By submitting this form, I agree to these terms and conditions. I talk to the sex workers there and assist them with any family, social, or health problems they may have. I also train community leaders who are in the sex work industryβpeople who are interested in helping their peers and better the lives that they lead. Together with my staff, I create and initiate programmes for these leaders in the hopes that they will go back to their communities and inspire other sex workers they might come to know.
In , I came up with the Human Rights Defender Programme ; a session programme aimed at empowering sex workers by equipping them with relevant skills to aid others in their community. They also learnt counselling skills from the kind folks at the Social Service Institute , and suicide intervention from Oogachaga.
In my earlier days of activism, I was keen to work and partner with sex workers in Singapore. In my conversations with them, I knew I had to be mindful not to come across as wanting to change their lives or show them how to live. I made a conscious effort to understand what the community needed and what my role was in the grand scheme of thingsβor if my presence was even necessary in the first place.
Increasingly, I became very close to the local transgender community because a disproportionately large percentage of Singaporean sex workers are transgender. The rapport I have with them made me very vocal about transgender issuesβto the point where people tend to confuse Project X with The T Project. We are still a group focused on research and cultivating best established international practices. At the same time, we have always been at the forefront of issues facing the local transgender community and figuring out how best to help them with the resources that we have.
Of course, when I was younger, it was not something that I immediately recognised or acknowledged. I was an extremely sheltered student who met her first Malay friend only in Junior College. It was a horrible, traumatic part of my education, with no application at all to my post-university life. I continued studying economics on protest at Warwick University after my dad refused to allow me to enrol in the theatre programme that had already accepted me. I should have listened more intently during class because now, nothing makes sense to me [ laughs ].
