To exist is to resist.
In observance of the Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), Bahaghari Center for SOGIE Research, Education and Advocacy, Inc. (Bahaghari Center) launched the #ExistToResist campaign, which emphasizes not just the need for visibility but also the need to provide opportunities to LGBTQIA+ people to be seen and heard.
This is a way “for them to help dictate the discourses about them, thereby the direction that their particular sector is headed towards,” said Mx Disney Aguila, co-executive director of Bahaghari Center.
As TDOV highlights, transgender people “should be given opportunities to tell the world their lived truths,” Aguila added. “We all matter, yes, but when If not visible, it makes the job of those who hate us easier in ‘othering’ us. It all starts with being seen, being heard, being known to be here and that we’re not going anywhere.”
For Aguila, a Deaf transgender woman, transgender people continue to face numerous issues, “from the denial of our identity, lack of laws allowing us to identify our personhood, refusal of services solely because of us being who/what we are, exclusion in LGBTQIA+ programs (such as HIV-related efforts), and so on.”
Aaron Moises C. Bonete, co-executive director of Bahaghari Center, added that visibility “is even more needed for minority sectors within the already minoritized LGBTQIA+ community, particularly those with multiple identities that put them at higher risk for abuses.”
As examples: LGBTQIA+ gatherings still do not have Filipino Sign Language interpreters, automatically excluding Deaf LGBTQIA people from participating; there is apparent discrimination of transgender women who do sex work even in the transgender community; et cetera.
Lack of visibility has “real-life consequences,” Bonete said, citing as an example the 2023 research done by Michael David Tan, editor in chief of Outrage Magazine, who found that even if transgender women are supposedly to be targeted in the distribution of HIV PrEP in Cebu City, none of the transgender women who do sex work knew about PrEP, where to get the same, and so do not use it. “People forced to be invisible are left out of development efforts altogether, and this shouldn’t be what’s happening.”
Bonete added: “They need to surface, to be visible, yes. But we – people in subjectively better positions in the LGBTQIA+ movement – should help make that visibility happen.”
Bahaghari Center’s efforts focus on minority sectors in the LGBTQIA+ community in the Philippines. As examples, it worked with the National Council of Churches in the Philippines from 2016 to make its member churches more inclusive in their HIV-related services; researched on HIV PrEP use of transgender women who do sex work in Cebu City in 2023, and has been delivering training on community-based HIV screening for Deaf community leaders since 2017.
The #ExistToResist campaign was supported by Outrage Magazine, Center for HIV and AIDS Responses (CARE), and Fringe Magazine.
