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TIA: It stands for Trans in Action Belize. It’s a group that advocates for the trans community whether it be Transgender, transsexual, transvestite, all groups of people who have different experiences, but all want the same thing: to be respected and afforded the same rights and basic privileges like everyone else. Today TIA met at the Radisson to present a documentation known CEDOSTALC which means Center of Documentation and Trans situation in Latin American and the Caribbean. The Co-founder of TIA told us more about this report and how it fits into their mandate as a group.

Zahnia Canul - Co-Founder, Trans in Action Belize
"It has been 3 years that we partnered with RED LACTRANS. It is a regional network of Trans organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean so we started a project which we are presenting right now CEDOSTALC (Center of Documentation and Trans situation in Latin American and the Caribbean where we started to take documentations of the Trans violations here in Belize, CEDOSTALC has allowed us to take more ownership of the violations where we can started our own documentation and reporting and today we are reporting on these cases where we see more violations when it comes to education, violations on streets, crime, hate, hate speech, we are talking about access to health care. This morning we also had that conversation with our members where we see how we can start accessing our health care facilities because we see that there has been an increase in the population when it comes to HIV/AIDS infections. So for us we have started to sensitize the hearth care facilities because of the main issues that we have is the girls coming in to access these institutions, because of stigma and discrimination, there is a lot of it, we find that we would rather auto-medicate rather than coming into the facilities.â€￾

Now while there are these differences between Transgender and Transsexual people, there is also a difference between trans and gays. Canul told us more.

Zahnia Canul
"When we speak about people of trans experience we are talking about something that is more mental and how you perceive yourself than your biological make up. We found the need to formulate our own organization because there is still a lack of education when it comes to gender and gender identity and gender construct because not every transgender person wants to do the transition or go the extra mile as people say we needed to differ ourselves from men who have sex with men we don’t see ourselves like that, we don’t live that lifestyle and we still have certain characteristics in our daily lives that differs from the LGBT community. When it comes to someone transitioning there is a lot that comes with transitioning, you have the psychoactive response how your family responds to you, all that is a different process than someone saying well I am gay."

TIA was established in 2014. TIA is also partnering with the Ministry of Education to create health packages for trans people especially as it relates to providing hormones and other injections for their transition.