What's stopping us from being more forceful about stepping up to the plate and fighting for trans human rights in our communities on this side of the Atlantic?Over the last few years I've noted that despite faith-based anti-trans and gay hatred injected into the continent by white American Southern Baptist missionaries, our African trans cousins in their various nations on the continent gave been over the last several years increasingly stepping up,organizing and fighting for their human rights in their various nations and across the Mother Continent.
They are also doing the education on trans issues. Forming trans organizations not only in their own respective nations but banding together to hold conferences and form regional and trans African coalitions to do the work. You have people such as Liesl Theron in South Africa, Audrey Mbugua in Kenya, Victor Mukasa in Uganda becoming the spokespersons for the trans communities in their nations.
In Victor's case, he was forced to leave Uganda because of government harassment to the point he sued them and won in 2009. Others like Nigeria's Mia Nikasimo are part of the Diaspora and eloquently writing and speaking abut the issues related to being trans on the African continent and debunking the lie that transsexuality is 'un-African' , they don't exist there and being trans is 'a Western concept'.
We in the Western end of the African Diaspors definitely need to be following their lead. We need to be doing what we can to not only build our communities here on our side of the Atlantic, but prepare ourselves for the day when we can reach our hands out to our African trans cousins and our African descended Caribbean ones as well if they ask for our help.
So I ask again. If our African trans cousins can do it in terms of being agents of their own liberation, why can't we African descended people in the United States do a better job of emulating them?
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