Pink Alliance 粉紅同盟

By LIEN HOANG

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/vietnam-a-leader-on-l-g-b-t-rights-in-asia/?src=recg

HO CHI MINH CITY — In the video, a transgender Vietnamese in a stringy, low-cut top entertains a crowd by balancing three fiery batons in her hands and on her head. A while later, other transgenders talk about the daily challenges of being at odds with your sex of birth, ranging from which restroom to use to bickering with the police over the gender stipulated on your official I.D.

In November, “Vui Song Moi Ngay” (“The Joy of Living Every Day”) became the first mainstream TV program to run a special about transgenders in Vietnam. The episode marks an encouraging if humble milestone for the transgender cause — and more broadly for human rights in Vietnam, which is better known for cracking down on bloggers, demonstrators and believers of minority faiths.

Transgenders tend to have a harder time than homosexuals because they’re more conspicuous. Harassment pushes them to drop out of school; bigotry in the workplace leads them to take menial entertainment gigs. Some make use of their perceived strangeness by performing at funerals, which in Vietnam are celebrations of life rather than occasions to mourn death.

The nation’s transgenders are clamoring for legislation that would recognize their right to undergo sex-change operations in Vietnam and to select the gender listed on their I.D.s. Current law doesn’t allow for the surgery, except for people who are intersex, or born with characteristics of both genders. And without proper papers, transgenders have trouble boarding planes, buying property and opening bank accounts.

Support for change is growing. Participants at Vietnam’s first transgender workshop in August included officials from various ministries and the Office of Government, the state’s executive arm. One Justice Ministry representative invited attendees to call him if they had trouble with official paperwork. In November, after a fact-finding mission to Ho Chi Minh City, the ministry submitted a report to the government in Hanoi stating that existing laws were preventing transgenders from building happy families.

This increasing open-mindedness is part of the government’s bid to burnish, at a low cost, its international reputation on human rights. Vietnam is applying for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, even as watchdogs criticize it for its heavy-handed monitoring of Internet activity. Expanding religious rights or freedom of expression risks empowering the political opposition; doing more for the L.G.B.T. community does not. The U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has made clear that progress against homophobia would be looked upon favorably.

When it comes to L.G.B.T. rights, Vietnam already is unique in Asia. Last year, the government elicited global surprise and rare applause when it floated the prospect of legalizing gay marriage; it is poised to become the first country in the region to do so next year. Even gay-friendly Thailand, where Vietnamese transgenders typically go for sex-reassignment surgery, has yet to approve such unions.

Vietnam might have an authoritarian bent like Malaysia and Singapore, but it does not criminalize sodomy. Indonesia and the Philippines are the only nations in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to count more Catholics, but religious resistance to L.G.B.T. rights is much greater in those countries: The church has little influence in communist Vietnam.

This is one reason that granting wider freedoms to transgenders would come at little domestic cost to the Vietnamese government: Few important constituencies much care. Another reason is that in this one-party state, politicians seeking office don’t have to stake out positions on social issues. If there’s any place in the world where the L.G.B.T. movement is apolitical, Vietnam is it.

It doesn’t hurt that the population is young — more than half of the country is under 30 — and so less likely than older generations to consider transgenders socially deviant. Young Vietnamese easily name off the country’s celebrity transgenders, from Cindy Thai Tai to Huong Giang, a finalist in last year’s Vietnam Idol.

Now it’s rejection by older Vietnamese, which is linked to fears of stigma in local communities, that poses the greatest obstacle for transgenders in Vietnam.

Truong Thi Mai, a 20-year-old with bleached hair, fake eyelashes and hot-pink nail polish, works at Thuy Linh, a seafood restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City. The owner, a woman who once shunned transgenders but now offers them jobs, has famously turned the place into a haven for transgender waitresses.

Mai and her colleagues spend their after-hours upstairs, where they live, sleep and commiserate together. But when Mai visits her family, the lashes and polish come off. “When I go to my hometown, I have to pretend to be a man because they don’t want the neighbors to know,” she said.

It’ll take time for the older generations to come around to transgender rights — longer, it would seem, than for the government.