Me Love You No More: The Killing of Jennifer Laude, TransPinay

On September 13, 2020, at precisely 9:15 am, US Marine Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton flew out of the Philippines, freed from his ten-year jail sentence by a full pardon from Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines. He had not been treated fairly, the president said in justifying the pardon. Such a pedestrian phrase nullified the significance of Jennifer Laude’s life, the one year of intense public agitation by thousands of Filipinos to bring her killer to justice, and the meaning of finally getting a member of the US military to a Philippine court. It even nullified donations Duterte himself made to the Laude family. But most of all, it canceled Ganda — “Beauty,” as Ms. Laude’s family called her.

These are the bare facts of the incident: On October 11, 2014, Ms. Laude joined her friend Barbie at a disco bar to trawl for clients in the red-light district of Olongapo, the former site of one of the two largest overseas US military bases. The air here always carried a faint scent of putrefaction. Here, they met “a white foreigner.” An agreement was reached, and while Barbie went to another room with a different client, Ms. Laude and Cpl. Pemberton retired to Room #1 of the Celzone Lodge. Thirty minutes later, the Marine exited the hotel. The hotel staff would find Jennifer Laude, 26, dead — half-naked, her head submerged in the water of a toilet bowl. An autopsy determined she had been strangled and drowned.

The Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between the US and the Philippines kicked in immediately (a nine-page document, compared to the 37-page VFA between Germany and the US, with a large part covering the conduct of US military personnel among Germany’s civilian population). The most significant provisions concerned jurisdiction over the accused and the crime. Per the VFA, while jurisdiction over the crime would be with Philippine courts, the US military would maintain jurisdiction over its accused personnel. Also, the US military would make the accused available for only one year from the date of the crime for investigation and trial. The initial slow-motion investigation and case preparation for the Laude killing almost drove social justice movements into hysteria.

The irony is that Duterte himself, in February of this year, terminated the VFA ostensibly for the “insult” of the US canceling the visa of his close comrade-in-arms Bato del Rosario, former chief of the national police and now a senator. But by June, he was reversing his own decision. The speculation is that both the pardon of Cpl. Pemberton and the reinstatement of the VFA were the results of a phone conversation between Presidents Duterte and Trump. However, both Pemberton’s lawyer and the US ambassador to the Philippines were surprised by the pardon, which occurred in the middle of hearings on the Marine’s request for an early release based on “good conduct.” State prosecutors and the Laude family lawyer had opposed the petition, which would have released the Marine after serving less than half of his ten-year sentence.

President Duterte is known for his often arbitrary and gratuitous decisions based on either grudges or gratitude amid a geopolitical situation that grows more complicated each day.

Extraterritorial power over the body

Jennifer Laude’s killing triggered debates for the year between the crime and the sentence; the presidential pardon inspired another surge of opinions. Public reaction has been both macro and micro. To Attorney Virginia Lacsa Suarez, the lawyer for the Laude family, the pardon was revolting, “a grave injustice to the Philippine people” and “a travesty of Philippine sovereignty and democracy.” For so many of the public, it was strictly micro — i.e., Jennifer should have revealed she was a trans woman.

When Pemberton used “trans panic” as his defense, Judge Roline Jinez Jabalde accepted it and lowered the charge from murder to homicide, saying that the Marine acted “out of passion and obfuscation.” In Olongapo City itself, with the US Navy canceling all shore leaves while the trial was ongoing, operators of bars and nightclubs and the ubiquitous street pimps blamed Ms. Laude for loss of business — not the Marine who killed her. Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority Chair Roberto Garcia said businesses in the free port and Olongapo City lost $3.5 million in potential revenue during the shore leave cancellation.

The unasked question in all the sound and fury was why a category of people even had to be in the sex trade. Why was there one in the first place when, historically — from 30,000 BCE to the 20th century — there was none? And how, in the noticeably short span of a hundred years of contact with the US, had the sex trade become so accepted that 800,000 people engage in it, nearly one percent of the Philippine population?

The remarkable “grooming” of an entire nation into monetizing the flesh began in 1900, when US control of the archipelago was barely consolidated. Indeed, “grooming” was a tactic of consolidation. The US war in the Philippines had officers fresh from wars against Native Americans; perhaps they understood the Cherokee proverb: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished.”

Filipino revolutionary guerrillas were still fighting the Occupation when US military authorities started issuing memos on protecting the health of US troops through the purported regulation of prostitution. “Regulation” meant subjecting the women to medical check-ups for STDs even though the US army had an outstanding record for the diseases. Indeed, military records showed 100,000 cases of gonorrhea in the Union Army during the Civil War. STDs were so unknown to the Pacific islands before their conquest by the West that, to this day, venereal diseases are known locally by their foreign names. Much as the word for a prostitute has remained the four-letter Spanish one, commercial sex being beyond the islanders’ imagination before colonialism.

Brothel-keeping was part and parcel of dominion-building for the US military. In one instance, the US military used it to “minimize” negative contacts between Muslim women and US troops in Jolo, Mindanao. Douglas MacArthur, the American general known best for his role commanding the Southwest Pacific in World War II, himself kept a mestiza mistress — Isabel Rosario Cooper, an actress who made film history with the country’s first-ever on-screen kiss when she was but 12 years old. She was 16 years old when she became MacArthur’s mistress; he was 50. Leap a hundred years — UNICEF finds the Philippines the top source of child sexual abuse film and digital pornography.

Parenthetically, it was during this period when US colonial authorities also started replacing the hitherto predominantly male live-in household servants with women. A hundred years later, and the Filipina is a domestic worker in 193 countries.

All this was but a prelude: The US war in Vietnam would be the main event, bringing 10,000 GIs to the Philippines per day seeking sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. “Rest and recuperation” grew into a multi-million dollar business in the cities of Olongapo (adjoining Subic Naval Base) and Angeles (adjoining Clark Air Base), creating a new political principalia. Thousands of women arrived or were taken from rural areas to become a commodity. Thousands of young men also arrived to form the infrastructure of the sex trade – pimping, controlling, and managing the women. And hundreds of the other marginalized genders came to work at beauty parlors, massage parlors, and retail shops. As in the 1900s, only the women had to undergo regular check-ups at clinics funded by US money. The first recorded cases of HIV occurred here; it has now become a virtual epidemic, afflicting even ten-year-old boys.

Class, race, and gender in a sexual embrace

By the time the US-Philippine bases agreement ended in 1991, the sex trade had metastasized into an integral part of the global economy as a major tourist attraction and an exporter of “commodity.” As with the rest of Southeast Asia, men comprised 80 percent of tourists as the sex trade repurposed itself for the neoliberal global market. The cultural warping was swift and breathtaking. Even in Manila’s posh districts, one would often see Westerners with a girl tucked under each arm. What was bought and sold and exported became diversified as the sex trade established the maxim that those who could not sell their labor power had to sell their orifices. That included “ladyboys” and children.

In the documentary film “Call Her Ganda,” about Ms. Laude’s case, Naomi Fontanos, a pioneer advocate and organizer for trans rights, said that the transgender movement “has to work to eradicate the notion that you need to sell your body in order to survive.” These are brave words, indeed. In a country marked by steep class divisions, trans women are among the most discriminated against, marginalized, and stigmatized. Groups of them are used for entertainment at town fiestas, in mock beauty pageants based on self-denigration. Routinely under threat of violence, many strive for tolerance by finding themselves a niche of “productivity” where they can earn a living, provide for family members, and have even a sliver of hope for normalcy. As with the born-female in the trade, hope means a foreigner who will take the imposed-upon into a social milieu of acceptance — because the foreigner is still the all-powerful Empire.

Are other doors to becoming a productive member of society that closed? In pre-Dominion times (i.e., before the West docked on the island shores) five or more genders based on their social functions were accepted without hostility. But the current macho culture has reduced validation to the cash nexus. A favorite refrain of Duterte’s supporters is “ano ang ambag mo?” (“What is your contribution?”) — to the government, to society, to family? As if existence is not a miracle enough. The beki (gay or trans) must make up for his/her/their person by providing for lover, family, and friends. “Our bodies are not acceptable,” Ms. Fontanos says in the film. “Our identities are not acceptable. We've been forced to be part of niche industries like the beauty industry or the sex industry.”

It took a hundred years for Jennifer Laude, transPinay*, and Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton to meet at the corner of despair and hope on October 11, 2014. While the bases have gone, the sex trade the US military created remains its bastion. It is still an arm of Empire, the streets where it takes place Occupied Territory, and the sex tourist having all the rights of his desires, including violence. How Pemberton must have looked to Jennifer: a foreigner, a white man, a military man, a sex tourist. He was Empire. He used all those powers. The president of the Philippines confirmed his right to do so.

*TransPinay refers to the preferred term by trans women of Filipino lineage.


Ninotchka Rosca is a Philippine-born writer. She works with the feminist organization AF3IRM.