A very involved mother of a transgender child recently joined a panel hosted by an organisation called The Living Newspaper and attended by an audience consisting of about 100 men and women of the Jewish Community.
Transgender people express a Gender identity that is different from their birth sex. Male people identify as female and vice versa. Some of them change their bodies with gender affirming hormone treatments and surgeries, if they are able to gain access to this kind of health care. Many cannot access this kind of health care due to health issues or lack of availability in South Africa. Some of them are able to express their gender by permission of their communities and do not choose medical intervention. Some trans people in South Africa, prefer to make use of traditional and indigenous medicines.
People in Africa face violence and inequality and sometimes torture and even execution because of their Gender expression. Gender identity and sexual orientation are integral aspects of our lives and should never lead to discrimination or abuse, yet in Africa we have a long way to go in understanding the difference between the two. This is clearly reflected in laws dealing with gender variance in most African countries. The legal and social response to people who express gender in conflict with birth sex are all based on notions of sexual practices.
A day in the life of Munir, Admin officer and bookkeeper at Gender DynamiX, is so hectic he literally needs a twenty-five hour day. Munir’s day starts long before he even gets to work. There is his nine-year-old son who is in grade three whose needs have to be attended to in order to get him ready for school, and then comes the first major decision of the day – what to wear! This is punctuated by sms’s from staff or, in most cases, from Gender DynamiX director, Liesl Theron with urgent tasks which actually needed to be done yesterday, please.
There is no doubt that transgender individuals endure a great deal of discrimination in all spheres of society. From childhood this marginalised group of individuals come up against many challenges. This is particularly true when it comes to sport. Given that Netball is a female sport code, many transgender women are not allowed to participate on the basis of medical arguments. As a transgender woman, I had to go undercover in order to determine the legislative framework allowing passage of transgender women in netball as a classically female sport code.
Gender identity