Singer/songwriter Teddy Geiger opened up about her transition story in an interview with the New York Times.
“I can remember back to being 5 and looking in the mirror, feeling like a girl and wanting that,” Geiger, 29, says of her childhood. “But growing up in Rochester, there were limited resources. I’d never met a trans person before.”
Geiger shot to stardom after competing on VH1’s reality competition “In Search of the Partridge Family.” She went on to release the 2006 album “Underage Thinking” which had the chart-topping single “For You I Will (Confidence).”
“I was going through adolescence and having sex for the first time, but it was in this really weird context,” Geiger says. “I didn’t have a real support group.”
Geiger revealed she developed a dependency on cigarettes and marijuna and that she struggled with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including perfectly painting her nails.
“It was the only femininity that I was expressing, so I wanted it to be so perfect,” Geiger says. “It was the only thing I could control.”
She entered a month-long treatment program and decided she needed to transition.
“I threw away all my boys clothes and started wearing makeup,” she says.
She publicly came out as transgender in October and began hormone replacement therapy in November.
“Because I’m willing to talk about everything now, people are then more open with me,” Geiger says.”There’s no longer this piece of me back there saying, ‘Don’t go there.’ I used to find that I’d sing songs and think, ‘Ooh, it sounds like I’m talking about that stuff, and I don’t want to talk about that stuff.’ But it was just coming out.”
Geiger is known for penning a number of hit singles including Shawn Mendes’ “Mercy” and “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back.”
“It was the first time I ever saw her sober,” Mendes says about Geiger leaving treatment. “She was like Teddy, but on steroids. There was this electricity running through her.”
Geiger released “I Was in a Cult,” her first single since her transition, under the name “teddy<3” on Thursday.
