Erasing the margins
Meet Chu Thanh Ha, a 33-year-old transgender man in Vietnam who has spent the last decade advocating for legal reform to increase the visibility and participation of the transgender community in his country.
Referring to himself as "Ha," which means "river" in Vietnamese, he understood from a young age what it meant to be trapped in the wrong body. Growing up, he dreaded wearing a female uniform to school, and simple activities like using the toilet became a nightmare. He suffered physical and emotional bullying and spent much of his youth feeling “totally left behind and ashamed.”
During college, he joined groups like Oxfam and used advocacy as a way of finding himself and connecting with other like-minded people. After working for three years in different organisations, Ha applied to work in Oxfam’s LGBT department to push for legal reform at a time when Vietnam was “boiling” for changes to transgender laws.
Rather than working against them, Ha realised that policymakers could be his greatest allies, and that a legal framework was the key to advancing his broader mission. In 2015, Vietnam passed landmark gender recognition legislation, which allowed people who had undergone gender-affirming surgery to register under their new gender. Despite the victory, the law failed to protect those in Ha’s community who couldn’t afford or access surgery.
In 2018, Ha established IT'S T TIME to further the civil rights of the 480,000 transgender people in Vietnam. Since then, his organisation has partnered with the Ministry of Health, collecting personal stories as part of community-led monitoring research to help push through the Gender Affirmation Bill, which will enable people to recognise their gender whether they choose to have surgery or not.
Throughout my years working as an activist, I have heard people referring to our community as vulnerable, underrepresented, and marginalized – that we are at the edge of society with minimal legal protection. I want to change that. I want to erase the margins, extend the legal framework, and bring equality to us all.
