The way Geena Rocero stares down a camera is captivating. Here, at Silverlens, a gallery in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, she challenges its gaze with the kind of merciless confidence that comes only after nearly two decades of modeling. With each click, the elegant frame of her face tilts, her lithe limbs flick, and her eyes steady on the target. Then, as soon as photographer Agata Serge breaks to take stock of the images gathered, Rocero comes back down to the mortal realm to be with the rest of us.
“It’s about little movements,” says Rocero, who is—when she’s not in front of the camera—also a transgender rights advocate and film producer.
If I had just walked in, I might’ve thought Geena Rocero, 40, was simply a muse at the center of “Remains of Surface,” the current exhibition featuring noted Filipino American artists Leo Valledor and Carlos Villa. But nothing about Rocero is passive. In fact, it was she who adamantly requested New York’s first-ever Filipino-owned gallery as the site for this shoot because, for her, intentionality is key.
This year Rocero released her groundbreaking memoir, Horse Barbie. The book recounts her rise from pageant queen in the Philippines to a laudable career in fashion and advocacy in the United States. It also reveals the process behind her decision to share her trans identity publicly. But as much as it’s autobiographical, Horse Barbie is also an exploration of some of the most universal themes of womanhood: belonging, confidence, and love.
Horse Barbie’s publication was a balm as a years-long wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation crested in 2023. More than 500 pieces of legislation have been introduced at the state level in the US, many targeting trans people and youth, specifically. There have been attacks on everything from health care access and drag performance to adults simply affirming queer and trans youth. Given the stakes, it’s no wonder that Rocero’s memoir has been received with such enthusiasm. She quite literally models what triumph can look like.
The book’s release was met with critical acclaim. Rocero was recognized by Gold House and them for her literary contributions. On a visit to the White House, she presented copies to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who has kept the book in her office. The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino called Horse Barbie “vivid, hilarious, [and] exhilarating.”
“I made a very conscious decision on how I wanted to communicate this story,” Rocero tells me when we meet for lunch not long after her shoot. “I said clearly to my editors, team, and book agent, ‘I want this to serve the artist and the storyteller in me.’ [And] I feel like I've sprinkled the world with my world, with my way of thinking, with my magical sense of things.”
Now, months after its release, she feels achievement and relief not unlike the incredibly public moment in 2014 that shifted her life’s trajectory. It was on a TED stage in Vancouver, where she audaciously shared her trans identity publicly for the first time after years of modeling under the radar.
“I felt like I was freeing myself to be fully as I am,” she told Glamour at the time.
In that moment Rocero remixed her Filipina heritage and queer pride into a force for collective transformation. And now she’s done it again.
Rocero’s early life in the Philippines was humble, but she was surrounded with tremendous love from the beginning. Her origin family, including her mother, father, and siblings, mostly accepted her gender nonconformity from a young age. Still, her childhood was marred by abuse and violence that partially influenced her mother to immigrate to San Francisco—Rocero and the rest of her nuclear family remained in the Philippines. The absence took a toll on 11-year-old Geena, but she and her mother stayed close through long-distance calls. And, in time, she found a chosen family in the Filipino trans pageant system.
In Horse Barbie, Rocero exalts Tigerlily Garcia Temporosa, the mentor and community mother who encouraged her to embrace not just her gender but also the derogatory remarks made about her “equine” neck and limbs. That advice gave birth to the nickname “Horse Barbie“ and catapulted Rocero into top-billing status on the competition circuit.
“I became the thoroughbred,” Rocero says with a chuckle. “It's a whimsical thing for me to think about.”
Temporosa and Rocero were determined to succeed despite a culture that didn’t always cherish Rocero’s beauty, particularly her more deeply melanated skin. Nevertheless, she experienced a spectacular ascent fueled by her charisma and natural star quality. She dominated nearly every stage she stepped onto.
“At 15 years old she took the highest titles here in the national pageant,” Temporosa says. “I [was] so proud and so happy. A lot of good transgender [competitors] wanted me to handle them, at that time, with Geena rising as a promising star.”
Then, just as Rocero’s pageant career reached its apex, her mother invited her to move to the United States. At the time Rocero had been contemplating a move to Japan. But her mother pressed with an appeal, telling her that she’d be able to legally change her name and gender marker to read female. It represented an opportunity unavailable to trans people in the Philippines to date. She decided to take a leap.
“Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized,” Rocero writes in Horse Barbie. “We are culturally visible but legally erased. 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.”
Just before Rocero settled in San Francisco, her father suffered back-to-back strokes. He died in 2001, a loss that marked both an end and a beginning to chapters of her life.
“I think this book's my way to process [his life],” she says. “He truly influenced me and gave me an early freedom. It’s my version of closure.”
When Rocero returns in the second look of the day, she’s dressed in a matching taupe trench and shirt set. It’s a far cry from her first job in the States: a gig at a Macy’s cosmetics counter.
San Francisco, at the turn of the millennium, offered Rocero unimaginable access to her transition goals. Her mother was her coconspirator throughout the process, from helping her choose her new name to being at her side during a gender affirmation surgery. But with the promise of a different life, she grew increasingly eager to live without having to wear her identity on her sleeve. She’d been out in the Philippines. Not so much anymore.
“Transness was hypervisible [in the Philippines] in a way that it wasn’t in the United States of 2003,” Rocero writes. “And so for our entire community of trans Filipinas in San Francisco, wa buking [to be unclockable] was a common goal: To be unclockable was to ascend to the highest levels of affirmation that American society had to offer. It was a measurement of how far we all had come from a place where everyone knew our T.”
While working at Macy’s, she met a customer—herself a professional model—who suggested that her aesthetic would help her excel in the industry. What started in San Francisco led her to New York, where Rocero experienced both the espionage-tinged fear of having her transness revealed and her career cut short, and also genuine, thrilling fun.
“When I was doing the book tour, people would ask me about my time modeling,” Rocero says. “Yes, it was difficult. Yes, I was paranoid. The other side of that is I was really living my life, playful, sensual, sleeping with whoever I want. You know, the hottest people that I know. People were really surprised how much I talked about pleasure.”
Part of what made Horse Barbie such a success is the same quality that makes Rocero so magnetic in person: She holds nothing back. The book chronicles fleeting and consequential loves throughout her life. But after a period of “casual, carefree, and cathartic” encounters with various men, she met her forever love, Norman. She’s protective of this relationship—that continues today—but she shares that, as their connection grew, she was inspired to dive deeper into her history. She began to explore her Austronesian origins and experimented with psychedelics. It was at Burning Man, of all places, where she encountered her father’s spirit, reenvisioned her life and career, and considered embracing her identity publicly.
“That was the first inclination that I would come out, the first seedling,” she tells me now. “One of the Burning Man principles is radical inclusion. I felt people were living it and I wanted to too.”
Now, more than a decade later, Rocero is a beloved media figure and social justice heroine. She has accrued numerous accolades, including becoming the first trans woman ambassador for Miss Universe Nepal and the first trans Asian Pacific Islander woman to be named a Playboy Playmate of the Year. She’s also advocated for trans rights at the White House, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, and in her native Philippines.
Actor Gabrielle Union-Wade isn’t surprised to see Rocero’s continuous climb. As stepmother to one of the most high-profile trans teenagers, Zaya Wade, she intimately knows the necessity of possibility models like Rocero.
“When I first met Geena, I was blown away by her beauty, her intelligence, and her graceful presence,” Wade-Union says. “Her fierce and unrelenting activism in the face of mounting adversity is incredibly inspiring to me and my entire family. Knowing that there are angels on earth like Geena, fighting for real equality and change, is so necessary. She provides a voice for the voiceless and the road map for others to follow her lead.”
To fashion designer Prabal Gurung, Rocero represents “several communities that have been unseen.” She is, he continues, “so fully aware of the space she occupies and the relationships she has within the world.”
Back in the Philippines, Rocero’s impact is felt as well. There’s a whole generation of trans girls who’ve come up through the pageant system with bolder ambitions thanks to her example. One is Mela Habijan, who embarked on a successful journey and media career shortly after embracing her identity several years ago.
“Looking for a role model that will allow me and other trans girls to see a reflection of us was not available up until we saw a glimpse and pieces of Geena Rocero,” Habijan says. “We had the same profile. She's a pageant queen. That, in itself, was so powerful on my end because I found an affinity with the queen sister like her.”
In Horse Barbie, Rocero recalls a pivotal pageant moment when she and her competitors were caught in a rainstorm. While the other candidates worried about the mud flow surrounding them and its impact on their routines, Rocero flipped the challenge into an opportunity to wow the judges.
“I walked out in my red evening gown,” she writes, “but instead of trying to avoid all the rain and mud, I embraced the messiness instead, flinging the trail of my gown to the judges’ delight as I walked back and forth in front of the stage. The audience applauded my ingenuity. Never had they seen a performance that was so down-to-earth—literally.”
That fearless persona is still something she can summon on command. The afternoon of this shoot, rain pounds the streets of Manhattan, but Rocero is determined to deliver. Despite the downpour, she hits the sidewalk. No matter the career she’s built and the heights she’s reached, she will always know how to turn life’s elements, especially struggle, into art.
These days Rocero is focused on a slate of projects she's developing with producers, and her next scripted project, which she is writing and directing. Rocero yearns to produce work that encourages young trans people amid the current waves of restrictive legislation in the States and the Philippines, which still lacks legal recognition for trans people.
These days Rocero is focused on Gender Proud, a media production company that elevates stories about trans and gender-nonconforming people. She founded it in 2014, right around the time of that game-changing TED appearance, and has a slate of top-secret projects on the horizon. Rocero yearns to produce work that encourages young trans people amid the current waves of restrictive legislation in the States and the Philippines, which still lacks legal recognition for trans people.
“I hope the next generation will really see art, how powerful it is, how liberating spiritually it is. Or at least find liberation in that expression,” she says. “It's given me power, at least in these things that I think about in my head of what I want to do. I want them to heal.”
Photographed by Agata Serge
Styling: LJ Perez
Hair: Takuya Yamaguchi
Makeup: Stevie Huynh
Location: Silverlens Gallery
Silverlens is an international gallery with locations in both Manila and New York. Through its artist representation, institutional partnerships, art consultancy, and exhibition programming including art fairs and gallery collaborations, Silverlens aims to place its artists within the broader framework of the contemporary art dialogue.
Read all the Glamour 2023 Woman of the Year profiles here:
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America Ferrera
Mary J. Blige
Quinta Bunson
Brooke Shields
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