Geena Rocero is an activist, a model, and the Founder of Gender Proud, a movement that aims to change the global perception of and conversation about transgender individuals. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
We are all assigned a gender at birth. Sometimes that assignment doesn't match our inner truth, and there needs to be a new place -- a place for self-identification.
I was not born a boy, I was assigned boy at birth. Understanding the difference between the two is crucial to our culture and society moving forward in in the way we treat -- and talk about -- transgender individuals.
One of my earliest memories is from 5 years old. I used to drape T-shirts on my head, and would delight in feeling the fabric on my back. My mom asked me, "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, I was involved in transgender beauty pageants from the age of 15. In Asian cultures, the fluidity of gender has been part of life for thousands of years, evidenced by the Buddhist Goddess of compassion, GuanYin and the Hindu hijra Goddess, Bahuchara Mata, who is sacred to men who want to be cured of impotence, and to women wanting to become pregnant.
Yet despite this nuanced understanding, and despite the pageant culture I grew up in, in many countries, fluidity is celebrated but not politically recognized.
A personal turning point came in 2005, a year before I became a U.S. citizen, when I was traveling through Tokyo. Back then, I still had my Philippines passport and my former male gender marker, but I presented 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 dehumanizing.
When I first moved to the United States to work as a model, and I finally had the opportunity to change my name and gender marker, I felt as though my outside self finally matched my inner truth. I really felt like I'd made it but, over time, I realized that there's a lot of work that needs to be done and that I was only just beginning.
Today I am launching Gender Proud, which envisions a world where transgender individuals are able to self-identify with the fewest possible barriers.