“We have so many who tell us there was this trans woman who was found dead in some street, in some province, and there’s nobody who cares about her so that case doesn’t get reported,” said Naomi Fontanos, co-founder and executive director of GANDA Filipinas-a transgender rights organization based in Manila. The real death toll is likely much higher: When a trans woman is murdered, the Philippine National Police (PNP) logs her gender as male (and vice versa for trans men), while many LGBTQ activists say the stigma that continues to shadow homosexuality and queer identities often dissuades family members and friends from speaking out. Little data exists to illustrate the scale of the problem, but Nierra and Remiendo are two of at least 50 transgender or gender non-binary individuals who have been murdered across the archipelago since 2010, according to Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) initiative that tracks the murders of trans people around the world. Although both trans men and women experience abuse across the country, human rights groups told me it’s trans women who are particularly vulnerable to violence. Over the past three years of reporting on gender-based violence in the Philippines, I’ve heard stories like Nierra’s and Remiendo’s again and again: tales that begin with a young woman on a night out, and end with a body in a river, on a beach, in a bathroom. Almost every trans person I interviewed said they had feared for their life. 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”. Similar murders were happening every few months, they said, their voices wavering over the phone. She was 23 years old, and she was found less than two miles away from home.Īs Nierra’s family grieved their daughter, members of the Philippines’ LGBTQ community told me that they were feeling something in between terror and despair. Her name was Madonna-or Donna-Nierra, her sister announced through her tears.
Later that afternoon, the police came and dragged her body onto dry land and marked it as evidence. Her long black hair was a watery crown, her face tilted towards the sky. 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.