A Photo Essay

We sometimes forget that around the world trans-women often wear their traditional native dress, CNN Style has an article “The secret lives of transgender Mongolians,” that the photographer took an interesting series of photographs of the trans-women in contemporary and traditional dress in Mongolia.

Spanish photographer Alvaro Laiz spent three and a half months documenting the lives of male to female transgender people in Ulaanbaatar, intrigued by how they saw themselves in the larger fiber of society. "I decided to travel to Mongolia because it's located in the junction in between three different worlds -- Russia, Europe and China, while still retaining its own identity," says Laiz. "The country is facing sudden changes after opening their borders to Western investment, but on the other hand, their nomadic and communist heritage still remains. It is this duplicity in their contemporary time that fascinated me," he explains.

Many other trans-women from in counties like Korea, India and Thailand also have interesting style of traditional dress, a friend, who travels around the world doing medical and socioeconomic research once gave me a calendar from China of trans-women were wearing traditional dress.