‘I know it’s bad for my health, but I want to be a woman’

Faced with discrimination and a lack of resources, the Kingdom’s transgender community are taking matters into their own hands – often at great risk

Rith Rasy fears the large doses of hormones she takes to maintain her feminine figure could cut her life short. But the happiness she gets from living as a woman, the gender with which she’s identified since she was seven years old, is enough for her to justify continuing to take six tablets each day, without any medical guidance. The regime she follows gives her breasts, thin, hairless arms and a more womanly figure. But it has also makes her prone to mood swings and memory loss and diminishes her sex drive.

Transgender women, who are born with male anatomy but identify as female, and transgender men are subject to discrimination in Cambodia – from banishment by their families to difficulty finding work.

“To explain all the bullying and discrimination, it would take an hour,” said Rasy, who is a Cambodian Muslim. She said she has been turned away from her mosque, and rejected from jobs based on her gender. She is also dogged by the slur for transgender women, a-khoey.

But one of the other major problems affecting the community, she and local LGBT activists say, is the lack of access to information about how to safely transition to another gender.

In many developed countries, transgender men and women are able to access medical professionals who can advise them about which hormones to take to minimise health risks, or else opt for surgery. But in the Kingdom a combination of discrimination and lack of surgical options means that transgender people have little choice but to resort to dosing themselves with over-the-counter birth control pills.

“What else can I do?” asked Rasy, sitting in a Phnom Penh pagoda complex, wearing evenly ripped blue jeans and black, tight-fitting T-shirt. “I know it’s bad for my health, but I want to be a woman,” Rasy said of the pills she’s taken each day for two years. “There are no places giving information, it’s just word of mouth.”

Read more at: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/%E2%80%98i-know-it%E2%80%99s-bad-my-health-i-want-be-woman%E2%80%99