On Tuesday, CBS Mornings gave three teases and a lengthy second-hour interview to “model and trans rights activist” Geena Rocero on the heels of Rocero’s memoir Horse Barbie that celebrated their decision to become transgender at 14 years old and how being trans in the United States is “nightmarish.”
Socialist co-host Tony Dokoupil boasted in the first tease: “We will speak with model and trans rights activist, Geena Rocero, who’s telling her powerful life story in a brand new memoir.” In the second, he said Rocero was secretly transgender “for nearly 10 years.”
Dokoupil later said “we’re very excited about our next guest” as Rocero’s an “award-winning producer, model, and transgender rights advocate” who “immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines” as a teenager, but “[f]or nine years, she kept her transgender identity a secret, however, not even her modeling agent knew she had been assigned male at birth” until a 2014 TED talk.
Rocero insisted in the TED Talk that “I was assigned boy at birth, based on the appearance of my genitalia,” but Rocero knew by age five that “I’m a girl” and thus “knew...how to self-identify.”
CBS played all this as normal and uncontroversial, further bolstering their support for transgenderism and grooming children to play fast and loose with their gender and pronouns.
Reacting to the book, Dokoupil gushed “[t]here are so many lines in the book I love like, ‘I learned to be trans in the Catholic Church.’”
Co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King was also enthralled:
One of the things you said in the TED Talk that I never thought about, we get our driver’s license, we take it for granted. You said for you your driver’s license wasn’t just to drive, it was also saying that you could live. Why? Because on your driver’s license, when it said gender, it said F for female.
Rocero replied that “it’s just an affirmation” of “the most basic thing that we tend to forget” as “trans people just want to live our lives, to feel affirmed, and...in the Philippines, we didn’t have access to be able to change name and gender marker in legal documents, so when I moved to America...I can be legally recognized as a woman”.
King later asked Rocero why “you felt so empty inside” despite having just been in a John Legend music video.
Rocero replied that, while Filipino “trans people are culturally visible” and “part of mainstream culture,” they “are not politically recognized.”
Upon arriving in America come 2005, it was in reverse as “I was legally recognized as a woman, but there was no cultural visibility,” so “I had to go stealth.”
Dokoupil turned the discussion back to the book in which Rocero said being trans in America is “nightmarish”:
I actually want to talk about the visibility, right, because so much has changed culturally in America. Your book is out, you’ve got a major publisher, you’ve got a TED Talk that went viral, right? People know you, and yet you also describe the situation here in the U.S. for trans people as nightmarish. Talk about that dichotomy, those two worlds.
Rocero bemoaned that “it’s just this constant navigating the different cultures” and “know[ing] that visibility is just one component and finding equity.”
Rocero kvetching in eye-rolling fashion about “attacks on...trans youth” as the “most vulnerable” group of people “in our country” (click “expand”):
ROCERO: The equity access to the most basic rights, the visibility, respectable. Nuanced, dignified visibility for trans people, all of those things, and I think even in this moment that we’re seeing right now, the attacks on particularly trans youth, the most vulnerable in our country, we need to honor their lived experience. I want to tell them that there is nothing wrong with them, keep living your life, be who you are, as what I have detailed in my book, you know, I —
KING: You say on Page 243, and this is how we should end it, that trans joy can never be fully extinguished and that really is the message that you’re putting out. I think your book will help many people —
ROCERO: — thank you so much.
KING: — who may be struggling, who may be curious, who may be wondering and —
BURLESON: In any walk of life.
KING: — yes, exactly. You educate people, too.
ROCERO: I think there’s something powerful with trans people like we know who we are —
KING: Yes.
BURLESON: Yeah.
ROCERO: — and in the world that tells us — that doesn’t give us space, we still choose to be who we are.
Rocero closed by insisting that “there’s nothing more courageous” than being openly transgender, so “I just want to honor that” with the book, “particularly the trans youth that are wanting to just live their dreams. I honor them.”
The co-hosts were giddy with Dokoupil and King saying “you have done that” with Dokoupil adding “[s]tories are a resource and this is one.”
CBS’s insane segment seeking to normalize underage transgenderism and castration was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as Hyundai and Popeyes. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant transcript from May 30, click here.
