“Every transgender person in South Africa has to reinvent the wheel”

Finding the “T” in South African LGBT organizations

Post-apartheid South Africa has seen a significant boom in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) serving historically oppressed populations. This includes the development of NGOs whose intention is to serve gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (“LGBTI”) people.  Most of the largest and well-known LGBTI organizations in South Africa have joined the Joint Working Group (JWG), which was founded in 2003 with the goal to “strengthen the organized LGBTI sector to maximize our response to LGBTI needs through partnership, collective use of resources, and drawing on the strengths of participating organizations.”  The JWG includes the following organizations

• Durban Lesbian and Gay Community Health Centre
• Forum for the Empowerment of Women
• Behind the Mask
• The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project
• Gay and Lesbian Archives
• OUT – LGBT Well-Being
• Triangle Project
• GenderDynamix 
• UNISA Centre for Applied Psychology

Seven of the nine organizations listed above claim to serve the entire LGBT community – the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (whose primary focus is black lesbians) and the UNISA Centre for Applied Psychology do not. However, many of these groups are still struggling to find ways to support transgender people within the larger queer/LGBT population of South Africa.

“Every transgender person in South Africa has to reinvent the wheel.”

GenderDynamix (GDX) is the first, and currently the only, transgender-focused organization in the African continent.  Liesl Theron, a non-transgender woman, founded the group and now serves as its president. She is supported by the board of the organization, which has 10 people – half of them are transgender-identified. 

Theron first became interested in transgender rights after dating transgender men and realizing how difficult it was to find the resources to transition:

“Even your LGBT organizations, within South Africa, are like the rest of the  world I  suppose, [say] LGBT and once you start questioning what services are for the T, they  are nonexistent or very minimal. So that made me realize that each and every  transgender person in South Africa has to reinvent the wheel. [They] have to find  out, where is this, where is that? Then they transition, and they just want to keep  going on with their life, [and] they deliberately go into stealth, and with them goes all  the information.”

GDX’s primary way of reaching transgender people is through its extensive website, at the heart of which are informal message boards (called “forums”) where members can post questions, concerns, community announcements, or any other pertinent information. The site also has photo albums from group events that members can access, and links to other sites with relevant information. In order to access all of the website’s resources, one must become a member and develop an online “profile” in which you can list your gender identity, sexual orientation, location, contact information, and fill out a short biography or “About Me” section.

Currently, GDX has about 130 members , and most of them have only made contact with the organization through the Internet. This presents a problem, because the majority of South Africans do not have regular access to the Internet. “It’s a big disadvantage,”  says Theron, and she says that the organization is trying to find other ways to reach out, including newspaper and magazine articles, radio, and word of mouth within the queer/GLBT community. Through these mediums, she hopes to make contact with people who are transgender or questioning their gender identity. When she does find them, Theron directs them toward the website, and to the two support groups associated with GDX: T-Junction in Cape Town, and Budding Roses in Johannesburg.

T-Junction was started by Theron and members of GenderDynamix within the last year, and is a mixed group of transmen and transwomen that meet for periodical, informal social events. The group has twenty members, although Theron knows of twice that many transgender-identified people in Cape Town. However, many of them are living in stealth, or are not interested in a support group. The group is mostly white, but there are a few non-white members that attend on a regular basis, and Theron says they are actively trying to create a more racially diverse group.

Budding Roses was started about four years ago, before the creation of GenderDynamix, and has no official relationship or affiliation with them. It began as an informal social group for transgender (MTF) women, and had four founding members. Today, the group has about 35 members in total, and almost all of them are white transgender women. The main organizers of the group, Michelle and Amy , say that it is only in the last year that “one or two” transmen have attended Budding Roses events, but that they “didn’t stay long.”  They said that they have had only a few non-white people attend events, and none of them lived in a township, to their knowledge. They cite this as being a problem of geography, that the group does try to offer ride-shares, but usually the townships are “too far out of the way. ”

The overwhelming majority of the members of GDX, T-Junction, and Budding Roses are white. This is largely due to the country’s history of systematic oppression of non-white people, and the lingering effects of apartheid. Most non-white South Africans do not have access to the Internet, which is the primary point of entry to these groups. It is also important to mention that the term “transgender” was not developed in Africa, although the concept seems to have existed for centuries. Anthony Manion (GALA) commented on this:

“These are words that most people who grow up in not just township areas but  unresourced areas are not familiar with. And when they hear them, they don’t  understand what they mean. In our work, we’ve heard some people say words like  ‘transsexual’ to refer to bisexual people. Words like transgender and transsexual are  words that are coming from the West, so it’s communities that have the most  contact with the West that are using those words.”

At its first meeting, the Board of GDX set a goal of trying to set up three new support groups each year, so that they may be able to reach out to more people who may not be able to access the Internet. Theron hopes that they will be able to start some groups in townships and other predominately non-white areas.  GDX’s strategy in doing this is to work through pre-existing organizations. Theron hopes that through training existing organizations on transgender identity, they will be able to support people who come to them with questions regarding gender identity. Once this happens, she thinks that these NGOs will discover that there are more transgender people in their organization than they may have thought. Once she is able to find transgender people, then hopes to empower and train these people in starting their own support groups in the communities in which they live.

Right now, she says that most people within the queer/LGBT community believe that “you are only gay or lesbian,”  and do not know or fully understand the idea of being “transgender.”  As a result of this, many people who identify with a gender different from their birth sex are told that they are gay or lesbian because of their gender expression.

For example, a person from a township in Pretoria recently approached OUT – LGBT Well Being, expressing a desire to find more information on Gender Reassignment Surgery and hormone therapy.  The staff has a close relationship with GenderDynamix, and told the person to call Robert Hamblin. At the time, the person was lesbian-identified, which caused some confusion between the two organizations. Liesl recounts the situation:

“I think a lot of times there is not vocabulary available, but the concepts are  mostly  the same. He phoned Robert and says, ‘I got your number from OUT, and  I’m a  lesbian.’ And Robert says, ‘Why did you phone me ?’ Because we are all thinking [ in  terms of] transgender … but then we listen more and the wish is for hormones, the  wish is for surgery, he clearly knows that is the route he wants to take. But the  wording initially was still ‘lesbian.’”

In general, Gender Dynamix is overwhelmed by trying to support all of South Africa’s transgender population. It appears that the other organizations in the Joint Working Group, as well as queer/LGBT groups that are not members of the JWG, are referring everyone that comes to them with questions regarding gender identity to GDX. In some ways, this is a positive thing, in that GDX’s name is certainly getting a lot of publicity within the queer/LGBT NGO sector. Transgender and gender non-conforming people are finding others like them, many after decades of believing that they were the only ones. GDX’s website is an important centralized source of information exchange regarding surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, and general information on the necessary resources required to make a full physical transition.

However, Theron does not have the capacity to counsel every transgender or gender non-conforming person that comes her way. She is the only full-time staff member of GenderDynamix, and receives no salary. It is important that other LGBT organizations in South Africa hold themselves accountable to the “T” in that acronym. GDX hopes to provide trainings for these groups so that they will have a clear understanding of what transgender identity is and how to help people who may be struggling with issues of gender identity.

It is important to mention that there are other organizations besides GDX that are making a concerted effort to be trans-inclusive. OUT in Pretoria has a transgender woman on their Board, a transgender nursing sister who has volunteered for the organization, and is in the process of creating a brochure specifically about transgender people and identity. They regularly host transgender-identified speakers, and have workshops and discussions regarding gender identity. They recently opened a small LGBT health clinic at their office, and are hoping to eventually make it available as a transgender clinic on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on demand. 

The Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA) in Johannesburg recently began a Transgender Oral History Project, in which they are attempting to record the life histories of South Africans whose “biological sex is different from their internal sense of their own gender.”   Anthony Manion, says that because the word “transgender” has not been adopted within all South African communities, they try to use it as little as necessary:

“We call it the transgender project for convenience, but we don’t use labels like  transgender or transsexual as criteria for interviewing people, because that would  exclude a huge number of black South Africans who do not use that terminology,  but who nevertheless, when you interview them, they talk about a sense that their  biological sense is different from their internal sense of their own gender.”

This project is being conducted in collaboration with GenderDynamix. GALA trained Liesl Theron on interviewing skills and techniques, and she has managed to do six interviews with transgender-identified South Africans. GALA has done a total of five so far. Together, they hope to get a minimum of fifteen more interviews by 2007.  From the interviews, GALA is planning to design a  “digital story project” that will include digital photographs of participants played in a slideshow with an audio recording of their interviews. After that, they hope to publish a book including all of the life histories they have collected.
 These projects and initiatives all show great promise, and will hopefully set a standard for other queer/LGBT-focused NGOs in South Africa to begin to devote time and resources meeting the needs and recording the history of transgender and gender non-conforming people.

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