Featured in international film festivals in 1998, the documentary, Woubi Chéri, directed by Laurent Bocahut and Philip Brooks, focused on the lives of Woubis*, Yossis**, and other members of the Branché*** community in Ivory Coast. The award-winning documentary was featured globally in various film festivals and on a number of documentary platforms. The film won Best Documentary awards at the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival, the Turin International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and the Transgender Festival in London.

Shortly after Woubi Chéri’s release, Barbara (full name withheld for safety reasons) from L’Association des Travestis de Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast Transvestites Association), who was one of the people interviewed in the film, emigrated to France. Slowly the energetic drive for the Association decreased and no more signs of their militant activism were seen. It is speculated that the reason for this is the nonprofit industrial complex, which saw funding for activism increasingly moving towards HIV/AIDS in the context of MSM (men who have sex with men), which erased all the efforts made by the Woubis. 

Woubis (and cross-dressers or transvestites/travestis) cannot automatically be assumed to be transgender or to specifically claim Western terminology. Woubis existed long before any information about gender diversity or gender nonconformity was available on the internet and social media. Through research and the documentary Woubi Chéri, it became quite evident and very clear that the Branché community and the Woubi community have a much wider and larger range of genders and sexualities than the Western binary system. They are gender outlaws, so to speak. 

According to an academic article entitled “Violence, Exclusion and Resilience among Ivoirian Travestis” by Matthew Thomann and Robbie Corey-Boulet,

“Among sexual and gender minorities in Côte d’Ivoire, travestis are defined as individuals born anatomically male who live as women on a full- or part-time basis. Travestis encounter harsher stigmatization and violence than sexual minorities whose gender normativity allows them to avoid unwanted attention. Moreover, they have traditionally been underserved by Ivoirian sexual minority rights groups, who have worked to distance themselves from travestis, framing them as recklessly indiscreet. In this paper, we examine the extent to which travestis’ isolation has lessened in the wake of the post-election violence that followed Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010 presidential election. We trace how Ivoirian travestis became increasingly vulnerable following the installation of a new national army that proved more hostile to them. And we show how, as a result of anti-travesti abuses committed by the army, non-travesti sexual minority activists became increasingly aware of the plight of travestis, and took steps to include them in their programming. These activists may have also been motivated by an increasing interest in transgender issues on the part of international donors. Finally, we explore the extent to which emerging human rights and HIV/AIDS programming has resulted in newly embodied positions for travestis as they confront identifications reflecting Western trans-spectrum identities.”

Read here about the Miss Woubi beauty pageant and for more about the travestis and woubis.

* Woubis are effeminate boys who play the role of women or wife in the relationship.

** Yossis are the men or the husbands in the relationship. They can be bisexual and/or married with a family while in a relationship with a Woubi.

** Branché is a local term whose meaning is not widely understood by heterosexual and cisgender people in Ivory Coast and is used by sexual and gender minorities to describe themselves and one another.