Proud woman

When the chance to return to Hong Kong arose, I did not have second thoughts and immediately said yes to the invitation from Dr. Sam Winter to speak once again in his Sexual and Gender Diversity course at the University of Hong Kong. (see pic above) The first time I did so was in 2009. But already it feels like a long time.

It is my hope that more of the world will see the many other Filipina transactivists who are here in the Philippines, working hard to make real change.Many of them have overcome the stage of "victimhood." Of course we always acknowledge the travails and hardships that come with being trans but more and more of us seem to be rejecting the victim mentality and really taking charge of our lives. They are not just complaining about how hard life is they are actually doing something about it, dreaming big, breaking barriers and going after jobs that transwomen of the past generation would have never dared go into: human resources, management, entrepreneurship, health care, information and communications technology, journalism, foreign language teaching, research, etc. I am truly in awe of this great community of sisters, proud transwomen, working to make Philippine society a better place.

Philippine government must apologize and start giving back to the Filipino transsexual community

Today, I came across news related to a story that came out in early January about Filipino transsexual women entering Japan with fake passports bearing the identity of non-trans women from the Philippines to marry Japanese men with whom they have had long-term relationships. You can read the news item here or below:

Philippine transsexuals nabbed for illegally entering Japan

Three Philippine nationals have been arrested in western Japan for entering the country on forged women's passports after undergoing sex change operations, local media reported on Tuesday.

The three had the illegal passports made by forgers in the Philippines using women's identification so that they could live in Japan as the "wives" of Japanese men they had met, Kyodo News said.

While working at nightclubs in Fukuoka, they secured spouse visas from local authorities, said Kyodo and other news reports, quoting local immigration authorities.

They were quoted as telling investigators they wanted to live as women and lead their lives with their loved ones, Kyodo said.

"They looked female. We could not tell they are men," an immigration official said, according to the Nishinihon Shimbun.

News like this makes me feel helpless, tired and angry at the same time. I feel helpless, because even if I want to be of help to these women there is really nothing I can do about it with those involved very far away. I feel tired because of the repeated assault by the media on the dignity of these women by continuously referring to them as men or women in quotes. I feel angry because it is a public secret in this country that Filipino transsexual women formed a major part of the Filipino diaspora that began in the late 70s. With no job prospects here and the economy in bad shape, millions of Filipinos started going abroad risking life and limb in many a foreign land to earn their keep and have a dignified life.

Transpinays were part of the early migration of Filipinos to other lands to seek greener pastures. Japan opened its doors to many of them, granting them visas as entertainers so that waves of these transwomen could work as singers and dancers in bars, pubs and night clubs in Japan. The last batches of these transwomen who entered Japan stopped around the turn of the millennium when the US and UN started pressuring Japan regarding trafficking activities within its borders. The response of the Japanese government was to close down all the bars which left many transpinays with no work and no prospects.

Even when the transpinay migration to Japan started in the early 80s, the Philippines government did nothing to ensure that their working conditions were safe and that they were being treated properly as productive employees of Japanese establishments. No reference even has ever been made to them when the Philippine government started a myth-making campaign hailing the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) as a new hero of the country whose foreign remittances keeps this country afloat.

Yet if you speak with these faceless transwomen, they have toiled with their hands, and suffered hard and back breaking work just so they could send those precious yens to help their families in the Philippines survive for years and years. But instead of showing gratitude to these thousands of women, the Philippine government has chosen to continue oppressing and marginalizing them by allowing a cruel Supreme Court (SC) decision in 2007 to stand which denied a transpinay's petition to change her name and sex in her birth certificate--in effect not granting transwomen status as people recognized in their gender in the eyes of the law.

This news item is clear evidence of what a discriminated minority will do when their chance at a dignified life is at stake: they will do something illegal. In Filipino, we have a phrase for situations like this: kapit sa patalim. Literally it means, clutching a knife's blade. With nothing else to hang on to and nowhere to go, generations of transpinays have clutched the sharp blade of a knife by going to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Europe and many other countries and continents to survive. They do no one any harm. All they want is an equal chance at life and yet it seems the world will not stop until these transsexual Filipinas themselves give up clutching the knife and instead use it on themselves. Dignity only at the price of death.

I say enough! And I am demanding this country, this government to apologize to my community and start giving back to us! NOW!!!

Hong Kong Day 2: I, Transpinay

On January the 27th, Wednesday, I went to the University of Hong Kong around lunch time to get a feel of the campus. My talk was scheduled around 4 pm so I wanted to walk around, watch students and be in the middle of the hustle and bustle of campus life first. As I did, I saw different student organizations in booths advertising themselves or an issue. I think I passed by an environmental organization with their booth decked out in all green with posters on climate change. It made me reminisce briefly on my old college life. Dr. Sam Winter took me to lunch at the Faculty Lounge and left for several meetings after. I was pretty much on my own before I decided to go back to the auditorium that the good professor pointed out to me was the venue of his Sexual and Gender Diversity (SGD) class.



The auditorium was housed in the Knowles Building beside which was a lily pond with a full figure statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Around 3:30 pm, Dr. Winter's class began. The SGD, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is one of the broadening courses in the University of Hong Kong for undergrad students. It aims to broaden students' understanding of the nature and development of sexuality and gender by focusing on areas of knowledge that are not traditionally available to them such as: homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, and power-exchange relationships and expressions such as bondage, domination & sado-masochism.



The course will run this semester from January to April and the last two sessions in January are devoted to trans issues. A Hong Kong transgender advocate named MoMo was the class's guest speaker for the January 20th session while I was the guest for the January 27th class. The afternoon's session on Growing up transgender in Asia was divided between Dr. Sam Winter and I. For the first hour, he was going to give a sort of a Transgender 101 lecture talking about the issues facings Asian transmen and women (see pic above). Apart from the lecture, Dr. Winter also showed the class several videos of transpeople in transition so the students could understand the process. Videos of both transmen and transwomen were shown.



At around 4:30, my turn came. I was introduced and I started by thanking the class and the University for giving me the honor to speak before 160 undergrad students. I remarked that the University was truly doing its job by not only opening students' minds but their hearts as well. My presentation was divided into two parts. The first part, tells about my growing up years, from childhood to working as a professional post-college, while the second one, chronicles how I ended up advocating for transgender human rights. The class was generally attentive and laughed on cue at my jokes and asides (see pic below). I talked to them about transgender advocacy in the Philippines.



After my talk, we opened the floor to questions (see pic below). Many students stayed for the Q&A and Dr. Winter told me later that it was unusual for that many students to be seen in the auditorium at that time. Many of them had other classes to attend at around 5:25 and the fact that we had a lot of them in the room till 6 was indicative of their interest and genuine investment in the issue being discussed at hand.



The questions were really intelligent. One student observed that my working in the University of the Philippines shields me from the harsher world outside academe. Did I have any plans of working outside the University? Another student asked about my religious beliefs, while another asked about my relationship status. One student asked me, If you had not been born transsexual, do you think you'd have still achieved everything that you have in life? These youngsters do speak their mind and the quality of their questions was quite a revelation for me. I immensely enjoyed answering all of their questions.



At exactly 6 pm, we had to call it a day. A senior academic in the University of Hong Kong joined us because he invited a journalist to attend the afternoon's session. He is a Welsh guy who has been in Hong Kong the last decade and he said that the journalist who sat in the class had very positive things to say about the discussion that afternoon. We had our pic taken with him (see pic above) and after proceeded to the faculty lounge where he, Dr. Winter and other professors of the University had drinks. I had coffee and after decided to go out to Wan Chai for dinner. I left Dr. Winter and company and went out in the cold Hong Kong night.

Hong Kong Day 1: It Could Happen To You

My talk at the University of Hong Kong in their Sexual and Gender Diversity (SGD) undergrad class was happening on the 27th of January but I and Dr. Sam Winter, professor-in-charge of the SGD class and an ally and advocate of the transgender community and author of Transgender Asia Research, agreed that it would be a good idea to come earlier so any other pre-talk concerns could be smoothed out with enough time. So my flight out of Manila was booked for the 26th and I was scheduled to come back home on Saturday, the 30th. I left Manila Thursday via Philippine Air Lines flight PR 306 at 2:45 pm (see pic above), and arrived in Hong Kong two hours later. The Philippines and Hong Kong lie in the same time zone so I did not need to adjust my clock upon arrival.

I flew to Hong Kong on an uneventful flight. Immediately after stepping off the plane, I could not wait to take pictures to document every step of the trip. A long time ago, I gave away winter clothes which I had accumulated working cold nights for a call center in the past. Most of them were rotting away unused in my closet so when I had the chance, I gave them to friends who started working for call centers themselves. For this trip I had to borrow from friends warm clothes for the Hong Kong winter cold to avoid having to spend unnecessarily money that I could use in the trip instead. 



A while back, I had written here about the humiliating experiences of several Filipina transwomen who had passed through Hong Kong immigration. Apparently, transwomen have been singled out by Hong Kong airport officers for "standard security checks". This means that once a transwoman approaches an immigration counter to exit into Hong Kong, she has no assurance of entry. Instead, she will be passed on to a chain of several people until she finds herself in a holding room where she will be interviewed by a senior immigration officer, the end result of which is anyone's guess.

There the interview will vary from a brief polite exchange to insulting, heated argument between the transwoman and immigration official on why the former wants to enter Hong Kong. Through the trans community grapevine we have heard of transwomen who have seen the insides of that infamous holding room of being accused of illegal activity in the Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR), being required to empty out their wallets to prove their financial capacity to stay in Hong Kong, and the worst one yet--of being asked to strip naked for a body search. I know some people who have not been exempt from these troubling practices and they were slapped with a limited number of visitation days (the standard is 14 for all tourists) by being allowed to stay between one to two days only, detained in the holding room for varying lengths of time (sometimes under an hour, sometimes more), and the worst of all--deported back to Manila immediately which in local Filipino slang is called "airport to airport" or A to A.

So it was with great trepidation that I approached this trip. But although I was anxious, at the back of my head, I still kept thinking that this immigration hitch was never going to happen to me. I was so wrong.

The immigration officer asked for my passport. He went through it and when he seemed finished and satisfied (the entire thing took about 15 minutes), he called over an older guy, Guy Number 2 and asked me in a terse tone to follow him.

At that point I started to get angry. While trying to follow after Guy Number 2, I said in a curt and cutting tone, "Excuse me sir, but what seems to be the problem?". Guy Number 2 seemed to have sensed the unhappy tenor in my voice and answered nicely, "Oh just standard security check." After passing through the immigration line but not yet exiting, we got to the middle of the airport where Guy Number 2 stopped at a group of airport security-looking people and then handed us over to another person, Guy Number 3. Guy Number 3 began escorting us and so I asked him the same question. With a hint of a smile and very politely he said, "It's just standard security check." I asked him, "How long is this going to take? I have someone outside waiting for me." Guy Number 3 answered. "Just around 20 minutes or so."

At that point, there seemed to be nothing that I could do but just go through the process. I followed Guy Number 3 who ended up taking me to the infamous holding room. After waiting for a few more minutes, we were asked to see a senior looking officer, Guy Number 4.

He took me into one of the cubicles and asked me questions (i.e., What are you here for? When are you leaving? May I see your return ticket?). After noting my return flight, he thanked me and I was good to go.This time, a lady immigration officer escorted me to a special immigration counter where a surly looking guy took my passport and asked for my name. After this, I exited into the baggage claim area.

And so it came to pass. What I had been dreading finally happened to me. How silly of me to think that I was "special" and immune from such treatment. I know this is a bit of a thorny issue and I will talk about that point in another post. But my main point is: all transwomen affected by this issue should come together and discuss how to move forward in responding to this humiliating process already institutionalized at the Hong Kong airport. At this point, there is no sense in finding who to blame because as it were, it is a problem that already affects us all. We must unite and stand up to this unneeded harassment and not exclude anyone in the conversation. After all, this is a clear case of discrimination that does not choose, that includes us all.