Interview with Mai Như Thiên Ân, the Founder of FTM Vietnam
It was one of the biggest flash mobs Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) had ever seen. Five hundred LGBT people were dancing underneath an enormous rainbow flag, stretching 30 meters wide by 20 meters tall. Saigon was celebrating its first-ever LGBT Pride, VietPride, in September 2012. And one of the people dancing in the flash mob was Mai Như Thiên Ân (Ân), a transgender man who had come out.
Ân had been hesitant to take part in the flash mob. He was struggling with depression, fueled by rejection by his family and at school. But his friend Nguyễn Thiện Trí Phong (a.k.a. Aki), a transgender man he’d met online, encouraged him, saying ‘if you don’t do it, who will.” The experience for Ân was life-changing. As Ân told me during his interview, “VietPride gave me life. It kept me from dying…that’s one of the reasons I started to love LGBTI activism and wanted to do it.”
Three years later Ân would found FTM Vietnam, the largest organization in the country for transgender men. FTM Vietnam has shifted the landscape in Vietnam; before 2015 transgender men had practically no visibility and no place to go to for community. But now, FTM Vietnam is over 5,000 strong, with events for the community several times a month.
I interviewed Ân about his path to becoming an LGBT community leader, and how his experience with discrimination has motivated him to advocate for transgender men.
Early Struggles With Self-Understanding and Acceptance
Ân grew up in a Catholic Northern Vietnamese Family in Saigon, who, according to him, were “very judgmental and very strict; a typical Asian family.” They expected him to focus on his future career above all else. They controlled what he could wear, and even who he hung out with: “when I picked out black clothes for myself, my mom forced me to wear pink instead. I always had this feeling like I’d been living in a jail, not a home.”
Ân’s first attempts to express his queer identity at school were also met with rejection from his friends, a group of “queen bee popular girls.” When in 7th grade, when he confessed to one of the popular girls that he had a crush on her, she was so disgusted she told the group to avoid him. Soon, rumors spread through the school, and nearly everyone began treating him like he was “contagious” for being queer.
By 8th grade he had one main friend, a Japanese-Vietnamese student who others avoided because of their “weird Japanese style” and the low-class of their family. Ân had a huge crush on them, but it was one-sided. They were best friends, sharing a bond as the “2 biggest losers in school.” There was something else the two shared: even though neither knew it at the time, later both would come out as transgender men. Unfortunately, when Ân’s family eventually found out about their friendship, they banned Ân from hanging out with them because they weren’t respectable enough.
Around this time, Ân also started being called an “SB” by his peers. He didn’t know at first they were harassing him, and thought it was just a nickname. But SB, short for “soft butch” or “stone butch,” which refers to masculine women attracted to women, was an identity Ân would later reclaim for himself, even if it didn’t quite fit. Since he had no out queer peers at school, he began interacting with other queer people online, especially on a website called LesKing. Lesking was a place where SBs would go to learn dating tips, how to dress, advice on how to come out, and more.
New Visibility for Transgender Men in Vietnam
Before 2009, there was practically no visibility for transgender men in Vietnam. But that year, a young transgender man namedNguyễn Thiện Trí Phong, who goes by Aki, began sharing his experience of being transgender through newspapers, television, and other media. As Ân explained, “Aki was one of the first people who dared to come out as a transgender man. [Before him], if transgender men took hormones, they went ‘stealth’ and tried to live like cisgender men. Young transgender men who were not taking hormones were afraid and said they were lesbians. Aki’s visibility helped create a safe zone.”
The website LesKing also gradually began expanding to include transgender men. In 2011, it featured an article that helped its readers understand the differences between identifying as “SB,” a tom/tomboy (another identity for a masculine woman), and a transgender man. It was an “aha” moment for hundreds, if not thousands, of transgender men like Ân who finally felt they had a way to explain their identity.
Aki was one of LesKing’s forum moderators, and he took great care in mentoring younger transgender men, including Ân: “Aki has always been around and helping me. I admire him because he always answers my questions, like: ‘should I come out to my parents, and how should I come out.’ He did not get annoyed from my questions, and I appreciated it.”
While interviewing Ân, I also got to meet Aki. He is very humble about his activist career, and perhaps a bit shy for someone who was in the media spotlight for so long. Currently Aki runs the social media and manages administrative tasks for the ICS Center. ICS Center is an influential national LGBTI advocacy organization that also operates the ICS Hub, an LGBTI community library and café in Saigon.
Facing Family Rejection
Ân was understandably cautious about coming out to his parents. At age 14 though he tried testing the waters by leaving an informational newspaper article out on his desk about LGBT rights. When his parents when they found it tore it up and threw it in his face, saying “don’t ever bring this to our house again.” They grounded him for years, and even put somebody to spy on him to make sure he didn’t have any bad influences so he could be a “perfect kid.”
By age 19, Ân had started secretly wearing a binder to flatten his chest and was dating a girl. But his mom had noticed something was going on, and one day while watching TV with her, she asked “you don’t like boys, do you?” He was so surprised he couldn’t help but tell her the truth: that he was a transgender man and attracted to women. Unfortunately, she was not supportive, and also told his father.
His father was staunchly anti-LGBT, even saying “if there was a law they could kill these people, he would [support it].” No matter what Ân said to his father, his father told him his “opinion was worthless,” called him a “psycho,” and said Ân had “Satan inside him.” His father threatened to pull him out of school, even though there were only 72 days until he graduated.
Ân was devastated because his family had been his idols his whole life. Ân fell into a deep depression and attempted suicide. When he recovered, he felt utterly trapped. He went to a close friend who agreed to be his “fake boyfriend,” and told his parents he would change. He had no choice but to go back into the closet, at least until graduation.
Founding FTM Vietnam
After graduation Ân moved out of his parent’s house and began seeking out LGBT community. After Pride 2012 he joined the VietPride committee, and became involved in planning events for Pride Month in Saigon.
Despite being part of VietPride, by 2015 Ân still knew few other transgender men than Aki. He had met “less than 10 transgender men” in person, and as he told me, “we might share a look when we’re on the street, but not likely talk or anything.” Transgender men interacted primarily online, but Ân wanted people to meet and talk in real life.
Starting with a facebook group, Ân began promoting a meetup for transgender men. The first few meetings were at an LGBT coffee shop run by a transgender man named Danny. Meeting in public at an LGBT space felt like a radical act for the 10 transgender men who showed up, many who were not out to their community. They discussed safely accessing and using hormones, a difficult topic in a country that does not have clinics focused on providing transgender care.
The meeting was a success, with many forming new friendships. The next meeting drew 40 transgender men and addressed other aspects of transition-related care including surgeries. In addition to learning from each other, participants gained confidence in themselves and new friends. Meetings continued to be packed, and the group membership grew to 300 people.
2015 I am Transgender Campaign
While Ân was happy with the support group meetups, he saw potential for FTM Vietnam to also help advocate for transgender rights. In 2015 the Vietnamese government began considering an amendment to the civil code, Article 37, which would grant transgender people the rights to change their names and gender on government-issued IDs. A newly formed advocacy group which Aki was part of, TRANS Core, began a campaign for transgender people to come out in support of the amendment.
TRANS Core’s campaign asked transgender people to post a selfie on social media holding a sign saying Tôi Chuyển Giới (I am transgender). Ân knew many in his group would be nervous at first, but he found a clever way to get people to participate: “I started to post selfies of myself with the Tôi Chuyển Giới sign, then I told people to drop selfies below the comments or make their own posts in my group. It wasn’t that hard, I tricked them by saying it’s a trend. People love trends, so they gave it a go.”
After people began posting, Ân organized a group FTM Vietnam photoshoot with a transgender pride flag. Ân was able to send hundreds of photos for TRANS Core to use for their campaign. The campaign was celebrated as a success when the amendment to the Civil Code passed in 2015. However, in 2019, the amendment has yet to be implemented through a law.
ViLEAD: Learning New LGBTI Leadership Skills
Ân had always been eager to learn new activist skills, and in 2014 and 2016 he applied to an LGBTI youth leadership program called ViLead; he was accepted on the second attempt. ViLead is a program run by the ICS Center. It has trained many of Vietnam’s most influential LGBTI leaders, including Aki and ICS Center’s current Director, Linh.
ViLEAD is based on the theory that leaders must “know the context of their community,” and teaches that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to activism. This message resonated with Ân, who was building a community for transgender men where none had existed before.
Each “season” of ViLead (held about every other year) pairs up 14 to 20 youth leaders with about 10 mentors. Each year also has a theme, and the theme of ViLead 2016 was “the fire inside” and it helped activists learn skills to sustain activism for the long-term. As Ân explained “We all have a fire inside our heart…we learnt how to keep the spirit strong with you. The fire will be put out at some point, but we need to relight it. You need to be able to get back up after you fall down.” Ân told me that while he still struggles with self-doubt and has many times felt like giving up hope, what keeps his “fire” alive is remembering the Saigon Pride flash mob in 2012.
Participants at ViLead also learn many practical skills for running an organization, many of which were new to Ân. ViLead taught him how to fundraise, how to professionally facilitate meetings, grow leadership from within his organization, and how to work with other LGBTI leaders. It also taught him public speaking skills, which has helped him be a more effective transgender advocate.
Growing FTM Vietnam
Ân began FTM Vietnam simply as a way to get transgender men to meet and talk in person. After ViLead, Ân was able to transform FTM Vietnam into a professional organization. He started a Facebook page to grow the visibility of the organization beyond just the people who came to the meetups. It was one of the first Facebook pages for transgender men that wasn’t focused on performers/entertainment, and it became an important resource for the community.
FTM Vietnam began providing information and assisting community members with transgender issues including navigating employment, healthcare, and legal issues. As the work of FTM Vietnam grew, Ân also grew the leadership of FTM Vietnam. It now has a core team of thirty people running the organization, including transgender men, non-binary people, and allies.
Ân also began writing grant proposals to get funding for the organization. While his first few grants fell through, he kept going until he secured sponsorship by ISee (The Institute for Studies of Society, Economy and Environment). This allowed him to create a series of events known as “Trans Talk,” where he would bring in experts on topics relevant to the transgender community for a seven-part series of events.
Trans Talk is currently ongoing. The first five events series tackled love and relationships, employment, aging and generation gaps within the movement, family acceptance, and sex. Trans talk part six will bring visibility to transgender men who do not identify as straight, an often-overlooked part of the community who struggle with acceptance even from other transgender people. Trans Talk will culminate in a transgender conference on September 14 during Vietnam’s Pride Month.
Addressing Transgender Mental Health
Ân and I discussed at length that while mental health is a taboo topic for many Asians, it’s a crucial topic for transgender people which he hopes to eventually bring more visibility to.
It’s often been difficult for him to talk about his own struggles with depression and trauma, even with other LGBT people. While attending ViLead 2016, Ân experienced a panic attack, and hid himself in the bathroom crying because “I don’t know how to explain to others what mental illness is.” The skills he learned at ViLead to “keep his fire alive” when things seem dark have helped him greatly. Yet even though he’s managed to build a supportive community for himself and other, he continues to be affected by the trauma of his family’s rejection and bullying at school.
Ân’s story of how discrimination and rejection continues to negatively affect his mental health is not uncommon for transgender people. A 2015 study in the US by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 48% of Asian-American transgender men had attempted suicide, and 39% had experienced psychological distress in the last year. In one of the few studies conducted in Asia, a 2013 study of adolescent transgender women in Thailand found that those who were rejected by their families and/or lacked social support were much more likely to experience depression and attempt suicide.
Thankfully, the picture is very different for transgender people with accepting families. A 2012 Canadian study found that 70% of transgender respondents with with parents strongly supportive of their gender identity and expression reported positive mental health compared to 15% of those whose parents were not strongly supportive. A 2015 Canadian study showed that transgender youth with accepting parents were 84% less likely to attempt suicide.
Ân hopes FTM Vietnam can be a safe space for discussing mental health, as well as a place where transgender men can help each other navigate coming out to their families. When transgender people have accepting families, accepting schools, and accepting communities, they can live much healthier lives.
Gender Recognition and Anti-Bullying
One of the biggest challenges facing the Vietnamese transgender community in 2019 is that there remains no legal way to change their gender markers on government IDs, despite the 2015 amendment to the Civil Code. In order for the amendment be implemented, the Ministry of Health must first finalize and approve a law, which then needs to be approved by the National Assembly.
FTM Vietnam recently attended a conference with the Ministry of Health about the current draft of the law, where they provided input on issues with the draft. Currently Vietnam has almost no qualified transgender care providers, and no transgender surgeons.Yet the current draft law requires a person to undergo a medical transition, including hormones and/or surgical procedures, to change their gender marker. The law is supposed to create new regulations for transgender health providers who would be qualified to sign off on a person’s care. For now, almost all transgender people have to seek care in other countries and/or buy hormones on the street.
Ân has little hope the law will be implemented any time soon, and believes there will be major delays before qualified transgender health care providers would be widely available. Recently the head of the Ministry of Health publicly stated that she would not approve the draft “because there are other important laws that need to come first.” Ân believes it’s time for a coalition of transgender people and allies to come together again like they did in 2015 to protest the lack of progress on the law. Without community pressure, the government may continue to delay implementing the law with impunity.
One transgender issue where Ân believes there is hope for change soon is addressing bullying in school. Two years ago the Ministry of Education worked with UNESCO to create an amendment to protect students from harassment, and in the first draft, it included “diverse genders and sexualities” as a protected class alongside other protected classes including sex. It was the first time the national government mentioned LGBT discrimination in any draft. While this clause was removed in the fifth revision to the amendment, advocates used the opportunity to educate the public and government officials about LGBT bullying. Ân believes that when the law is implemented, it in effect will still protect LGBT people: “we can use [protections around] sex to talk to teachers about LGBT.”
Bridging Vietnam’s Transgender Communities
Ân has big plans for Vietnam’s Pride Month this September (2019), which he hopes will be a historic moment for the transgender community. His Trans Talk event on September 14 called “We are one family,” is intended to be a conference for all members of the community, including transgender women and non-binary people. Ân hopes it will help build a stronger, more unified voice for Vietnam’s fragmented transgender community. As Ân explained to me, “it’s important for us to understand each other, finally meet up, and become friends.” The event will be followed by a trans party that same night for the entire transgender community as well.
It has been Ân’s goal all along to bring transgender people of all identities together, and in fact, FTM Vietnam currently does have transgender women and non-binary people as members. Ân is currently working with a team to found the first-ever Transgender Pride celebration as a regular event each Pride Month. It’s only in its beginning stages, but he has high hopes. Maybe one day soon there will be a flash mob under an enormous pink-and-blue transgender pride flag. I would love to be there!
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