- International Transgender Day of Visibility — We speak to activist Leigh Ann van der Merwe

International Transgender Day of Visibility — We speak to activist Leigh Ann van der Merwe

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Trans and Intersex History Africa (TIHA) brings you this conversation about the importance of International Transgender Day of Visibility. Victor Mukasa speaks to the Leigh Ann van der Merwe — Executive Director of Social, Health and Empowerment Feminist Collective of Transgender Women of Africa (S.H.E). This video is part of a series in which Victor reflects with activists on pivotal historical moments that forms part of the collective histories about the trans and intersex movements in Africa. Victor is also the founder of ‘The Victor Mukasa Show’. Leigh Ann van der Merwe grew up in Ugie, the Eastern Cape of South Africa, “in the 80’s in the heart of the struggle for racial equality, those moments inspired my love of activism… by virtue of who we are, a person of colour, a gender diverse person – our lives are defined by struggle”. Leigh Ann continued by saying that in terms of Trans activism, she started at the end of high school when she moved from Ugie to Cape Town. “It was in 1999, that I first met another trans person, in person. There was no Google in those years. I met the person at the Triangle Project. Leigh Ann reflected that one of the pivotal moments, which shaped her as activist was the Exchange Program that included trans and intersex activists from a few countries. She remembered and shared about the experience when the Exchange Program was hosted in Uganda and the group visited Wonetha, a Kampala based Feminist organisation. It is at this meeting that Leigh Ann remembered about a conversation between herself and Beyonce Amooti, who told about a trans woman who passed on, and the morgue would not accept her body because of her transgender status. “This story moved me, I realized as trans women we face very particular issues, and that it is time that we stand up and take leadership… although it was a sad story, it was a milestone for me, because it really gave me this idea that we need to start an initiative, such as S.H.E to work on the particular issues that we are facing as trans women”. Leigh Ann then continued talking about another important milestone, the first Trans Health Conference. A great milestone was the launch of the first-ever African Trans Feminist Charter, in Johannesburg in 2014. The launch of the African Feminist Charter came about when a group of Eastern and Southern African trans women came together to identify priorities and what engagements are needed with other women and feminist organisations. “The African Feminist Charter is a set of principles in terms of how we want to engage with the broader feminist movement, as the feminist movement was to a great extent phobic [transphobic] and hostile towards the trans movement and trans women in particular. Our own fears have been exhilarated and in our response to this violence we have drafted a set of principles … we feel that this is important work in terms of centering trans women’s contributions to the women’s movement, in particular the African feminist movement. I think we face a different type of exclusion in the African feminist movement – if you compare us to our Western counterparts, which had been an intellectual fight, an intellectual debate and exclusion of trans women – you will find that a lot of the Trans Radical Exclusionary Feminists (TERFs) are white, cisgender feminists, academic feminists. We started to see some of that spill into the African continent through white feminists from the global north. Victor and Leigh Ann discussed the dynamics of feminist spaces, trans women within feminist spaces, who are included and who are excluded. Leigh Ann talked about rural movements that include grassroots organizing and intersectional approaches and reflected on the development of trans women (especially in leadership), because when she started S.H.E in 2010, two trans women were Executive Directors in the entire African continent – it was myself and Audrey Mbugua from Kenya [TEA]. Speaking about role models – Victor highlighted how great it is, that in South Africa, Leigh Ann is the first trans women who is a Commissioner for Gender Equality. Leigh Ann shared how she was nominated, and after the committee reviewed her documents, she was short-listed. After preparing herself, and attending the full-day interview panel, and then she continued with life… until her phone became very busy one Saturday night and suddenly saw all the messages of congratulations!