Expanding the spectrum: A trans woman’s story in the sciences

Scientia
Scientia
Published in
8 min readMar 31, 2020

Feature | by Pauline Alyanna Lontok, John Rafael Ambag, & JL Maderazo

Graphics by Hanz Salvacion

Pursuing a career in the sciences is difficult especially in a country where support in science and technology is lacking. In a heteronormative and misogynistic society, it’s an entirely different story for women, even more so for trans women. Rey Salinas tells us how one can pursue a science career as she faced one constant challenge: being different.

No one to follow

Most scientists started pursuing science to satisfy their curiosity, to be enthusiastic junkies teeming with countless questions. Meanwhile, the only thing Rey Salinas knew was she wanted to be someone who could help people someday. “My first dream in life, really, was to be a doctor ’cause so many of my family members are getting sick, and I just wanted to help them,” she said.

Today, she follows her initial goal of helping people as she pursues a different career as a molecular biologist. This profession cannot be any further from her initial notions of a scientist at a young age. “I would probably just think of an astronaut, or … someone stepping on the moon. That was how I would envision, or visualize the word ‘scientist’ at that age,” she added.

For a cisgendered straight white male, one can easily identify famous scientists such as Einstein and Newton. Having a role model not only allows a child to visualize where they’ll be in the future, but also allows them to gauge the environment where they will be working. In spite of being constantly belittled in the sciences, cisgendered women had Marie Curie as a symbol that they can, in fact, achieve even more than the typical male scientist.

As a trans woman scientist, Rey Salinas had no role model. Unlike others, she was forced to carve her own path without having other scientists to look up to. This is already a challenge for anyone in the Philippines, with only 189 scientists per million. This is only approximately half of the ideal number according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which stands at 380 scientists per million. Being a trans woman magnifies this even further. “I never saw any queer scientists growing up. I barely saw any scientist…let alone an LGBT one,” she said.

Being aware of this challenge that she faced, Rey seeks to be that model scientist that she was yearning for during her childhood. She added: “That’s one of the things I ended up realizing … I may not have had anyone open the door for me, but I could be that person opening the door for others like me.”

Coming out

Not being able to fully express herself in her growing years prompted her to accept that change is necessary during her undergraduate years. “[There’s] a point in our lives that we decide that … we don’t care what people think, we’re going to be our true authentic self. And that included me channeling everything in my schoolwork and my thesis and just saying, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to work hard for everything, and I’m going to be who I really am inside,’ ” she exclaims.

Rey Salinas during the CNN round-table discussion on the lives of transgender women in the Philippines. Photo by JL Javier

However, pushing for drastic changes is never easy. For Rey, her gender dysphoria became a hindrance in her studies. It took a toll on her mental health. She confessed to having developed unhealthy coping mechanisms to the point that she almost got kicked out from her program. During such times, she depended on her friends and teachers to find the strength to labor through another day. Rey was lucky enough to have a thesis adviser, Dr. Neil Andrew Bascos, who always believed in her. She shares, “He knew about the things I was going through. He knew that my problems were not intellectual … [that] they were emotional, and he knew that if I were allowed to blossom [just] like everyone else, then I could deliver, and I proved that by working extremely hard on my thesis.”

Welcome to the sciences

As a third-year undergraduate student at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (NIMBB) at UP Diliman, Rey independently developed the framework for her thesis, titled Investigating the Effect of Cancer-Related Mutations on the Structure and Function of Integrin αVβ3 Heterodimers through Molecular Dynamics Simulations. The study explored the ability of cancer cells to spread from one body organ to another by looking at mutations affecting cell receptors that promote stable interaction between cells and the matrix that surrounds them . Her work was later accepted for abstract presentation in several conferences including the 62nd Annual Meeting for the Biophysical Society and was ultimately published in the Biophysical Journal.

After graduating from her program, Rey refocused her efforts from cancer research to autism research. Currently, she is working for the Philippine-California Advanced Research Institutes (PCARI) to develop the first diagnostic laboratory for Fragile X syndrome. She also became the youngest scholar for the International Training Program in Neurodevelopmental Disorders (ITPND) in the University of California Davis. Here, she worked together with researchers from all across the globe to research on and screen for Fragile X Syndrome in the under-served communities in Colombia.

Her shift from cancer research to autism research goes back to her initial goal of being a person who could help. “Yeah, that’s a big leap. … I found it difficult to have to accept that … let’s say that I discovered some treatment for cancer. In the first place, where is this treatment going to go? It’s just going to be in the pockets of the wealthy. It’s just going to be something that’s not even accessible to the vast majority of people who need it. And it felt like a lot of the research that I was doing was disconnected from actual people … Part of the reason [that] I transitioned to autism research is, I wanted to be able to interact with actual patients,” she said. This cannot be further from the truth. The 2016 Cancer Council reports that the recent increase in investment in cancer research was followed by an increase in the overall survival rate for cancer patients. However, this masks the class struggle that also persists in treatment. Patients coming from poorer areas suffer from lower survival rates compared to patients from wealthier areas. In a span of four years from 2012 to 2016, mortality rates for cervical cancer in the poorest countries is twice as great compared to mortality rates from the most affluent nations. The same trend also follows for lung and liver cancer in male patients, wherein the poorest countries have mortality rates greater than 40 percent compared to those of their wealthier counterparts.

Call for acceptance

As Rey came into terms with her identity, the journey shifted from going inward to outward. She started new efforts for helping people like her who are currently facing either an identity crisis or constant discrimination. Her lack of voice, as it may seem, was only a lack of a proper platform. Rey exclaims, “… when I found Bahaghari, that was when I realized that I could speak out, that I could organize, and that I could lead just like anyone.” Rey is the incumbent spokesperson for Bahaghari Metro Manila.

Choosing Bahaghari as her platform got the gears turning for Rey, who not only advocates for the rights of the LGBTQ+, but also acts on other pressing matters that affect the rest of the Filipinos. “I chose Bahaghari … because it recognizes that LGBT struggles are not divorced from the struggles being faced by the rest of society, … we fight for LGBT rights, but we also fight for the rights of working-class Filipinos, we fight for the rights of farmers, we fight for the rights of the urban poor, we fight for the rights of all the marginalized sectors of society. There will never be liberation for the LGBT unless there’s liberation for everyone,” she said. For Bahaghari, no one is free until all of us are free.

It will never be an easy transition from one version of society to another. Rey believes that the greatest roadblock to the liberation of trans women in the Philippines boils down to class struggle. Acknowledging that the discrimination faced by trans women exists as a spectrum is the first step. “We actually have trans people who are successful. But [if] you look at who these trans people are, these are often people from political dynasties, these are trans people who are wealthy, these are trans people who have the economic privilege to be who they wanna be despite the kind of society that we have,” she said. Rey adds, “The people who are economically privileged within our community are people who are obviously not immune, but are shielded from the greatest forms of discrimination in our country … Jennifer Laude was a trans woman who was murdered by a US soldier … she was a sex worker because in military bases, such as in Olongapo, it is documented that there are greater rates of prostitution, and greater rates of poverty. When we talk about the LGBT who are farmers, LGBT who are workers, they not only experience discrimination by virtue of their gender identity, by virtue of being trans, or by virtue of being LGBT, they are also held back by the fact that they are poor.”

Solving this roadblock will require more than just integrating trans women to typical activities associated with women such as beauty pageants. Rey believes that although the inclusion of trans women in such events is welcome, it limits the scope of who receives such acceptance from society. “They also need to push for larger and more [systematic] progress on the acceptance of trans women … This means the liberation of all trans women: from workers, to farmers, to urban poor trans women. This means trans women not just being valued for being conventionally attractive, but also trans women being valued for what they can offer across all aspects of society. So, if we talk about true progress, true progress is when we finally see that trans women could be pioneers, leaders, and revolutionaries too,” she says.

Longing for change

Embodying her vision for all trans women, Rey rallies her fellow scientists to not sit back and be idle, and instead remember why they do science in the first place. “Our role [as scientists] does not just end at the lab or at the clinic. We are not supposed to be people who are isolated, or people in an ivory tower separated from the rest of society … scientific advancements that are meant to be in service of mankind have always been hijacked into serving the interests of the ruling class … I think that it’s time that we as scientists stand up and say ‘We’re not going to live with a system that prioritizes profits over people. We’re not going to live with a system where the people we’re supposed to be serving are the last people that we’re thinking about when we’re facing crises or calamities,” she says.

At the end of the day, Rey goes back to her initial goal: to help those in need.

“I will never stop being a scientist. I’ve always been a scientist at heart. My message to my fellow scientists is that we need to stand up, and make science serve the people. The next big step in science is not some magical drug, it is not some magical invention, [but] it is the one that we take on the streets as we demand for our voices to be heard.”

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Scientia
Scientia

Published in Scientia

The official student publication of the College of Science, UP Diliman.

Scientia
Scientia

Written by Scientia

The official student publication of the College of Science, UP Diliman.

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