Gender Variance in Africa

The relationship between transgender topics and race, particularly in African or Black history, is of interest to me for many reasons. The ways in which race and gender are discussed in every other Afro-American Studies course at the university neglects transgender identities or issues, except for a Black Feminisms course. For the above reasons, focusing on concepts of gender variance and transgender identity within African history and its relationship to the present and contemporary obstacles in place against LGBTI communities in Africa deserves critical attention, especially since Western imperialist notions of gender are still imposed on Africa through Western organizations (Sweet 138). However, further examination of African gender concepts seem embedded in a male-female binary, albeit one that can be crossed, but seemingly rooted in a binary nonetheless.

Several questions are apparent as a result of centering the experiences of African transgender topics. James Sweet’s focus on transvested male healers recognized as women within West and Central African societies forcibly relocated in the context of Portuguese colonial rule and racial slavery. As mentioned in class, Sweet asserts the differing fields of perception that Africans and Europeans came from in defining genders. Some African societies constructed a transwoman identity for healers for instance (132). However, Sweet recognizes that not all healers were tranvested males, nor were all homosexual men seen as transvested healers (137). Interestingly, Sweet links the origin of the Central African Bantu term, jimbaanda, used in colonial Brazil to describe passive ‘sodomites’ who identified as female, to healers and spirit mediums (131). Once again, this still reinforces a gender binary or male-female dichotomy in both Portuguese and Central African contexts, which is problematic because of the presence of transgender individuals who do not identify as either gender.

Sweet also suggests that effeminacy was a widespread trait many African societies believed was necessary for male healers to be spiritually penetrable or mediums, so these tranvested males within an African socio-cultural context practicing female gestures were erased under the Western and colonial labels homosexual. Taken from their African-derived relations and kin structures where transvested males were accepted, Sweet locates the persecution of homosexuals in Africa to the colonial and post-colonial eras, when migrants to cities and industry were rooted from their cultural context that had a recognized role for them(138). This has, as suggested by Sweet, an important impact on homophobia and transphobia in Africa, which relates the existence of homosexuality to European colonialism and influences that did not exist in Africa.

Beyond historical examples from contexts of slavery and colonialism in Africa, the experiences of gender-transgressive black South Africans and transwomen facing homophobic and transphobic violence today is reminiscent of the problems rooted in colonialism and Western discursive violence through imposition of Western-minded labels and definitions for LGBT South Africans. An odd problem appears for how can South African transgender communities identify without some reference at least to the broader world’s notions of sexuality and gender. It seems inescapable and evident in not only some of the vocabulary used by South African LGBTI to describe themselves, but also due to the fact that many African cultures seem to reinforce a concept of gender that is rooted in a male-female binary (Baderoon 392). Societies may have “boy wives” or “male daughters,” but that is still rooted in some binary that seems inevitable and exclusive to those with no interest in male or female identities (Sweet 140).  Fortunately, some efforts at surpassing a gender binary have taken place in South Africa due to the growing indigenous vocabulary for gender and sexual diversity (Baderoon 414). The space for moving beyond the gender binary seems to only appear in the case of a transman, Gerard, who defines masculinity or the male identity on an individual level by not binding his breasts, for example (412). This form of transgender identity, individualized and not linked to any notion of spirituality or kin relations like transvested male healers, however, seems to resemble Western notions of gender and sexuality not based in community-oriented notions of gender seen in pre-colonial Africa.

Nevertheless, the problems transgender identities face in South Africa, if still primarily based in transing to another socially-recognized gender, remain linked to the pre-colonial past and colonialism’s destructive impact through heteronormative Christianity as demonstrated by Baderoon and Sweet. The masculinization and sexualization of black bodies, oddly never mentioned by Baderoon but present in white American mainstream media coverage of Delisa Newton, an African-American transwoman mocked for trying to pass as a woman, must also be relevant to issues of homophobia and transphobia in South Africa (Skidmore 293). Black bodies in South Africa and elsewhere remain seen as oversexualized and demonized as well, since the days of Sarah Baartman, from what is now South Africa, who was paraded throughout 18^th century Europe because of her buttocks and later dissected (lecture). Thus, black bodies are either oversexualized and acceptable for receiving or committing assault or seen as inferior and monstrous. However, the solution for lesbian South African photographer Muholi is to capture images of intimacy and sexual affirmation among trans and lesbian models, challenging widely disseminated images of beaten lesbians, for instance, attempts to raise consciousness of the sexuality and happiness of lesbians and transgender South Africans (Baderoon 401).

Overall, the readings of the course relevant to Africa and African bodies, though critical of Western colonialism and imperialist discourse on defining transgender, still perpetuate a gender binary. Moreover, what about male homosexuality and other divergent conceptual fields of gender exist in African cultures, especially for female-bodied individuals? Sweet’s article perpetuates a form of male-centered approaches to understanding transgender identity in Central Africa and the diaspora. Baderoon’s exploration of South African transgender and lesbian identities in South Africa seeks to move beyond that in the 21^st century, while also the need for LGBTI communities in South Africa to redefine and assert themselves in the public sphere through local forms.