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'Yes, I Can': University-backed program gives transpeople leg up in job market
Started in August 2017, the Yes! I Can program aims to empower transgender people, sex workers and street children in the job market.
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Participants raise a rainbow flag in a march to commemorate International Women's Day in Jakarta on March 8, 2019. (JP/Seto Wardhana)
D
ecember 2018 is the most memorable time for 32-year-old Iyet Kartikasari. It was the month she was crowned Miss Prada Indonesia, one of Jakarta’s beauty pageants for transgender people.
She became the sixth winner of the annual contest first held in 2013 by the Jakarta Transgender Community (KWJ).
“I’ve always wanted to become a model,” she told The Jakarta Post recently.
Originally from Jambi, Iyet moved to Jakarta in 2011 in a bid to pursue her dream amid pressure from her family that she said was pretty conservative about gender norms. Although lauding her family for accepting her for who she is, she recalled times when her family demanded she become ‘a real man’.
It was only when she joined a program called “Yes! I Can” in 2017, which introduced her to fellow transgender women, that she opened her eyes to violence against transgender people in Indonesia.
“I met fellow transgender people whose lives were incomparable to mine. Most of them had been kicked out of their houses and shunned by their families. If those things had happened to me, I am not sure what I would have done to myself,” she said.
Iyet is one 10 recipients of scholarship grants for professional training courses organized by the HIV/Aids Research Center (PPH) of Atma Jaya University in Jakarta.
