive patriarchal binary.”

“After dinner that night, Mama and Papa, my two sisters, and my brother gathered in front of the black-and-white TV to watch a movie. A 1981 film called High School Scandal was playing. Directed by Gil Portes, it tells the story of two high school senior girls, Roselle and Lynette, as they navigate prom and puberty. After being dumped by her date, Roselle has sex with one of her guy friends to validate her bruised ego. She winds up pregnant and decides to get an abortion, but the doctor is a quack. The following day, due to complications from the procedure, Roselle dies.

On its face, the movie was a morality play — the kind of story that conservatives would love to use as a counter-argument to those who call for reproductive rights today.

But however it might be co-opted now, back then the movie had a major impact on Mama.

The very next morning, Mama had been scheduled to have an abortion with the exact same kind of neighborhood quack doctor that Roselle had gone to in the movie.

“I had already borrowed the abortion money from the teacher’s cooperative,” Mama told me. “I was ready to go. Everything was set.”

But after watching High School Scandal, Mama told me, she felt traumatized. “I was shaking when I went to bed,” she said. “I tossed and turned thinking about Roselle’s death. I didn’t want to die.”

Early the next day she canceled her appointment and decided to put the abortion money toward food and daily survival expenses. She still didn’t know how she was going to feed four kids, but she would try.

For a long time, I wondered why Mama always called me her maswerteng bata, her “lucky kid.” That night in San Francisco, I learned why.

“I’m lucky that you were born,” she told me, and after so many years together — after our entire journey from the Philippines to San Francisco to Thailand and beyond — I felt the full weight of those words. I felt lucky, too. I felt lucky that she was Mama and that we had shared so many adventures together.

Right as I was tearing up, Mama broke into an almost impish grin, as if she were about to blow my mind with whatever she said next. Her story had one final twist.

“You know which actress played Roselle?”

“Which one po?” I asked.

“Gina Alajar,” she said in a reverent whisper, her eyes wide, as if she herself couldn’t believe it.

I was speechless. Gina Alajar, one of the Philippines’ most respected actresses — a woman who literally shared my name — was the reason I was born.”

Activism

“Imagine trying to get a job as a trans person living in poverty if your ID has the wrong gender marker on it. Imagine getting pulled over by police and having a driver’s license that shows someone who doesn’t look like you. Imagine trying to travel abroad and not having your passport reflect who you are.

As Gender Proud got off the ground, I talked about these issues at any venue I could — from UN events to State Department conferences to USAID engagements — personally testifying to the real human impact of making gender recognition policies more progressive. I traveled to South America, India, Thailand, and beyond. In a way, I felt it was my patriotic duty to give back. I spoke about how I had moved to California all those years ago because I had heard the state would recognize me as a woman. I talked about how much it meant to see that F on my license.

But I also talked about the pain of giving up my Filipino citizenship when I became a U.S. citizen in July 2006. Although I had the option to retain it, I couldn’t bear the thought of having a male gender marker in my Filipino passport. There was guilt and shame in that complicated choice. At first, I felt like I was letting go of my heritage. But then I realized it was my home country that was trying to erase its own heritage, suppressing knowledge of my gender-fluid ancestors, and trying to keep trans people locked into rigid boxes for their entire lives. That kind of gender policing was not something I could cosign.”

“It brought me joy to hear that I helped introduce that more humanizing and globally recognizable term into the mainstream. Filipino news outlets started covering violence against trans people differently, no longer reporting quite so sensationally about baklas. Many of the pageants even changed their names to reflect a changing cultural reality in which trans people were demanding more respect and more accurate language. Now instead of being called “Miss Gay This” or “Miss Gay That,” they ll be called “Miss Queen This” or “Miss Trans That.””

“In the initial aftermath of my TED Talk, I’d done a beauty campaign for a major department store. There had been an interview attached to the shoot, so I asked if we could discuss trans rights during my conversation. I had recently made international news, after all. “Maybe let’s just focus on the skin care product,” the interviewer told me. After that, I didn’t like to model unless I could also spread my message. If you were booking me, you were also booking my story. There’s only so much you can say about face lotion.”