We want to express our deepest gratitude to the organisations and individuals who support our initiative in various ways by contributing information, endorsing our work, and acknowledging the importance of us capturing these historical events as seen through the eyes and voices of trans and intersex activists.
Transgender and Intersex Africa (TIA) primarily focuses on black trans and intersex people living in rural areas and black townships in South Africa. TIA runs projects that bring these communities together. Their advocacy programme seeks to ensure trans and intersex rights are recognised and protected, that trans and intersex people have access to legal gender recognition and affirming quality healthcare, and also aims to prevent discrimination against trans and intersex people in education, and employment.
Transgender Education and Advocacy (TEA) is an international human rights organisation working towards defending and promoting the human rights of transgender/transsexual people. TEA is registered in Kenya by the NGO Coordination Board under the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government.
The website is a very emotional tale. It is a great reminder of what can change in our societies when people dedicate their lives to fighting oppressive systems and beliefs. It shows what changemakers can do when they conquer fear from within and without. There is strong animus towards transgender persons in Africa. But the levels years back were mind-boggling. The milestones articulated in the website gives meaning for the trauma people got from the wars and struggle for liberation.
The website also feels like a time machine. Biko Beuttah’s entry took me back to 2006 watching America’s Next Top Model on a local TV station. My dad walked away very confused when Tyra announced that all the models in front of her were at one time men – and one was Kenyan. It was bizarre!! I could not believe what I was watching. I was not alone.
This should be a must read for young and upcoming changemakers.
Audrey Mbugua, TEA
Established in 2005, Gender DynamiX (GDX) is the first registered Africa-based public benefit organisation to focus solely on the trans and broader gender diverse community.
Over the past 13 years, GDX has built up a strong track record in understanding the diverse nature of the work, and the diverse needs of trans and gender diverse persons both in South Africa and its surrounding regions. Based on its organisational values, GDX aims to work in ways that uphold ideals of self-identification, self-determination, respect for diversity, inclusivity, meaningful participation, transparency, and accountability, while seeking to position trans and gender diverse persons through the realisation of their (our) autonomy and potential for nation-building.
Best,
Liberty
Transgender and Intersex Africa, South Africa
Marc Epprecht is the author of Hungochani and Heterosexual Africa? and is a professor at the Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. His research areas are environment, health, social history in southern Africa, and gender and sexuality.
Congratulations to the TIHA team for launching this vital, brilliant and beautiful initiative. Trans and intersex people have historically been marginalized from the main currents of lgbtiq+ activism, with trans folks typically assumed to be gay or butch lesbian and the intersexed often completely disregarded, even as a token in the acronym. The interactive, generative nature of this project thus promises to create an essential counter to that marginalization. The ambition to counter the predominance of South Africa in the existing scholarship on lgbtiq+ struggles is another extremely welcome aspect of it. The accessibility of language meanwhile fulfills a longtime aspiration of many of us academic workers, that is, to render very challenging research, subtle and shifting identities, and complex ideas into a language that is open to a much broader audience than us eggheads tend to reach. Bravo!
Trans and intersex people obviously existed long before 1992, but the time frame selected here imposes the discipline of a very clear logic: to archive moments when the struggle for trans and intersex visibility and human rights are explicitly asserted or, in many cases, denied. Closing it off in 2016 makes sense as well, although this will likely limit input from many African countries where trans and intersex activism has only just begun (or indeed, has yet to begin). Yet this keeps the focus on documenting the early history and avoids getting bogged down in contemporary partisan or other contestations. My hope is that this strategy – and the beautiful graphics – open the door of welcome to submissions from far and wide, in diverse forms of expression, so to that help build and preserve a more inclusive history than we have seen so far.
Amanda Lock Swarr is the author of Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa and Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine. She is also Associate Professor in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies department at the University of Washington, USA. Her work is concerned with queer, trans, and intersex studies, medical inequities, and feminist politics in South Africa and the USA. and the U.S.
This website includes information from a critical period in South African trans and intersex history from the perspective of activists who were deeply involved. This archive is not available anywhere else, and it constitutes an essential resource! Folks included here did critical work for and with trans and intersex communities across Africa, and it is amazing to see how the organizers of this archive documenting histories and memories. This site will serve as a model for those organizing for justice and researching the globally significant accomplishments of African activists.
