Michaela Jaé Rodriguez has opened up about coming out as a transgender woman to her parents and being bullied for being feminine as a child.
The actor and singer said taunts from bullies at school never phased her as a child as they reaffirmed how she felt at the time.
Rodriguez discussed feeling a “divine feminine presence” inside herself at age seven in a new appearance on Meghan Markle’s podcast, Archetypes.
The Loot star said she was “extremely feminine”, and that she would regularly be bullied for this in the early years of her school life.
“But it never affected me,” Rodriguez explained. “The bullying was the exact thing I wanted to hear; it was exactly who I’d been.
“I think it would make the bullies upset that I didn’t fall or give into it. I didn’t take the bait because it was exactly what I was when the bullies were saying: ‘Why do you sound or why do you look like a girl?’
“I would say: ‘Oh OK, that’s because I feel like one’.
Rodriguez also shared that she felt terrified when she came out to her parents at age 14 out of fear they might “discard” her despite their strong relationship.
“Even though I knew my mother loved me to the moon and back, my dad loved me to the moon and back, there was always this tension and this scariness of ‘what if?’” Rodrizuez recalled.
She said she cried whilst telling them, but they barely reacted.
“They were like ‘oh, OK’. I was crying so much but they were filled with love, and they cloaked me instead of letting me stay out in the cold,” Rodriguez said.
“They put a cloak around me and made sure I was warm. That just instilled even more strength in me.”
The “Something to Say” singer said her parent’s acceptance had further affirmed her own feelings about her identity.
“After I got the right of passage from my mother and my dad, there was nothing that could stop me. Until this day, there’s no one that can really deter me from my goal, my passion or from who I am.”
