Features

THE TRANSGENDER MOMENT

There are an estimated three-quarters of a million transgender Americans. Herewith, 20 individuals from the U.S. and beyond whose life stories have resonated across the culture

August 2015 Cat Buckley, Jaime Lalinde, Mary Alice Miller, Sarah Schmidt, Louisa Strauss, Elise Taylor
Features
THE TRANSGENDER MOMENT

There are an estimated three-quarters of a million transgender Americans. Herewith, 20 individuals from the U.S. and beyond whose life stories have resonated across the culture

August 2015 Cat Buckley, Jaime Lalinde, Mary Alice Miller, Sarah Schmidt, Louisa Strauss, Elise Taylor

JANET MOCK

AUTHOR, EDITOR, TV HOST

In 2011, journalist Janet Mock came out as transgender in Marie Claire. She has spoken of "the sheer torment of inhabiting a body that never matched who I was inside," eventually deciding she "would never be a man"—a story she contextualized in her 2014 memoir, Redefining Realness. Mock, who covers pop culture for MSNBC, helped found #GirlsLikeUs, which, as she puts it, "empowers trans women and celebrates the diversity of womanhood."

BALIAN BUSCHBAUM

ATHLETE

Nineteen ninety-nine was a good year for Balian Buschbaum. As a young pole-vaulter, he placed first at the European Junior Championships, and went on to compete in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. But 1999 has nothing on 2007, when the German-born athlete announced he would begin transitioning as a transgender man. Since then, he has published a memoir, landed a role on Germany's top dance-competition show, and taken up coaching, inspiring his sport's next generation.


CANDIS CAYNE

ACTRESS

When Candis Cayne played Billy Baldwin's sultry paramour on ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, the blonde beauty wasn't just heating up the screen—she was making history. Cayne is the first transgender actress to portray a recurring transgender character on primetime television. A former fixture of New York's nightclub scene, renowned for her one-woman cabarets, Cayne continues to pave the way for transgender actors hoping to find a place on screen. "I am [a] living, breathing testament to the fact that nothing, and I mean nothing, is impossible," she. has remarked.

CARMEN CARRERA

MODEL, ENTERTAINER

"Growing up, I'd pray that I would wake up a girl," says Carrera. While struggling with gender identity during adolescence, she found acceptance on the stage, where she was free to perform as the inner female with whom she had always identified. This confidence carried Carrera to the burlesque circuit, onto RuPaul's Drag Race, and ultimately into the fashion world, where she has walked the Marco Marco runway and been the focus of a vocal (but failed) fan petition to crown her as Victoria's Secret's first transgender model.


ROCCO KAYIATOS/KATASTROPHE

RAPPER, PRODUCER, PUBLISHER

Rocco Kayiatos, a self-proclaimed "transsexual intellectual," is a dynamic force in hip-hop, a genre of music that historically hasn't been very open to the LGBT community. Assigned female at birth, Kayiatos— known in the music world as Katastrophe—puts his identity on display in his lyrics ("if you didn't understand, try to, women or a man, not true, I'm something different") and in his frank public statements. In 2009, along with Amos Mac, Kayiatos founded Original Plumbing, "the premier quarterly print magazine dedicated to the culture and lifestyle of transgender men."

TIQ MILAN

JOURNALIST, ACTIVIST

Tiq Milan cut his teeth on an MTV reality show, vying for an editor gig at Rolling Stone. Before he officially came out as transgender, he was featured in U People, a cinematic mash-up: part music-video, part doc. Milan started transitioning in 2007 and shortly thereafter appeared in Out magazine's Transgender Issue and in Realness, a film about his journey. Tiq, along with his wife, Kim, were the grand marshals of this year's Pride Parade in Hudson, New York. The theme: "Loud and Proud."


DR. MARCI ROWERS

GYNECOLOGIST

Marci Bowers, MD, is revered for her work specializing in clitoral restoration for female victims of genital mutilation and in "gender reassignment surgery." She is also the first openly transgender woman to perform such procedures—some 1,600 to date, many done in Trinidad, Colorado, a longtime mecca for these operations. Now in San Francisco, Bowers says of her patients' predominant state of mind after surgery: "They feel like they're one with their soul, finally."

JAZZ JENNINGS

AUTHOR, TEEN ACTIVIST

Talk about self-awareness. At the tender age of three, Jazz Jennings announced that she was a girl. Eleven years later, Jennings is a self-described "transkid" spokesperson, YouTube sensation, and now star of her own reality series, I Am Jazz, companion to her best-selling illustrated primer of the same name, co-authored with Jessica Herthel.


IAN HARVIE

COMEDIAN, ACTOR

Ian Harvie's mother still refers to him by his birth name. It doesn't bother him; in fact, an anecdote in which his mother calls him Janet in a department store is part of the comedian's stand-up routine and also made it into the Amazon series Transparent, on which Harvie portrayed Dale, a transgender man teaching women's studies. "Mom, you know what?," goes the rest of the joke. "If you keep talking like that, they're going to put you in a home."

KYE ALLUMS

ATHLETE

When Laverne Cox debuted her inspiring 2014 documentary, The T Word, she reintroduced a young man who, four years earlier, had rocked the college sports world. Kye Allums had come out as a transgender man while playing for the George Washington University women's basketball team, becoming the first NCAA Division I athlete to make such a declaration openly. Allums, who identifies as queer fluid trans, wrote in his collection of poems and letters, Who Am I?: "Dear Kye, Remember this. You are what you think. You define who you are. Love, Yourself."

HARI NEF

MODEL, ACTRESS

With her quirky, luminous look, 22-year-old Hari Nef has quickly become one of the bohemian darlings of fashion's inner circle. The first American transgender woman to sign with IMG— just days after graduating from Columbia—Nef also joined the second season of Transparent. One of her recent tweets seemed particularly axiomatic: "trans beauty is its own thing: determined by trans people out of necessity! it is also one of the world's final untapped beauty markets."


JENNIFER LEITHAM

MUSICIAN

In 2001, a jazz band virtuoso changed the tempo: the upright bassist, who jammed with Mel Torme and The Tonight Show All-Stars, introduced herself as Jennifer. (A 2012 documentary chronicling her transition, I Stand Corrected, triumphed at film festivals.) But to many of her fellow players, Leitham's most surprising attribute has always been the fact that she's a left-handed bassist—a true musical rarity. As the music writer Will Friedwald has extolled, "She is one of the few practitioners of her instrument, of any gender, genre, or generation, who can completely command my attention with what is, essentially, an entire set of bass solos."

ANTONY HEGARTY

SINGER

The hauntingly seraphic voice of Antony Hegarty has struck a powerful note in the transgender community and on the international music scene. The British-born lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons—who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns—has entranced listeners since the release of her first full-length album, the 2005 Mercury Prize-winning / Am a Bird Now, which chronicled Hegarty's experiences. Her elegiac tone and candid refrains have made fans and collaborators out of Lou Reed, Boy George, Bjork, and performance artist Marina Abramovic.


NICOLE MAINES

ADVOCATE

In 2009, 11-year-old Nicole Maines and her family sued the Orono school district after she was banned from using the girl's ⅜. bathroom. In response, the Maine Supreme Gourt .became the first higher court to rule that a person has the right to choose the bathroom that matches his or her gender identity, declaring the school's actions to be a violation of the state's anti-discrimination law. Today, Moines's Twitter feed is like that of most teenagers, infused with talk of exams, Netflix, and prom selfies. But among those idle tweets lie some that are bolder and braver. "When you discredit work that I've done, you discredit progress made in the trans community," she wrote this past June. "So don't let the door hit you on the way out."

GEENA ROCERO

MODEL, ADVOCATE

In March of last year, Geena Rocero, a Filipino model with a booming career and a devoted fan base, took the stage for a TED talk with a revelation: she was transgender, something many of her closest colleagues weren't even aware of. Today, Rocero, aged 31, is as in-demand as ever and has founded the advocacy organization Gender Proud. "I felt like I was freeing myself to be fully as I am," Rocero told Glamour about coming out. "No turning back."


LANA WACHOWSKI

FILMMAKER

"So I'm at my hairdresser's. He's gay, go figure." So began the first public speech given by the notoriously press-averse Lana Wachowski—the genius, along with her brother Andy, behind The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta, and Cloud Atlas. It was 2012 and Wachowski was accepting the Human Rights Campaign's Visibility Award. She and Andy kept largely out of the public eye for years, but this seclusion was not a product of her transition—a word she eschews "because of its complicity in a binary gender narrative." They simply preferred anonymity. "Every human life involves a negotiation between public and private identity," she went on to say. "I knew I was going to come out, but I knew [that] when I finally did come out, I didn't want it to be about my coming out."

RHYS ERNST ZACKARY DRUCKER

VISUAL ARTISTS

In 2014 the transgender couple exhibited profoundly intimate critically acclaimed show at the Whitney Biennial: a series of photographs that revealed the artists' concurrent gender transition. Ernst (left) and Drucker, who met in 2005, brazenly challenge traditional constraints of gender and sexuality in both their work and personal lives. As Drucker told NPR, "I think gender is a journey, not a destination." Striving to help create an authentic portrait of the transgender community, Drucker and Ernst serve as associate producers of Amazon's award-winning series Transparent.


LEAT

MODEL

She is the breathtaking beauty kissing Kate Moss on the cover of Love magazine's Androgyny Issue, shot in black and white. But so little is black and white about a Lea T, one of the world's most sought-after models. Assigned male at birth, Lea T struggled with her gender identity as a child, and says she worried about being judged by her observant Catholic mother and her father, a soccer star. In 2008, Lea T began her transition, and seven years on, she has evolved into nothing less than the muse of Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci. Even so, it has been her openness about her human saga that has made hers a respected voice in the LGBT community.


CHAZ BONO

ACTOR, ACTIVIST

Talk about firsts. Many Americans had never had a meaningful understanding of the transgender community until they first encountered Chaz Bono, the son of the '60s pop duo Sonny and Cher. The 46-year-old transgender advocate, in fact, has appeared in two documentaries about his experience (the Emmynominated Becoming Chaz and a follow-up, Being Chaz) and has written three memoirs (one as Chastity, two as Chaz). In 2011, he became the first openly transgender contestant on Dancing with the Stars; the next year, he was the first transgender recipient of GLAAD's Stephen F. Kolzak Award—presented to him by his mother—for his efforts in the fight for promoting equality. After decades of sidestepping the spotlight, Bono, currently producing and performing in plays, has embraced his activist role—and his place in the family business, as a bona fide icon.