ILGA meets... Mikee Intonhttp://ilga.org/ilga-meets-mikee-inton/ilga/26th August 2015 14:08 Alessia Valenza
"What made you become an activist for the human rights of LGBTI people?
I fell into activism quite by accident. I was in my early 20s and taking a class on gender studies when my friends told me about STRAP – the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines. I went to an LGBT bazaar carnival that my friend had helped organize and saw that STRAP had a booth. I took fliers and briefly chatted with some of the girls – turns out a few of them came from the same high school as me, and it seemed quite like an unlikely reunion. I came to my first STRAP meeting in June 2011, where I met several other transwomen – an important step for me, personally, because while I had always been surrounded and supported by my gay friends, I had never had much contact with other transwomen. Being at that meeting was a liberating experience for me – knowing that my experiences as a trans* person were shared by others, and that there was a group where I could come and be myself.
With my STRAP sisters, we were exploring the concepts of the SOGIE framework and working on ways to localize these universalized ideas. While "
