This post is a proposal for Matter’s International Reporting Fellowship.
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The Badings of Haiyan
How do Philippine trans women cope
after the Earth’s most destructive storm?
As typhoons are like hurricanes, badings are like trans women. They may be the same general phenomenon, but they are thought of differently in different places, using different words. In the Philippines where I’m from, badings suffer too, yet wear the protective garb of their ancestry, the role of mediator between genders before Western colonists came to ruin it all.
Haiyan is the typhoon that gashed through the center of the Philippines in November 2013, flattened everything that once stood, the most destructive storm in human history. I was in the U.S. here and not the Philippines there, though I only came here when I was 15, and was born and raised in the Philippines. I was also assigned male then became a woman in my early 20's, and would have been a bading had I stayed. I would like to go back to where I’m from, to find out how trans women like me survived the storm.
Did the badings of Haiyan find shelter with each other or with their families? Did they have less access to the tools that make them badings, the makeup and clothes that are key to shaping their womanhood? Were they more ostracized when resources were limited or were they treated like everyone else? How have they coped? Given the greater tolerance in the Philippines for people who are third-gender, I hope they didn’t fare too badly, but I don’t know. I’m asking you to help me find out.
As a writer and a person, I believe in improvisation. I believe in letting a story take you places you don’t expect. This proposal is not about telling you what exactly I’m going to write about, but defining the space that I intend to write in, and allowing circumstance to inhabit that space. What I do know is that I have ready and immediate contacts in many parts of the Philippines, and that regularly going back there has allowed me to stay close to the language and culture.
I do not have a journalism background. I’ve been trained as a creative writer and an academic. I also went to school for fine art photography. So as someone who isn’t a professional journalist but is a capable writer and researcher, I’m in a good position to question some of the assumptions of journalists working in the field, while still being able to deliver a quality piece. This strand of my work is evident in my recent piece for Medium, “The Queer Case of Luke O’Donovan,” where I investigate the case of a man in jail for stabbing five people who he claims were gay-bashing him, and openly do so through the lens of my own experience. So far, it’s the only thing I’ve written that can be described as narrative journalism.
My first Medium piece, “I Didn’t Know I Was a Boy,” tells the story of my own relationship to gender, and I’ve written a number of opinion pieces on transgender issues for The American Prospect and The Nation. The one I’m most proud of is the first: “Coming Out Doesn’t Begin to Describe It.”
Yet my work is clearly moving in a journalism direction, as I’ve been spending time documenting the lives of other trans women both through writing and photography. I plan to write stories about trans women to go with images like these:
But I’ve never documented the lives of trans women in the Philippines. I hope that the Matter International Reporting Fellowship can give me that chance.
I am in the unique position of being trans while trained to have enough distance not to get carried away. I speak fluent Tagalog, the main indigenous language of the Philippines, and have partial fluency in Visayan, the indigenous language of the central region. I grew up in Luzon, far from where Haiyan struck, but I’ve visited the area several times because I have family there. I would have grown up a bading had I stayed in the Philippines, but because I left, I did not grow to have the same sets of assumptions about gender as the future subjects of my piece. So I am an outsider and an insider in many more ways than one, and I find that to be a promising position from which to tell this story.
The last and important thing is that I’m cheap, since I am both a writer and photographer. You only need to pay for one round-trip ticket, $2,000 at most. Then with travel inside the Philippines and reasonable accommodations, I probably only need to spend another $1,000 for other expenses.
I want this story to shift the way people understand transgenderism in the English-speaking world. I want it to shift the way people understand natural disaster. I want people to come to a better understanding about how people and their environments intersect. But I also want to shift how we understand what it means to tell a story, and the tools we use to do it. With the Matter International Reporting Fellowship, I hope to have that chance.
