At 43-years-old, Gracie Cartier, former celebrity hairstylist and host of the +Life talk show Transcend, is still in the process of embracing the fullness of who she is. Describing her journey for Out Magazine’s Out 100 this year, Cartier said, “For me, authenticity is all about stepping into the fullness of who I am as a Black powerful woman.”
She didn’t include the trans qualifier.
“Of course, I’m very proud to be a trans woman,” Cartier told ESSENCE. “But at the end of the day, I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. That’s been the journey. Embracing all of my truth. Embracing all of the aspects of my journey that has led me to this point of my womanhood.”
Cartier understands that people may not understand or support her choice. But identity is personal and a truth only for her and her higher power to fully know. The journey to this level of confidence was not an easy one. Cartier knew from around the age of five that she wasn’t like the other boys around her.
“I watched ballroom dancing, I would watch figure skating. I would watch Miss America pageants,” Cartier recalls. “It was the movement of the woman, it was the clothing, the hairstyles, it was the essence of a woman. I knew that it wasn’t just a little boy who wanted to dress up in their mother’s clothes–although that is something that I did. It naturally felt right to me.”
At the time, she didn’t necessarily have the language to define her feelings. It wasn’t until Gracie was 18, seeing femme queens in the ballroom scene that she realized there were others who were living out her childhood thoughts.
That same year, Gracie came out to her mother. “[I] told my mother I was gay, the first thing she said was, ‘I don’t care if you’re gay, as long as you don’t dress up like a woman.’ So from that point on, I noticed that the feelings that I had were made to be wrong. I did everything in my power to not do that and not be that.”
But living out of alignment with her true self caused drama and turmoil.
“Two years before I transitioned, I told my daughter that I was going to transition and the first thing she said to me was, ‘Well, God didn’t make you that way so why would you want to do that?’ That made me prolong my choice two more years. That’s when I reached the bottom, my lowest point.”
Cartier shared that while so many great things were happening in her life, she was the most unhappy she’d ever been.
“I kept
The post Trans Talk Show Host Gracie Cartier Shares Her Ongoing Journey To Live Authentically appeared first on Essence.
0 Commentaires