CAVITEÑA

Through self-portraiture, CAVITEÑA interrogates the politics of visibility for the transgender Filipina body and maps the negotiation between provincial origins and urban self-determination, between patriarchal condemnation and the insistence on return.

I made these images because I needed proof that I existed.

I grew up in Cavite Province, in the Philippines, amidst its rural greenery and open pastures. I am the eldest child of a farmer and a homemaker. The land was quiet and expansive, and so was the self I was expected to become: the one who would carry the burden of moving the family forward. But even then, something in me already knew that I was different. I saw it in the way I moved when no one was watching. I recognized it in the names I gave myself in private. I felt it in a longing that had no language yet.

Metro Manila gave me that language, and with it, the idea that transitioning was possible, that I was not alone in wanting it. But transitioning itself was not acceptance. I spent years avoiding myself in mirrors. I developed a severe aversion to my own self-image, a form of facial dysmorphia. I made myself smaller to steer clear of unwanted attention. I chased a womanhood built from other people's definitions. I was becoming, but I was also disappearing.

This work is the answer to that disappearing. Spanning the rural landscapes of the province and the streets and private spaces of the city, it is my confrontation with every space my body has had to learn to exist in. In a conservative culture where womanhood is defined by family, faith, and society, I ask what it means to be seen as a trans Filipina woman, and whether that gaze has ever truly been mine.

It is also a mediation: between the land that formed me and the woman I have become, between the anguish held in that soil and the love I am still learning to extend to it. To place my body back into these landscapes on my own terms is to ask what it means to belong somewhere that did not know how to hold me.

CAVITEÑA, the title itself a feminine marker claimed as identity, bridges my transness and my upbringing. It is a reconciliation between the land that shaped me and the child who grew up running through those fields: the girl quietly blossoming underneath, and the boy the world insisted on seeing. The woman I am today has returned not as a failure, not as a ghost, but as myself, finally, fully, in the frame.

This project was supported by Sachet Projects. Thank you to Ginoe Ojoy and Celso Huelgas Jr.