Binibining Pilipinas International 2021 Hannah Arnold Joins LoveYourself
Binibining Pilipinas International 2021 Hannah Arnold joins LoveYourself in its multiple advocacies as an official ambassador. Hannah will …
Transcend by LoveYourself Raises the FLAG with Accenture
Transcend by LoveYourself brings its #BreakFreePH campaign to celebrate the crystal anniversary of Accenture’s diversity organization Friends, Lesbians, …
Director’s Statement One Year Into the Community Quarantine
It has been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our nation. Now that we …
Applying Telemedicine to Trans Health
LoveYourself services are officially offered through an appointment basis starting June 2020 through go.loveyourself.ph/booking in alignment with the …
LoveYourself Launches Services Beyond HIV
LoveYourself, Inc., the leading HIV advocacy group in the country, launches three innovative and timely programs on a new HIV prevention method, transgender health, and mental wellness initiatives. The advocacy group unveiled these services to further care for oneself during Spectrum: The LoveYourself Perspective event on September 11, 2019 at My Cinema in Greenbelt 3, Makati City.
Transitioning and the Call to Love
If you search for “transition” on Google, it actually gives a specific definition for gender transition: to “adopt permanently the outward or physical characteristics of the gender one identifies with, as opposed to those associated with one’s birth sex.” It’s an incomplete definition, of course: it’s not just outward characteristics that change. Neither are they always the most important changes which that assume such changes happen at all: being transgender doesn’t always mean having extreme discomfort with the body you’re born with, as we’ll talk about later. But transitioning, in whatever form it takes, does mean a change that radically alters an individual. Many transgender people, very appropriately, refer to this as a “journey”.
A Trans Woman’s Risk
The HIV and AIDS epidemic has long been attached to the LGBTQI+ community since the early 1980’s. As of December 2017, the HIV/AIDS and ART Registry of the Philippines has reported that 87% of sexually transmitted cases of HIV are men having sex with men (MSM).
Globally, there is limited data on the prevalence of HIV infection among transgender people as most epidemiological surveillance systems only ask for a person’s sex at birth, making transgender women fall under the MSM category. A meta-analysis by Baral and colleagues in 2013 [4] revealed that the average HIV prevalence among trans women in several North American, Latin American, European, and Asian countries was 19.1%, significantly higher than the general population. Other studies, found that transgender persons have higher risk of HIV infection than MSM.