Self-Organizing Man

Juliet Victor Mukasa is transgender and recently spoke movingly about the experience of being transgender in Africa. Later in this post Mukasa describes personal violations of human rights because she is trans. Holding the bladder for 12 to 18 hours showed up in the list. Then I thought about an old work acquaintence who grew up in a migrant farming family from Mexico. “My parents remember when they won the right to have a toilet next to the fields they had to work. Before that, they had to hold it or risk a job loss or the humiliation of having to relieve themselves in public.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. I will say though that people worldwide do a damn fine job of punishing people through urinary segregation and prohibition.

In Africa, transgender people are seriously punished for being who they are. While still with my parents, I was always beaten by my father for “behaving” like a boy. In school, the same story. While peeing one day my neighbours daughter found me peeing while squatting and she screamed like she had seen a monster. I became the laughing stock of the village and I expelled myself because of the humiliation. I could speak the whole day about the discomforts. I have suffered in life more because I am a transgender than a lesbian.

All trans people that I have interacted with mention such or even worse moments in their lives. It can be a very deep violation of our being to be forced to perform our gender differently than we want it and feel it for ourselves.

Some people, like myself, are born with a sense of ourselves as male in some ways, even though we are biologically female.

As a transgender person, I am constantly demanded to explain and justify why I am not fitting into other people’s idea of what a woman or a man should be.

Victor goes on to describe the type of violatons faced by transgendered people in Africa:

Human Rights Abuses and Violations
I can give specific examples :
• Raped to prove that you are really a woman
• At school: public assembly and humiliation: beaten
• Thrown out of family home
• Thrown out of subsequent homes by landlords
• Lose job because feel violated wearing a skirt
• Psychological Effects of Abuse: Depression, Anger, Drinking, Suicide
• Daily level: holding full bladder for 12-18 hours
• Being undressed and humiliated:
o By government: To get passport
o In church – I was once stripped naked as in naked!, in church, before a multitude of people. The pastor ‘saw’ a spirit of a young man inside me and they burnt my clothes and shoes in order to kill the male spirit.
o By Police: humiliation, mocking, mistreatment

(via Blacklooks)