Sass Rogando Sasot
Love Advocate
By Kiki Tan
PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 2009

“I got involved, and am still involved, in transgender (TG) activism and advocacy because of love.”

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That, says Sass Rogando Sasot, is how she, well, got involved in GLBTQIA advocacy.

“My high school life was laced by intense doubt about everything handed to me by culture and tradition. I questioned the way things are. Blind conformity suffocated me.”

"Everyone wanted to offer an explanation why my boyfriend fell in love with me: Was he insane? Or was he a homosexual? My boyfriend and I even had an awkward conversation about this, with me asking him: ‘Do you like me because I’m a boy?’  He said no. For him and for me, he was just a boy falling in love and having a relationship with a girl." Sass Rogando Sasot

In 1999, as a fourth year high school student, “gender gender politics aroused my interest,” says Sass, who, at that time, had a relationship “with one of my classmates, (which) sparked a scandal in my school, an exclusive Roman Catholic school for boys. Everyone wanted to offer an explanation why my boyfriend fell in love with me: Was he insane? Or was he a homosexual? My boyfriend and I even had an awkward conversation about this, with me asking him: ‘Do you like me because I’m a boy?’  He said no. For him and for me, he was just a boy falling in love and having a relationship with a girl. But, ultimately, it was a non-issue for us. After all, it wasn’t gender identity nor sexual orientation that sparked the love we felt and shared with each other. Love, after all, is genderless, hence has no sexual orientation.”

Sass, of course, recognizes “that strange tenacity to force other people to define themselves so that we can bear the indefinability and immensity of life and love by turning them into spectacles of convenient labels,” she says.  It was, after all, this tendency to define, i.e. in the “way people treated my boyfriend” that made Sass “so concerned to define my gender. This quest for definition led me to know and understand transsexualism (TS).”

GROWING PAINS

Sass’ earliest exposures to TS were through the Internet – understandably predominated by Western literature, so that “at an early age of 17, my brain devoured everything about transsexual issues. I read, through the website of symposion.com, the e-book version of Harry Benjamin’s seminal book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. I related so much to his description of transsexualism. From that moment, I considered myself as a transsexual girl,” she says.

Male-to-female transsexualism was, by the way, the subject of Sass’ term paper in her English class (then).

After self-identifying as a TS, Sass came out to her mother through a letter – and it would become one of the most painful decision she is to do in life.

“Through a letter, I told her that I was not gay, that I was a transsexual, that I wanted to start taking hormones, and live full time as a woman. It was the first time I opened up to a family member,” Sass says.

Perhaps she should have anticipated the usual (negative) reaction, but “I thought she would be supportive. I was wrong. It alarmed her. She had my hair, which was below my chin (then), cut so incredibly short. She insisted that I am not a girl but a boy because I have a penis. And that instead of reading the stuff I was reading, I should start reading those that would forge a male identity in me. She advised me to start thinking ‘I’m a boy’ and nothing else. She assured me that there is nothing going to happen in my life if I insist on what I like and that my talent and intelligence would just waste away because society will never accept people like me. To cap it all, she threatened that she would not pay my college education if I would continue my delusion.’”

It was this reaction from a loved one that developed in Sass internalized transphobia – with her initial “acceptance that perhaps my mother was right,” especially since she had no one to turn to for support, so she came to think, too, that “There’s nothing good that was going to happen to me if I would insist on what I said I am: I would just end up as society’s entertainment. To go on existing like what she insisted me to be, which is as a man, and to live as what I felt myself to be, which is as a woman, were no different from being dead.”

Unhappy with her situation, and the seeming futility of living, Sass attempted suicide in December 2000.

PURPOSE DRIVEN

After Sass’ suicide attempt, “I lived with a deep sense of purpose: I would help initiate a transgender movement in the Philippines, and I’d like to become part of a group that would help initiate change in our society. I want a society that would cherish, value, and respect the flourishing of one’s individuality. My 20th century ended with this purpose flickering inside of me, driving me to go and explore the world,” she says.

That was after EDSA 2 (which saw the removal from the Office of the Presidency of Joseph Ejercito Estrada), sometime in January 2001, when Sass – after writing to volunteer herself to, among others, Amnesty International-Philippines and the Rationalist Humanist Society of the Philippines.  The latter allowed her to meet “a group of free thinkers, passionate individuals, mostly from a generation senior than mine, who would like to propel secularism in the Philippines.”

Among the people Sass met were “Poch Suzara, a staunch atheist and humanist; and Margarita Ventinalla-Hamada, founder of Harvent School, a school in Pangasinan (a province in the Philippines) which doesn’t use grades and considers its students as individuals rather than a group of people receiving indoctrination”; and Aleksi Gumela, who “shared the same dance that I was dancing – a gay guy, an anarchist, an atheist, a freethinker, a bohemian, a philosopher, an artist, a creature of the counterculture.  Aleksi shared the same zest for exploring life beyond tradition and conventions that was flickering in me,” Sass says.

It was Aleksi who introduced Sass to the Luneta University – a gathering of free-spirited radicals (meeting at the Chess Plaza), “self-styled rebels with a lot of cause,” who   gathered for “discussions on philosophical questions: from art, to boredom, to god, to stupidity. We nurtured each other’s intellectual development.

The homeless, the vagabonds, and sidewalk vendors listened to our conversations. We wanted freedom from the fangs of hierarchy. We believed in no gods, in no masters, in personal liberation, in individuality, in diversity, in mutualism, in a voluntary society. We held Food Not Bombs sessions. We marched in anti-globalization rallies. But along our seriousness, we had our share of fun and deep belly laughter.  It was our la vie boheme!”

It was this partnership with Aleksi that paved the way for the formation of the Luneta Freedom Collective (LFC), a counterculture performance art group that performed in “artsy” bars, in a zine convention, in an underground punk concert, in protest rallies, in a gathering of filmmakers in a full moon’s night, in the park, in schools – and it was this that allowed Sass to showcase Ayoko sa mundo nyo (I don’t want to be in your world), a monologue she wrote about the struggle for personal gender and sexual liberation.

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