A thesis submitted in patial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Gender and Development Studies

Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2026

This study examines how transfeminism is articulated and embodied in the everyday lives of Filipino trans women. It positions narratives from the Global South as sites of knowledge production. Drawing on sixteen in-depth life interviews, the research employs critical narrative analysis to explore how participants engage with dominant meanings of (trans)womanhood, enact practices of everyday resistance, support, and world-making, and envision the future of trans communities amidst marginalization. The study foregrounds everyday life as a terrain where gender and power is continuously produced, contested, and reshaped. The findings advance four key arguments. First, trans womanhood emerges as a contested and relational process shaped through overlapping frameworks of language, beauty, religion, and desire. Participants do not simply reproduce or reject dominant norms but actively redefine them, suggesting that negotiating womanhood itself constitutes a transfeminist practice. Second, everyday resistance operates through mundane and relational practices{u2014}discursive, embodied, biomedical, spatial, and relational{u2014}that both navigate marginalization and generate alternative possibilities for living. Third, support functions not only as a mechanism for survival but as a form of world-making, as informal care networks, kinship, and mutual aid sustain trans life beyond exclusionary institutions. Fourth, participants articulate trans futures through situated imaginaries of recognition, belonging, and collective struggle that emerge from everyday practices of survival, resistance, and support. By grounding transfeminism in lived experience, the study advances an alternative transfeminist lens that centers relationality, embodiment, and everyday resistance. It contributes to feminist and trans scholarship by demonstrating how marginalized lives generate situated knowledge that challenge dominant frameworks and expand the understandings of everyday resistance, support, and political possibility in the Global South.