An interview with June Chua, founder of Singapore’s only transgender homeless shelter
June Chua’s philosophy is simple, “I don’t want to tell the Singapore transgender community what to do. I want the community to tell me how I can support them.”
June is the co-founder of the T Project Singapore, which provides services to support the Singapore transgender community including housing, a food bank, peer counseling, and corporate sensitivity workshops. Her organization, which she co-founded with her late sister in 2014, was the first transgender-led and transgender-focused organization in Singapore, and it has made her one of the most visible leaders of the Singapore transgender community. I recently had a chance to sit down and chat with her about her life and her work.
Before the T Project, the Singapore transgender community had few resources. The T Project was founded because, according to June, “I wanted transgender people supporting transgender people.” It now provides services in two locations. First, there’s the homeless shelter which provides emergency, short-term, and long-term housing for transgender women eighteen years and older. Then there’s the the Alicia Community Centre, named after June’s late sister, which is open to queer and transgender youth and adults. One of the most important programs at the community center is the peer counseling, which allows transgender people to talk to others like them about issues including relationships, family acceptance, coming to terms with their identity, and violence and sexual assault. The community center has a library full of LGBTQ resources, and is a place where the T Project can refer people to services including healthcare and legal help. It also regularly hosts events and workshops, including the corporate sensitivity trainings. When I met June at the community center, it still had sticky notes on the wall from a training the T Project provided to a health organization that wanted to better serve the Singapore transgender community.
The Singapore transgender community exists in a legal “gray area”
One of the first things I asked June was to explain the state of LGBT rights in Singapore. As June stated, “my government is very funny, they know we exist, but we have to be quiet about it.” Singapore lacks LGBT non-discrimination protections. Consensual same-sex sexual acts remain illegal under Section 377A of the penal code, a holdover from homophobic laws instituted while Singapore was a British colony. While it is possible in Singapore for a transgender person to change their gender on official identification documents, it requires both surgery, and a note after an examination by a certified Singaporean doctor, which according to June, few doctors are willing to provide. Usually members of the Singapore transgender community have to travel to another country to access surgery because of lack of Singapore transgender surgery providers. According to June, Thailand is a particularly popular surgery destination, not only because of the experience of the surgeons, but also because many Singapore transgender women enjoy that Thailand is generally accepting of transgender people, and they enjoy experiencing Thailand’s large and diverse transgender community.
Political protest in Singapore is highly constrained, and an activist can even be sued by the government for a Facebook post. In 2016 the government even demanded foreign multinational corporations cease donating to Singapore’s Pink Dot festival, the country’s most public LGBT event. The Singaporean government also has refused to register The T Project as an official business, despite years of attempts by June to register it even under the most basic corporate status. Without this registration, the T Project has been unable to take donations from anyone other than private individuals; LUSH Cosmetics, which has a history of donating to transgender organizations, promised her a grant years ago but cannot legally give her the money until the T Project is a CLG (Company Limited by Guarantee).
Meeting Basic Needs For the Singapore Transgender Community
In this difficult political situation, June takes a rather pragmatic approach to the T Project’s work. She focuses on providing direct support to the Singapore transgender community rather than advocating for specific political policies, unlike the Thai transgender advocates I recently wrote about. “I’m about immediate help…Let me [help Singapore transgender people] take care of basic issues first, like finding a place to stay, food, finding healthcare, then we can work on broader issues like rights.”
The housing the T Project provides through their shelter gives clients a foundation to build a better future for themselves. Typically clients have no other form of stability, and having a safe place to live is life-changing. Many are living with HIV and/or mental health disabilities. As June states, “I want my shelter not to be the first option, but last resort. Those who stay at shelters are really at the bottom.” The government social service sector in Singapore, which lacks transgender-competent providers, refers many clients to the T Project. She even recently received inquiries from the prison system about two women who’ll need housing, and she hopes to help them. “If you come out from prison, no social services and no shelter will help you, especially if your gender marker is still male.”
Homeless shelters in Singapore routinely place transgender women in the male population, and she described to me how dangerous and horrifying that experience can be, fraught with potential violence and sexual assault. As she stated “No one wants to go to a male shelter. You know what happens when the lights go out.”
While the T Project had to institute some basic rules to keep clients safe and obey Singapore law, June prefers a hands-off approach. She doesn’t visit the shelter often for fear of being seen as “mothering” her clients: “Transgender people far too often are told by society who they should be.” Her experience is that clients are already highly motivated to take steps to become independent and take charge of their lives, as “no one ultimately wants to live in a shelter.” She gave me the example of a woman who just recently got a job offer, and the first thing she did to celebrate was to clean the shared kitchen. June allows her clients to stay in the shelter for up to 6 months even if they’ve found work, because it allows clients to save money for a security deposit or down payment on an apartment.
Transgender Employment Discrimination and Sex Work
The first time during the interview I asked June if the T Project does anything to help their clients get jobs, and she rebuked me by saying “it’s a very privileged white thing to say ‘why don’t they get a job,’ there’s so many other obstacles first.” I was immediately humbled, and it made me reflect on my own privilege. As June explained, you can’t just push someone into a job before they feel safe, secure, and supported in other ways, or they’ll not be able to keep that job. That said, she did eventually open up a bit more about the topic of employment, especially to discuss how she’s seen the employment landscape shift for transgender women since she came out 30 years ago.
When June first came out, sex work was practically the only option for income as a transgender woman: “Even [though I had] very supportive family, I entered the sex industry because it was a norm for us.” The sex industry provided a supportive community for her, which didn’t really exist elsewhere, and it was the mentorship of other transgender sex workers that helped her become a “full fledged” transgender woman. Regarding the work itself though, June doesn’t glamorize it, and finds humor in looking back on her twenty years as a sex worker: “Sex work is a very mundane and repetitive career. It’s overrated. After the first 3 months I’d seen everything…And after one year, I was bored.”
June is glad that “now this generation has so many more opportunities,” although she repeatedly emphasized during our interview that she doesn’t judge or reject any clients who engage in sex work. She’s incredibly optimistic that once transgender women develop confidence in themselves and have basic support, they can find employment in other careers if they want to: “Their capabilities, their talents are buried…Though employers sometimes do see our gender identity first before our capabilities, I think…that is very minimal.” She related to me many success stories of transgender women who, thanks to seeking out education opportunities, are now “counselors, insurance agents, social workers, [and] Kindergarten teachers” working in Singapore, as well a PhD student now researching facial recognition software in the USA. June also recently attended the Economist’s 2019 Pride and Prejudice conference in Hong Kong to speak with business leaders about the experiences of the Singapore transgender community.
Employment discrimination against transgender people is still widespread in Singapore, according to a recent study on transgender job applicants by the Asia Pacific Transgender Network. This study, Denied Work, tested employers’ responses to 1200 job applications sent to 600 different jobs in three different job sectors in Singapore. Half the applications were made to appear to come from cisgender applicants, and the other half from transgender applicants with the same level of education and experience. The differences in employer’s responses were stark: cisgender applicants received 81.5% more positive responses than transgender applicants. Discrimination was even worse in careers requiring higher education levels. For applications to jobs in the business administration sector, 31 cisgender applicants were called back for an interview, as opposed to only 14 equally qualified transgender applicants called back for an interview.
Building More Awareness of the Singapore Transgender Community
The T Project is doing something to address the lack of awareness and acceptance of transgender issues in Singapore. Recently they’ve begun corporate sensitivity trainings on basic transgender competence in the workplace, covering everything from pronouns to safe bathroom access. The T Project also has begun working with social workers/counselors who serve the Singapore transgender community, including the Singapore LGBTQ organization Ooogachaga, to improve their ability to compassionately and competently address key transgender issues.
One very common issue in both fields is the lack of understanding of the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. Often transgender women are misunderstood as being feminine gay men, and transgender men are even less visible in society and widely misunderstood as lesbians. I asked June specifically if there were transgender people who were out and visible as being queer, and she explained that most members of the Singapore transgender community try very hard to appear as heteronormative as possible to gain acceptance. But she was aware of transgender men who used the gay dating app Grindr, and also stated she personally knew at least “five to ten transgender lesbians” including one staying in her shelter. June also added that she herself was open to being with someone of any gender.
The interview concluded with June showing me a few items on display in the Alicia Community Centre from a museum exhibit on Singapore’s transgender history that the T Project had curated. One item was a volleyball from one of my favorite movies, Iron Ladies, a film about Thailand’s transgender and gay volleyball team which won the national championship in 1996. The volleyball was signed by the movie’s director Yongyoot Thongkongtoon and the actor Kokkorn Benjathikoon when Iron Ladies was screened at the 30th Annual Singapore International Film Festival. The volleyball was one more example of how many in the Singapore transgender community find inspiration in Thailand’s transgender community.
June’s favorite item though seemed to be a movie poster from the film Saint Jack, one of the first Hollywood films to feature transgender woman actresses, all of whom were Singaporean, and famously included a transgender nude scene. The oddest item on display? A Muslim transgender woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery donated a preserved portion of her penis that had been removed. As June explained, the donor wanted to observe Islamic tradition and be buried “whole,” so the organ was on temporary loan until her funeral.
I left feeling incredibly inspired by June and what she had managed to create. As we spoke for close to three hours, there was a significant amount of conversation I couldn’t cover here, and I plan to delve more into the Singapore transgender community in the future. Currently though I’m now in Vietnam collecting new stories for the blog which I plan to publish soon!
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