A memoir of the Karen (Kayin) Transgender Woman of Burma

I have been worried that I would not know where I will be placed well enough before I travel to the States.  But I was hint by our ACYPL local counselor that she even envy me.  That has been a puzzle since end of July.   My another worry is about clothing and I asked if my placement would be freezing too and she told me nooooo, warmer.  I could not guess where I would be going, a warmer place in October and November in the States! Days passed and 3 weeks ago, my placement was confirmed.  I am very excited.  My placement is somewhere, I have never expected to be.  Sometimes it is very hard to know what God plans for you.  Prior to knowing where I would go, I talked to my relatives who settled in the States 30 years ago.  We talked about so many things and she eagerly asked me where I would be and to visit often if possible.  But after knowing where I would be now, it would not be possible to meet my relatives and spend time ...

I checked my emails and realized that last year in 2016, I applied for a the ACYPL professional fellow program but I was not selected.  And again, I did apply this year in the beginning of 2017 and I got selected. According to the program, I will have to travel to the US in October and November and the period is going to be almost 6 weeks.  I am excited!  And while writing this post, I have secured my US entry visa and most of the paper works done.  But I have yet to know where my placement will be. But luckily, I got hint that I would be placed together with a friend, a transgender woman from Thailand together as our cause are similar.  So, I am happy.  We will cook, and either speak Thai or English from time to time.  The theme of our fellowship is Legislative Process and Governance but I also expect there will be other things coming up and I will get a lot of experience during this fellowship. 3 years ago, I was in Australia (Melbourne and Syd...

ကျမ နာရီကြည့်မိတော့ မနက် နှစ်နာရီထိုးခါနီးလေး ကျမ အမျိုးသားကျမကိ အမှီလိုက်နေတဲ့ ပေါက်စီပူတူတူးကတော့ တခေါခေါနဲ့ အိပ်နေပြီလေ။ ကျမအမျိုးသား ဒီရက်ပိုင်း အလုပ်များပါတယ်။ မနက်ဆို အရင်က အေးအေးဆေးဆေးမှ အိပ်ရာထတဲ့ ပူတူတူး အခုဆို မနက် ၆း၃၀ အိပ်ရာထတယ်။ မနက်စာအတွက် သမီးတော်ကျင်ကျင်နဲ့ ပြင်ဆင်၊ အလုပ်သွားဖို့ ပြင်ဆင် ရေမိုးချိုးပြီး ကျမကို ပုံစံအမျိုးမျိုးနဲ့စပြီး နှိုးလေ့ရှိပါတယ်။ ကျမကတော့ အခုလို ညနက်မှ အိပ်တော့ မနက်ဆို အခုနောက်ပိုင်း ၈ နာရီလောက်မှပဲ ထဖြစ်တော့တယ်။ ညနေဘက်ဆိုလဲ အလုပ်ကပြန်လာရင်နောက်ကျတယ်။ ဒါပေမယ့် သူပျော်နေတာ မြင်တော့ ကျမရင်ထဲလည်း ပျော်မိပါတယ်။ ကျမ ၂၀၁၅ ခုနှစ် ရွေးကောက်ပွဲကာလတွေဆီကို သွားသတိရပါတယ်။ အဲ့ဒီအချိန် ပူတူတူးလေး ကျောက်ကပ်ရောဂါကြောင့် ခါးတွေနာပြီး တစ်ကိုယ်လုံးဖောရောင်နေတဲ့ကာလပါ။ ဒါပေမယ့် ကျမ သူ့အနားမှာ မနေနိုင်ပါဘူး။ တနင်္လာနေ့မနက် ၅ နာရီ ဆို နေပြည်တော်လေယာဉ်သွားတိုးစီးပြီး သောကြာညနေ ၈ ခွဲလောက်မှ ကျမပြန်လာတတ်တာ ရွေးကောက်ပွဲကြီးပြီးလို့ ၂၀၁၆ ခုနှစ် ၄ လပိုင်းအကုန်လောက်အထိပါပဲ။ ကျမ သူ့ကို မကြည့်နိုင်ဆေးခန်းလည်း မပို့နိုင် Creatinine တွေ Ablumin တွေ ဘယ်လောက်ရှိလဲ မသိ၊ သူဘာဆေးသ...

A tragic story of one of my friends, I would say my comrade, hurts. But that made me realised I am leaving one day too. I just do not know when and how it would be. Every morning when I wake up, I thank God for giving me another morning so that I can do the work that feed me and at the same time, I thank God for giving me another morning to prepare for the day to come.   And every morning, I ask myself a question. Am I ready? When I started asking myself that question, I felt so bad. I was not ready. When my mother was sick in 2015, and she passed away but my answer was still negative.   A year later, my sister got married. On the morning she had her make-up done for the wedding, I look at her and the answer turned yes. From that day on, the answer remains unchanged. I am ready. My physician told me,"You are not a coincidence and you are strong."  One day, eventually, the strong one falls too...

I used to put on less make-up and made efforts to wear gender-neutral clothing when going to clinics or hospitals for treatments.  A few days ago, in a workshop where I facilitated, a senior LGBT citizen and attorney stated that stigma and discrimination becomes huge when one do not respect their gender identity.  This inspired me to respect my gender identity more and I went to clinic to have my doctor appointment with normal make-up and dress.  Nurse aids laughing, duty MO puz zled, other patients turned wide eyes.  Once again, all I need is to respect my gender identity. It worked. Most nurse aids are Karen girls. I did my advocacy that silent their laughters and gossips in Karen.  More advocacy and respect on gender identity is still needed and I will continue until they stop laughing not because I understand them but because they understand it is not funny to see a transgender woman in their daily work.

My partner is busy today at his office and they will have a water festival celebration at their office!  I have been working all day on my mac translating a legal document for hours.  I could not stand it anymore and I have decided that I need to get out of my tiny bedroom-office! I went to Myanmar Plaza and looked for something to drink.  Given a sore throat I am suffering, I chose Gloria Jeans and got an Americano.  I rewarded myself a piece of red velvet cake.  Not a small piece though.  While enjoying my coffee and cake, I realised a middle-aged woman sitting with another younger woman (very likely to be her daughter) was looking at me curiously.  Then what I am going to write today disappeared and the way she looked at me came to my mind fiercely to start writing about it. Unlike other countries, transwomen in Myanmar face something else.  It is true that the community accepts them to some extent but not beyond that, i.e. a transwoman can...