Last week popular Filipino actor/singer Aiza Seguerra came out as a transgender man on the talk show Aquino & Abunda Tonight. "It answered a lot of questions," he said to host Kris Aquino before going on to explain the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity.
Gender identity is your own internal personal sense of being a man or a woman (or as someone outside of that gender binary), while sexual orientation describes a person's enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to another person (for example: straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual). Transgender people may be straight, lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
Seguerra, now 31, rose to fame as a child and appeared in over 30 Filipino films and TV series before he was an adult. He turned to music in his late teens and began a successful crossover career as a pop singer and guitarist. Segueera and his fiancé, model Liza Diño, plan to travel to the U.S. next year to be married and hope to have a child of their own together.