Review: "Horse Barbie" by Geena Rocero

 

Horse Barbie by Geena Rocero
Published May 2023 via Dial Press
★★★★

In the Philippines, Rocero was a star: she was known throughout the country as a pageant queen, and her regular winnings kept her in comfort, if not in luxury. She could help support her parents just as they always supported her. She could be open about who she was. But there was a limit to how far pageants in the Philippines could take her—financially, but also, crucially, in terms of having her gender legally recognized.

In the US, Rocero could have it all: the magical F on her government documents, a modeling career (with a rise nearly as rapid as her pageant rise in the Philippines), relationships and steady income and recognition. But in the US, it was not possible to both be openly trans and to work as a mainstream model—the few who had come before her and been outed had been shunned, demonized, and excluded. And thus began years upon years of going "stealth," keeping the sex on her birth certificate a secret so that she could live the high-fashion life in front of the cameras that she had dreamed of.

It's so easy to forget just how far things have come since the early 2000s—there's still so far to go that sometimes it feels like there's been no progress, but of course Rocero is painfully on point, and I'm grateful to have this reminder of how complicated identities are for so many. There's some fascinating basic background on the Philippines here that makes me want to read more about that—a Catholic country because of its colonizers, but with a rich cultural history that included acceptance of something much broader than a binary gender system. The Philippines of Rocero's childhood, then, was a place where it was not always accepted to be trans—but where the trans community was so visible that there was at least always a baseline understanding. It sort of boggles my mind that she could be so successfully "stealthy" in the US (side note: "passing" is not really a term she uses in the book, so I won't either, and Janet Mock's Redefining Realness is as relevant a read as ever) but also be so sure that anyone from her homeland would be able to clock her in short order.

Horse Barbie details years full of joy and successes, but also a heavy load to carry. It's one thing to know who you are, but another thing to know how badly people might treat you for something as simple as your identity. Rocero never lingers on the heavy parts, but she also doesn't let the reader sit back and think that it was all easy. I'm grateful for that, too, because one of the reasons I read memoir is to be catapulted into someone else's life for a while, with all its complications, and I'd be remiss to come away thinking that the Philippines was a bastion of acceptance, or that success in the US made having to hide okay—because it might have been worth it to Rocero, to a point, but she should have been able to live her life without fearing what discovery might mean.

As is not uncommon, there's so much more that I want to say than will fit in a review of reasonable length, so I will leave it with just two notes: first, whoever is doing memoir acquisitions at the Dial Press has killer taste—all of the memoirs I've read from them in the past couple of years have been somewhere between excellent and exceptional. And second, a round of applause for Rocero's mother, who sounds like the sort of quiet champion every kid figuring out their identity should have.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.