Paete is a small town in Laguna built on woodcarving and faith. For a child growing up in the community, there was very little room for questions.
Jennifer Cagandahan was born on Jan. 13, 1981, in the neighboring town of Pakil, with an “F” for gender written on the birth certificate. The child grew up in Paete, going to Sunday Masses, wearing skirts in school, and getting immersed in the ordinary rhythms of provincial life.
At the Catholic high school, Jennifer hated wearing skirts as part of the girls’ uniform but found it difficult to argue against the policy. At the time when the young girls experienced their first menstruation, not a trace of red arrived for the child.
Physical manifestations became sharper and broader in Jennifer — features that Paete had no name for and that began arranging themselves into something unmistakably masculine.
Some neighbors mentioned “tomboy,” others said “lesbian.” And then they moved on.
But not Jennifer Cagandahan, who would later discover in adulthood three words that finally made sense of everything: congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Gender-identity speaking, it was an intersex case.
Medical tests
At 22, Jennifer was formally diagnosed at the Philippine General Hospital in Manila with simple virilizing CAH, a genetic and biological condition in which the body produces excess androgen (a hormone that mainly triggers the development of male physical characteristics).
It was not an anomaly, or a punishment, or a malfunction; it was the body’s biology, working precisely as it is designed to work. For the first time, the body that had confused and isolated Jennifer had a scientific explanation.
With the lab test results, Jennifer decided to file a petition at the regional trial court (RTC) in Siniloan, Laguna, to change the birth name “Jennifer Cagandahan” to “Jeff Cagandahan,” and the gender from “female” to “male.”
In an exclusive interview with CoverStory.ph, Jeff looked back at his journey as an intersex person, struggling alone since childhood to cope with his then-undefined sexual orientation and the community’s less than encouraging approach to his case.
When he was a student, every school restroom was a risk and every swimming class brought quiet agony. He watched how he walked and measured how he spoke. He scanned every face around him — not out of curiosity but out of consciousness.
Daily dilemma
Each day carried the same dilemma: How much of himself could Jeff reveal before someone noticed what he had been trying so hard to conceal?
There was no word for what he was experiencing. Not in Paete, at least. Not anywhere he could reach. And because there was no “accurate” word for it, there was no conversation, and there was no one to turn to.
It was as if his body was harboring a secret, Jeff said: “Parang may tinatago akong sikreto sa katawan ko.”
At home, the silence was a specific answer. Family members did not speak of what was happening. He did not push them to; he was afraid, and they were perhaps afraid of what the conversation would require.
So instead of words, there was distance, avoidance. And in the space where support should have been, he found faith. He brought to God what he could not bring to anyone else. With no one having room for his truth, he held to the belief that his existence is not a mistake, that there is a reason for it.
“Faith, truly, until now, is still what I hold on to,” Jeff said in a mix of Filipino and English. “I told myself that perhaps the Lord has a mission for me. That is why it’s like this.”
It wasn’t comfortable, but it was enough to keep him going, to manage what his body was insistently becoming.
Jeff went on to attend a university in Sta. Mesa, Manila. He took a course in physical education that would, unexpectedly, intensify the anxieties he had carried since childhood.
A required six-month swimming class meant wearing a swimsuit he had to fortify with foam to produce a body he did not have. It meant excusing himself from the communal shower room and also borrowing his mother’s bra for use in athletic competitions, so no one would notice the absence underneath his uniform.
He completed the course, graduated, passed the licensure exam for teachers, and was eventually hired to teach at a college in Bicol. From the very first day, he introduced himself to his students and colleagues as Jeff.
‘XX’ chromosomes
It was in a college library that Jeff learned about CAH. As the features developed and became harder to ignore, he decided to consult doctors at PGH and found confirmation from them.
He went through multiple lab tests. from blood work to physical examinations to chromosome analysis. One procedure folded into the next, each requiring him to lay another layer of himself bare in a clinical setting.
“It felt like I was being exposed,” Jeff said.
Test results marked his chromosomes “XX,” or female. But the excess androgen his body had been producing shaped him otherwise, building the person that the Paete community had watched grow up without realizing what it was watching.
A psychiatrist at PGH would later certify what Jeff already understood about himself — that he was psychologically and emotionally sound, showing no signs of any mood, anxiety, or psychotic disorder, and consistently more comfortable being referred to as male.
The medical system finally gave him language, but it also made him a case study.
Even with a name for what he really is, he said, anxiety and humiliation awaited him each time he had to show his ID and what was stated there didn’t match his looks.
Court petition
On Dec. 11, 2003, Jeff filed a petition for correction of entries in a birth certificate at the RTC Branch 33 in Siniloan to change his birth name to “Jeff Cagandahan” and sex information. A lawyer-relative helped him find his footing in an unfamiliar process.
The court ruled in his favor on Jan. 12, 2005. Jeff thought the process was done, but it wasn’t. His case reached the Supreme Court on appeal by the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG).
In its motion, the OSG argued that the RTC had erred, citing that Rule 108 of the Rules of Court does not permit correction of something as fundamental as a person’s sex, and that Jeff’s petition had failed to include the local civil registrar as the law requires.
It was then that the realization hit Jeff: that maybe there was no real triumph in it. He wondered what would happen if the Supreme Court reversed the RTC’s decision: “Paano na ‘yan?”
Four years and nine months later, on Sept. 12, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. The decision reads less like a verdict and more like a recognition.
The high court said: “ … where the person is biologically or naturally intersex the determining factor in his gender classification would be what the individual, like respondent, having reached the age of majority, with good reason thinks of his/her sex.”
It noted that Jeff had “simply let nature take its course and has not taken unnatural steps to arrest or interfere with what he was born with,” and that in doing so, he had “already ordered his life to that of a male.”
He could have undergone treatment, the high court observed, taking lifelong medication to force his body into the categorical mold of a female. He did not, because he chose not to.
“Nature has instead taken its due course in respondent’s development to reveal more fully his male characteristics,” the tribunal said. “We cannot but respect how [the] respondent deals with his unordinary state and thus help make his life easier, considering the unique circumstances in this case.”
‘Preferred gender’
On his change of name from Jennifer to Jeff, the Supreme Court said, it was not a mere technicality, but something that “merely recognizes his preferred gender” — a change that would simply conform with the revision already made in his birth certificate, from female to male.
Four years and nine months since Jeff first walked into the courtroom in Siniloan, what he had always known was finally made official.
Yet, even without the tribunal’s decision, he has always been honest about who he is. From there, it reframes the legal chapter of his life, not as a story of what the court gave him, but what he had already given himself long before any ruling was written.
The case of Jeff Cagandahan remains, to this day, the only ruling of the Philippine Supreme Court that directly addresses intersex identity. It stands in deliberate contrast to an earlier case, Silverio v. Republic, in which the tribunal denied a transgender woman’s petition to change her sex marker after gender-affirming surgery.
It draws a legal line between someone who had medically transitioned and someone, like Jeff, whose body had simply continued doing what it was already doing on its own.
One favorable legal ruling, however, did not translate into broader protection. A 2018 editorial in the Southern Philippines Medical Center Journal of Health Care Services, co-authored by Michael John T. Timajo, notes that while certain cities in the Philippines have passed local anti-discrimination ordinances for LGBT communities, the country still has no national anti-discrimination legislation specifically protecting intersex individuals.
The editorial cites global estimates placing the intersex population at roughly 0.5 to 1.7% — comparable, researchers have noted, to the number of people born with red hair.
Unmentionable
Intersex remains, in both law and everyday language, unmentioned in broader conversations about gender and sexuality, and is rarely named on its own. In much of the world, including parts of Asia, intersex children are still subjected to so-called “sex-normalizing” surgeries, procedures performed not out of medical necessity but out of discomfort with a body that does not fit a binary mold. The procedures are often carried out before a child is old enough to consent.
It is in that gap, between a single court decision and a country still without a name for what it has decided, that Jeff has chosen to spend the rest of his life working.
He had always seen himself as a man even before the court issued its decision, he said: “Ang tingin ko sa sarili ko, lalaki talaga. ‘Yan yung sarili ko.”
And he doesn’t think anything has changed, except that he’s happier now, he said.
Now 45, Jeff is the co-founder and executive director of Intersex Philippines and has built a space for relevant conversations.
In September 2025, his work brought him to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where he addressed the 60th session on behalf of the Asian intersex community. It was a moment that coincided with the release of the first-ever UN report on human rights violations against intersex persons.
Drawing on his own legal battle, Jeff told the council that intersex infants and children worldwide are still subjected to irreversible surgeries and hormonal treatments without their consent, and that discrimination follows intersex people through every stage of life: bullying in schools, rejection by families, barriers in employment and housing, and exclusion from sports under invasive and humiliating rules.
“Action is our shared responsibility,” he told the council. “ … I ask of you today: listen to intersex people, partner with our organizations, and support legislation that protects our bodily integrity and ensures our full legal recognition.”
Through it all, he keeps faith in the idea of God’s involvement, that somewhere in the long and difficult arc of his life, there was a purpose that was worked out for him.
As for Paete’s very little room for questions, Jeff knows he has answered the only one that truly mattered — in the end, every person in every (small) town can eventually find for themselves the courage to stop hiding from their own reflection.
Now, he walks outdoors without fear. He had been doing it all along. The world just needed time to catch up. CS
K Cleto, a third-year journalism student at the University of the Philippines’ College of Media and Communication in Diliman, is an intern at CoverStory.ph.
