Emerson Mancini.Photo: saul moreno
Emerson “Em” Manciniis ready to share his story.
Growing up, Mancini recalls moments of feeling uncomfortable as female gender norms became prevalent in his life. “Hitting puberty was really awful, but I didn’t really know why. Other people were excited — I was not,” he tells PEOPLE. Questions about possibly identifying as transgender didn’t enter his mind until he was studying music production at Berklee College of Music, but “the answer was always ‘No,’ for lots of invented reasons,” remembers the self-described introvert.
Emerson Mancini.saul moreno
Since graduating in 2008, Mancini has worked as a mastering engineer, receiving music from artists after it’s been recorded and mixed and creating the final audio formats that get released onto streaming services and make their way to listeners' ears. For more than a decade since first questioning his identity, Mancini avoided coming to terms with it and instead, he says, “I just put my head down, and I worked.”
When the #MeToo movement swept the entertainment industry around 2017, as one of few female-presenting individuals in his field at the time, Mancini found himself uneased with being lumped into initiatives to highlight women in the music engineering world. “I was always trying to kind of erase my gender,” he says. “I felt uncomfortable being placed in that category.” But the complete picture of their identity wasn’t yet formed.
Spending time in lonesome solace led Mancini to have deeper conversations about identity with a couple of close friends. By the end of 2020, he realized he was transgender and quickly decided to get top surgery. “That was the first thing that needed to go, and that gave me a lot of space and freedom to operate,” he says.
Throughout 2021, Mancini read headlines aboutFlorida’s “Don’t Say Gay” lawand anti-transgender legislation sweeping the southern United States and began to feel enraged. He experienced urges to come out in many heat-of-the-moment instances but ultimately decided he wanted to discuss his identity with close friends and family before telling the world.
Then, at the beginning of this year, Mancini was in the midst of mastering Lamar’sMr. Morale & the Big Steppersalbum when he heard “Auntie Diaries,” a song about the 35-year-old rapper’s experience learning his aunt was transitioning from female to male. Lamar’s team was coming into his studio within the hour to check his progress, but hearing the rapper describe his flawed journey from ignorantly using anti-LGBTQ slurs to celebrating his relative’s identity left Mancini in “shock.”
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In order to keep the meeting professional, Mancini didn’t bring up his identity. But after finishing his work on Lamar’s album, he worked up the courage to email the rapper’s team and share his own story, which marked his official coming out to anyone in his industry. “I actually had to call my friend and say, ‘Will you make me hit send? Because I don’t know if I can do it,’ which is funny now because I’ve hit send on so many more of those emails since then,” he explains, noting that his parents have been “really supportive.”
Almost immediately, Mancini received a wave of support from longtime industry colleagues, all of whom quickly began calling him “Em,” a nickname they chose while transitioning out of their dead name, Michelle. “It took me my entire life to get to this moment, and then I send one email and everyone’s like, ‘Yep! OK. Sure, no problem,'” he recalls. “It was really an astounding experience.”
Despite not receiving Mancini’s email directly, Lamar himself caught wind of the engineer’s story and reached out to show his support. “He was really appreciative that I had gotten so much out of something he did,” he recalls. “He connected with the vulnerability that it took to come out. That was really special.”
Since coming out to select industry peers, he’s only received “warmth,” with one record label staffer even taking the initiative to begin re-crediting some of his works to Emerson Mancini. He’s not yet decided whether or not to change his legal name, but after earning a Grammy award for mastering Jon Batiste’sWe Arealbum earlier this year, he’s feeling an itch to be correctly credited. “Not that it matters, but it would be cool,” he says.
Mancini feels understandably “terrified” while gearing up for his widespread coming out. After all, he’s never been a public person and isn’t looking to be. “I picked this side of the glass on purpose,” he says, referring to his recording studio position.
source: people.com
