Answering a need: Trans man Ziggy Nkosi is the South African editor of the online publication Queerstion
An online publication aimed at promoting the visibility of transgender people in Africa will be launched on Friday, International Transgender Day of Visibility.
Under the name Queerstion, the online platform will feature contributions from transgender people in Africa to “prioritise a trans voice, a trans eye and a trans perspective”, says the publication’s South Africa editor, Ziggy Nkosi.
Celebrated annually, the day aims to seek support for transgender people and highlight the achievements of those in the transgender community globally. It is from this that Queerstion takes its cue.
“The aim of Queerstion is really to increase the visibility of transgender people across Africa. This is really important to us as a lot of people tend to confuse being transgender with homosexuality.
“Also, a lot of trans people don’t feel they have a home within the more traditional gay and lesbian spaces,” Nkosi says.
The publication is the brainchild of Miles Tanhira, a Zimbabwean transgender man based in Sweden.
“I decided to start Queerstion because I had a blog, called AfricTrans, and found I was getting a lot of inquiries from people wanting access to information about different aspects of being transgender — around health care or whatever. Sometimes I had answers to these questions, sometimes not. That is why the publication is called Queerstion.
“Also, from a political perspective, questioning is interrogating. And we need to interrogate so much.
“But, mainly, we really want it to be a place through which we can connect people across Africa, especially because there is very little out there aimed specifically at trans people, let alone trans people in Africa,” Tanhira says.
One of the biggest problems transgender people face is few employment opportunities. A report, titled It Costs to Be a Woman: Exploring the Socioeconomic Landscape for Trans Women in South Africa, was put together by the Eastern Cape-based trans rights organisation Social, Health and Empowerment Feminist Collective of Transgender Women of Africa (SHE).
Although yet to be released, some of the report’s findings were presented by the organisation’s co-ordinator, Leigh Ann van der Merwe, to the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women earlier this month.
Some of these findings include that only 47% of those surveyed nationally are employed. Of this group, 46% felt the need to hide their gender or gender transition.
For this reason, Tanhira and his contributors are determined to focus on sharing knowledge and the promotion of entrepreneurship as alternatives to what he refers to as “us having to beg all the time”.
“We are also looking at working at getting to work with corporates who are trans friendly,” Nkosi says. “But we are really still in the process of finding those.”
Waiting for corporates to come on board may take some time, but support for the initiative has been coming in from queer and human rights organisations across the continent, such as Fem Alliance Uganda and Lawyers League for Minorities in Nigeria.
Introducing Tanhira to activists and possible contributors has been one way in which these organisations have helped him to put the fledgling publication together.
One such contributor is Eva van der Heyden, a transgender woman, tasked with putting together content for the magazine’s beauty and health and wellness sections.
“Having this publication is really important for pan-African trans people to feel they have a home. At the moment, there is nothing doing that,” says Van der Heyden, who works as a counsellor for the organisation Right to Care in the Western Cape town of Grabouw.
Although she says being a transgender woman in such a relatively small community “was very difficult at first, just being here and helping people learn more about what it is to be transgender is helping people to understand”.
But her fellow contributor, a Malawi-based trans man, Chiku, is not as fortunate. “Here in Malawi, we face a lot of discrimination — rejection by our families and our communities, friends and churches. We face really hard times. That’s the reason we keep our identities secret from the media,” says Chiku, who chose not have his surname published.
Despite the threat of reprisals, he is contributing to the publication because “there is a real need to have something that helps connect us across borders and gives us space where we can communicate openly with communities and families”.
Content produced by people who are not transgender includes contributions from family members, medical practitioners and religious leaders. “Anyone who is an ally, basically,” says Tanhira. “We want to write our own stories in our own words. There’s that saying, ‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’. So we need to write our stories. We are our own heroes. There are lots of trans people doing amazing things out there, even if it simply surviving.”
Carl Collison is the Other Foundation’s Rainbow Fellow at the Mail & Guardian
