Old LY Site

By Yuki Asato and Carlos Diego A. Rozul In the 1980s, women in the Philippines had a pivotal turn in society. Countless women joined in the movement to make the Philippines a more inclusive country among the many rallies against the administration at the time. Before the women's movement, queer women felt ignored. Lesbian concerns were being tucked under women's and feminist studies, which were heterosexual in nature at the time. Even during the gay movement, lesbian women were seen only as female versions of homosexual men. Discontented by being silent, the lesbian community wanted their voices to be heard among the fight against the dictatorship. Eventually, the underground women's organization MAKIBAKA released a position paper that included sexual orientation as part of the gender equality movement. The inclusion of the queer women in the conversation about equal rights for women spurred a cascade of change. Later in the 1990s, gender and sexuality was a major concern i...

By Nicole Silvestre Women's month is a celebration of women’s success and contribution to our society. Inclusion has been a long standing issue in the movement towards equality, and for LGBTQIA+ women it is a bigger struggle to remain visible. During dictatorship in the 1980’s, the lesbian community struggled to be visible to the public due to subsumption of their rights between women’s rights that were previously heterosexual in nature and gay movement that previously regarded them as female version of homosexual men. It is already 2019 and the same struggles can be seen happening in the trans community. Photo by Raine Cortes History of Trans Women in the Philippines Contrary to popular belief, transgender women or trans women did not just pop-up in the 20th century. Several accounts in Philippine history prove that trans women had played important roles in our society even before the Spaniards came to the Philippines. The most popular of which are the Babaylans or Visayan Shaman...

Jan Gabriel M. Castañeda If you search for “transition” on Google, it actually gives a specific definition for gender transition: to “ adopt permanently the outward or physical characteristics of the gender one identifies with, as opposed to those associated with one's birth sex .” It’s an incomplete definition, of course: it’s not just outward characteristics that change. Neither are they always the most important changes which that assume such changes happen at all: being transgender doesn’t always mean having extreme discomfort with the body you’re born with, as we’ll talk about later. But transitioning, in whatever form it takes, does mean a change that radically alters an individual. Many transgender people, very appropriately, refer to this as a “journey”. While we are talking about transgender people specifically, it’s helpful to note that every person “transitions” at many points in their lives. We transition when we grow up and take on new responsibilities. We transition w...

By Carlos Diego A. Rozul The HIV and AIDS epidemic has long been attached to the LGBTQI+ community since the early 1980’s. [ 1 ] As of December 2017, the HIV/AIDS and ART Registry of the Philippines has reported that 87% of sexually transmitted cases of HIV are men having sex with men (MSM). [ 2 ] Globally, there is limited data on the prevalence of HIV infection among transgender people as most epidemiological surveillance systems only ask for a person’s sex at birth, making transgender women fall under the MSM category. [ 3 ] A meta-analysis by Baral and colleagues in 2013 [ 4 ] revealed that the average HIV prevalence among trans women in several North American, Latin American, European, and Asian countries was 19.1%, significantly higher than the general population. Other studies, found that transgender persons have higher risk of HIV infection than MSM. [ 5 ] What is the essence of a trans woman? There are many qualities to trans women that make up who they are as a group and ...