Belissa Andía Pérez

Belissa Andía Pérez (born 7 July 1953, Atico) is a Peruvian activist and essayist. She is the "trans secretariat" of Instituto Runa de Desarrollo y Estudios sobre Género. She is also a member of the Junta and the secretary in the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, a Latin American organization that represents the interests of transsexuals. She is also a founding council member of the Hirschfeld Eddy Foundation.

Biography
She was born in Arequipa, Peru. She went to elementary school at San Antonio de Padua and secondary school at Bartolomé Herrera. When she was a teenager, she came out to her family as a trans woman. She notes this was at a time when being gay was very taboo and that transgender people were rarely conceived of.

In her youth, she became involved with Catholic organizations practicing liberation theology. She left these Christian groups later, due to ideological contradictions. She soon was involved in leftist organizations due to their themes of meeting the demands of the working class and of sexual liberation, and finding these issues and more to be related to capitalism.

Pérez attended university for two years are National University of San Marcos in pursuit of a degree focused on genetics, though she did not graduate.

In 2004, she became a member of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association's (IGLA's) World Board for the Latin American and Caribbean Region. By the next year, the group decided there needed to be a transgender official. Thus, at the 2005 Latin American Regional Conference, members elected Pérez to the position.

Pérez speaks on the discrimination transgender people experience. Namely, how there is a strong association of transgender people with sexually transmitted infections and mental illness. She notes: "We [transgender people] do not have a place in society because of normalisation and narrow-minded views, even today some countries punish by law people whose conduct does not conform to their ideas of a binary, man-woman world." She has also observed that transgender people are "rebels of the rule of heteronormativity, and not only in the conceptual sense, but also in the physical bodies of transgender people."

Pérez is also a secretary at the Runa Institute for Development and Gender Studies. Her work focuses on human rights, especially for transgender people.

In 2006, she ran for the Congress of the Republic of Peru with the New Left Movement. She was not elected, but made history as the first transgender candidate in Peru's general elections.

Filmography

 * Loxoro (2011)