Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San by a writer. Today I'm joined by writer, model, and trans rights activist Gina Rosero.

As is often the case with Trail Blazers, Gina's career includes a series of firsts.

In 2014, she was the first trans person to speak about transgender issues on the main stage of

the TED conference, a talk that has been viewed nearly 5 million

times and translated into 32 different languages.

In 2019, she was the first trans-Asian play-boy-boymate in the history of the magazine.

Now, she's written her first book, a memoir called Horse Barbie. In it, Rosero charts her childhood in the Philippines,

where she quickly became a fixture in the transgender pageant circuit before immigrating to America, landing in San Francisco at just 17.

We unpack her journey throughout the conversation today, along with the success that followed, as she's now

become an outspoken advocate on behalf of transgender youth across the world,

especially here in America, where the Trevor Project found the reported that they have felt discriminated against in the past year

due to their gender identity.

We talk about this a little bit at the beginning and end of this episode,

but in the first six and a half months of 2023 there have been 558

antitrust bills introduced across the United States, 558.

Of those 558, 82 have passed with another 365 yet to be voted on. These bills, most of which have been spearheaded in states,

led by the GOP, have sought to block trans people from receiving

basic health care, education, legal recognition, and even in the most severe

cases the right to publicly exist. I'm not going to try to make sense of how or why so many public officials have made it their sad mission

statement to dehumanize these groups of people, to spend any more time than I have just now, even recognizing those

public officials is a colossal waste of your time, my time, and most importantly, our guest time.

Because today, we're going to try to tell a different story.

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