Since 2010, more than 50 transgenders have lost their lives in the Philippines. This stirring piece by Corinne Redfern sheds light on the search for equality and rights for the thousands of trans men and women who are seeking to live their lives, without fear.
This article is a partnership between The Fuller Project and Tatler.
The children found her first. Playing along the riverbanks in Caloocan City, to the north of Manila, they ran across piles of stones and discarded rubbish to where the woman floated in the muddy shallows. Her long black hair was a watery crown, her face tilted towards the sky. Later that afternoon, the police came and dragged her body onto dry land and marked it as evidence. Her name was Madonna—or Donna—Nierra, her sister announced through her tears. She was 23 years old, and she
was found less than two miles away from home.
As Nierra’s family grieved their daughter, members of the Philippines’ LGBTQ+ community told me that they were feeling something in between terror and despair. Similar murders were happening every few months, they said, their voices wavering over the phone. Several women described an incident almost exactly one year earlier, on September 17, 2019, when Pangasinan residents called police to Patar beach on Luzon’s west coast, where 29-year- old Jessa Remiendo’s body lay in the white sand: her neck “almost completely cut through”. Most trans people I spoke to said they had feared for their lives.
Over the past three years of reporting on gender-based violence in the Philippines, I’ve heard stories like Nierra’s and Remiendo’s again and again: tales that begin with a young woman on a night out, and end with a body in a river, on a beach, in a bathroom. Although both trans men and women experience abuse across the country, human rights groups told me it’s trans women who are particularly vulnerable to violence. Little data exists to illustrate the scale of the problem, but Nierra and Remiendo are two of at least 50 transgender or gender non-binary individuals who have been murdered across the archipelago since 2010, according to Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) initiative that tracks the murders of trans people around the world. The real death toll is likely much higher: When a trans woman is murdered, the Philippine National Police (PNP) logs her gender as male (and vice versa for trans men), while many LGBTQ+ activists say the stigma that continues to shadow homosexuality and queer identities often dissuades family members and friends from speaking out.
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