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During six years in Sri Lanka, I sought to understand the struggle for peace with justice through the voices and experiences of marginalised communities. I researched democracy, human rights and the civil society space available for such voices to be heard as constitutive elements of peace. Yet I also faced many structural barriers in my attempts to undertake the research. These barriers arose through my early attempts to engage people from within state and quasi-judicial authorities and my misplaced hope in their ability or willingness to participate. The institutional structural barriers I faced became instructive in creating the research journey. They served both as benchmarks and inflection points against and around which I learnt to navigate my way forward, to adequately prepare myself to listen to the participants' experiences, and to recount and interpret their own journeys. This article discusses those barriers and the construction of a set of methods enabling the research outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies proves that one in two hundred adults may be transgender. The physical identity of a person is determined by the external genitalia of the newborn baby. Through this, the male and female body has been established. Mental identity refers to the identity of a person as the feeling occurs mentally as whether he or she is a male person or a female person. There are very few studies in Sri Lanka, and this study was done as practical review and raising awareness about the socially transgender sex community. Therefore this article brings together three case studies that examined how transgender people dealing with psychosocial issues like abuses from state officials and private individuals. Those psychosocial issues compromise the quality and safety of their daily lives and their ability to access services that are central to their basic human rights. There are many transgender people and communities have been actively involved in community organizing and social action efforts since the early twentieth century, research on transgender issues has been reduce. Transgendered people continue to experience various forms of oppression and discrimination in Sri Lanka and throughout the world. Even though there are many social, legal, and political advances that have been launched in an attempt to grant transgender community basic human rights, transgender community become more and more vulnerable. Therefore psychological and social impact of oppression, rejection, discrimination, harassment, and violence on transgender people is reviewed in this study, and recent advances in the areas of transgender health wellbeing, public policy and other issues were detailed through this case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study from an Interpersonal Phenomenological Approach of gay sexuality in cultural terms offers an opportunity to identify the driving force behind why some men will marry a woman to fit into the society they grew up in. This study presents a case of a 40-year-old man, called Dillion living in London but wants to move back to Sri Lanka, who negotiates his identity to fit in with Sri Lanka and in London. The case study highlights the struggle of juggling between the culture of his birth and the culture he now lives in with his drive to become accepted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]