The Blog
TransWorldView is a blog by Kayley Whalen, a transgender activist from the USA, about her travels to meet with transgender people around the world. She is currently a SocioCultural Anthropology PhD student at UC Davis. This blog was largely collected between March 2019 and 2023 as she traveled the world to begin the research that she is now exploring for her PhD research. In that time she met with dozens of transgender people across 26 countries, especially in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Scandinavia. The blog shares their stories to showcase the diversity of transgender communities, as every culture has a different understanding of gender. Yet it also explores the common threads that tie our communities together. By sharing the stories of these transgender people, I hope to build a stronger global movement for transgender acceptance and human rights.
The Author
In February 2020, Kayley Whalen was selected to be Miss USA in the Miss International Queen pageant in Thailand, the world’s most prestigious transgender beauty pageant. She hopes to use her platform to stop transgender discrimination in healthcare, employment, marriage, and the ability to change someone’s identity documents.
She was invited to speak at the White House in 2016 about LGBTQ equality, and has also spoken at numerous conferences across the US. She is a founder and board member of Trans United Fund, the first transgender-run political organization in the US supporting transgender candidates. She also was the Digital Strategies and Social Media Manager at the National LGBTQ Task Force from 2014 to 2018.
In addition to writing for TransWorldView, Kayley Whalen is a digital strategy consultant. She specializes in writing for web, email, and social media for non-profit organizations, cause-driven companies, and NGOs. You can learn more about her consulting work at KayleyWhalen.com.
