Finding Their Place in This World

Since 2010, more than 50 transgender people have lost their lives in the Philippines. In 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.

- Corinne Redfern

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.