Shifting borderlands (Trans) 'Gender refugees' moving to and through an imagined South Africa - Amsterdam University Press Journals Online

Shifting borderlands
(Trans) ‘Gender refugees’ moving to and through an imagined South Africa

B Camminga

    TVGN ２０ (４): ３５９–３７７
    DOI: １０.５１１７/TVGN２０１７.４.CAMM

    Abstract
    Within Africa’s long history of migration, this article focuses on the specific
    context of South Africa’s recent influx of people fleeing persecution, violence,
    and discrimination on the grounds of their gender identity/expression. This
    paper conceptualises people who can make claims to the refugee status,
    fleeing their countries of origin based on the persecution of their gender
    identity as ‘gender refugees’. I argue that gender refugees are different from
    sexual refugees in that their pre-dominant forced migration issue pertains to
    their gender identity, which is perceived as incongruent to their birth-
    assigned sex. Drawing on life story interviews carried out by the author
    between 2013 and 2015 with gender refugees living in South Africa, along
    with analysis of media and archival materials, this paper explores how, when,
    and under what circumstances transgender-identified individuals from coun-
    tries in Africa are forced to journey, and come to seek refuge in South Africa
    specifically. Utilising the notions of ‘shifting’ and ‘discomfort’ as analytics in
    relation to narratives provided, I suggest that South Africa functions as a pan-
    African national imaginary, even for migrants, which represents a particular
    understanding of freedom due to widespread knowledge of its unique
    Constitutional precepts. In conclusion, I emphasise how the State in gender
    refugees’ countries of origin, which sanctions the possibility of death for
    transgender people as exemplary subjects, plays an especially transformative
    role in the decision to flee.

    Keywords: transgender asylum, transgender Africa, gender migration, borderlands,
    necropolitics

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South Africa offers the possibility of asylum on the basis of persecution due
to sexual orientation or gender identity through the South African Refu-
gees Act of 1998 when read in conjunction with a Constitution (R.S.A.
Const. Act 108)１ that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, gender,２
and sexual orientation.３ This unique trans-inclusive precept, along with
the fact that South Africa does not practise a system of encampment, has
created a distinctive asylum regime compared with the rest of the African
continent. Knowledge of South Africa’s somewhat controversial Constitu-
tion is widespread on the African continent. As a result, over time, South
Africa has become the destination for those fleeing persecution, which is a
growing class of persons due to growing antagonisms across the continent
regarding human rights, the legacy of colonial era penal codes, and a rise in
State-enforced practices of heteronormativity.
    Within Africa’s long history of migration, this article focuses on the
specific context of South Africa’s recent influx of people fleeing persecution
on the grounds of their gender identity/expression. This paper conceptua-
lises this new class of migrant – people who are fleeing their countries of
origin based on the persecution of their gender identity and who can make
legitimate claims to refugee status – as ‘gender refugees’. I argue that
gender refugees are different from sexual refugees in that their pre-domi-
nant forced migration issue pertains to their gender identity, which is
perceived as incongruent to their birth-assigned sex. Being transgender-
identified and a refugee or asylum seeker is a relatively recent and under-
researched facet of the refugee experience more generally but particularly
on the African continent.４ Furthermore, very little is known regarding the
lived experience of transgender-identified individuals in countries of origin
that might force them to seek refuge (Camminga, 2016).
    Drawing on fourteen life story interviews５ I carried out between 2013
and 2015 with gender refugees living in South Africa, along with the analy-
sis of recent media and archival materials, this paper explores how, when,
and under what circumstances transgender-identified individuals from
countries in Africa are forced to journey, and come to seek refuge in
South Africa specifically. Utilising the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Judith
Butler in conjunction with my ethnographic research, I see that, for gender
refugees on the African continent, their existence in their countries of
origin is often one of spatial and emotional ‘discomfort’ (Anzaldúa, 1987),
which requires a mode of survival that involves ‘shifting’ between social
registers (Butler, 1993). This is in large part due to the fact that those who
present in ways considered gender non-conforming or disruptive to the
social order are read as the epitome of homosexuality. Appearing as exces-

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sively gay results in a kind of sociocultural hyper-visibility of transness
that, in relation to same-sex sexuality’s status as widely illegal and immor-
al, situates trans bodies as one of Agamben’s (1998) ‘exemplary subjects’ –
they are placed beyond recourse to the law and yet ‘still occupy more-
often-than-not a precarious relationship to the law’ (Downey, 2013, p. 119).
    The scarcity of data regarding transgender specific experiences on the
African continent has contributed to a lack of funding, a lack of transgen-
der specific services, and an absence of information ‘regarding local differ-
ence within the broad category “transgender”’ (Jobson, Theron, Kaggwa, &
Kim, 2012, p. 161). Unlike the more generalised representations of lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) existence on the African continent
that tend to present an homogenous image of violence, the stories told
here challenge blanket narratives of constant persecution (Hoad, 1999, p.
561). Instead, they offer insight into the diverse circumstances faced by
transgender people with experiences of violence that lead to forced migra-
tion, and also powerful articulations of an imaginary South Africa invested
in available narratives of its constitutional democracy.

The violent shifts that gender the body: From ‘it’ to ‘she’ or
‘he’

  I fled my home after my mother tried to inject me with a syringe of gasoline
  [...] After leaving my mother’s house, I began living with my father [...] my
  father saw a picture taken of me kissing another man. After confronting me, my
  father and mother forced me into a ‘healing process’ run by a pastor. I was
  made to fast for days in order to expel the ‘devil spirit’ out of my body. When I
  did not change my behaviour, my father spread the news of my homosexuality
  to the community [...] My life was in danger and I had nowhere to go, so I
  came to South Africa. (Alex)

Alex left Central Africa, having known for much of their６ life that some-
thing about them set them apart from their peers. Their short description
of experiences leading up to their coming to South Africa highlights several
threads that cumulatively play a significant role in becoming a gender
refugee: family, community, homosexuality, violence – seemingly free of
impunity – and finally the threat of death. In looking back at their child-
hood, they recall what they now see as moments of ‘discrimination’ – being
taunted by local children, questioned by adults regarding their gender and
feeling as though they were somehow different. They attribute much of

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this behaviour on the part of their community to being a reaction to the
way they looked, spoke, and walked – all of which had a distinctive femi-
ninity perceived as indicative of homosexuality. Initially, as a child, in
instances of being teased, they would go and tell their mother, who
would then affirm her child’s assigned gender. For Alex, though, the feel-
ings surrounding these incidents were far more complicated:

  I start feeling that I am not normal [...] I start asking [...] ‘Why am I like this?’
  [...] You know if you want to play with girls they say no you not a girl you a
  boy. If you want to go play with the boys they say no you not a boy you look like
  a girl. So I was just like in the middle [...] my mother can go shout to these
  people, ‘Why you calling my child names? [...] He’s normal, he’s a boy’. (Alex)

A commonality in the lives of all participants, most often heard for the first
time in their formative years, has been this question of whether they are a
boy or a girl. This is not a line of questioning that requires an answer;
rather, it is a statement presenting the early borders of personhood and
belonging at several intersecting levels, but most importantly gender/sexu-
ality. Gender is imposed on an individual largely based on their perceived
biological sex. For Butler, medical interpellation from the time of birth
‘shifts an infant from an “it” to a “she” or a “he”, and in that naming the
girl is “girled”, brought into the domain of language and kinship through
the interpellation of gender’ (1993, p. 7). This founding interpellation is
then reiterated throughout their lives. When a child contests this by not
‘boying’ or ‘girling’ as expected, they begin to trouble ‘that field of discourse
and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as
‘the human’ (p. 8.). As with Alex, Stella and Ava from East Africa were
assigned male at birth and attest to the experience of this violent injunc-
tion to shift into a designated gender category, and their own reactions to
the confusion from early childhood on.

  The community [...] asked me everywhere I go, ‘Are you girl? Are you boy?’
  [...] it was very confuse. (Stella)

  If you could see me when I was little, people used to get confused, ‘Are you a
  boy or a girl?’ [...] I used to like it when people would see me as a woman’.
  (Ava)

The logic of the injunction is made clearest when Alex is told they cannot
play with anyone because they are not a girl, but they are also read as not a

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boy because they look like a girl. For gender refugees from African coun-
tries, the violent shifting that never fully achieves proper girlhood or boy-
hood often provides the first words or inklings that something is strange
and that this strangeness is visible to others. These situated African reali-
ties, encompassed in the idea of shifting, represent a specific geo- and body
politics of knowledge. This is epistemically important as a situated differ-
ence, because it opens the possibility of a particular African and/or migrant
ontology of the category transgender (and in this case, as will be seen, its
relation to sexuality) (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006, p. 207).
    The questions participants encounter as children are not directed at
who they are but rather, more crucially, what they are – a question of
their humanness. Sara Ahmed posits that the stranger is one who is already
known, someone who is recognised but, critically, this is an identification
of ‘some-body’ who is perceived as being out of place (2000, p. 21). This is
not someone that society fails to recognise; rather, the stranger is a body
that is differentiated from others within a visual hierarchy on the basis of
how they appear (pp. 21-22). Akraam, also assigned male at birth, from a
country in the Horn of Africa, acutely recalls this differentiation the nam-
ing practices of neighbourhood children. Based on her appearance, in par-
ticular in relation to her feminine hand gestures:

  They used to call me ‘ladyboy’ and when my mother heard that she used to cry.
  (Akraam)

For participants, violent acts of shifting into different, often-impossible,
gender categories through naming alerted them to their low rank on the
gender hierarchy. Yet, in grappling with the interpellated terms from
others, they also were opened to the possibility that they were ‘transgen-
der’, as Alex explains, even though they did not have the word for it. What I
am suggesting here is that gender non-conforming individuals present
visible signs of incongruence that raise questions and trouble the initial
interpellations. Like the state of forced migratory movement they were to
experience later, participants first experienced the violence of shifts from
‘it’ into proper gender categories and back towards the space of ‘it’. As with
Alex’s experience of co-impossible naming, it is in their initial readings of
being ‘not normal’ that gender refugees first face the threat of expulsion
from their ‘genders-of-origin’ that replicates, in geopolitical terms, from
their homes, communities, families, and even countries of origin.

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The family home and school: Unexpected sites for
affirmation and discipline

Contrary to generalising statements found in the literature on intra-African
LGBT experience, not all families read their children’s incongruence as
immediately problematic: not all homes carry the danger of expulsion –
some not initially and some not ever. Within some families, mothers in
particular show a certain level of acceptance. Bobbie, from Southern Africa,
explains how her mother would often buy her girls’ shoes or ‘high shoes’:

  When I was a kid [...] I used to cry for high shoes [...] my mother ended up
  saying, ‘Let me just buy shoes for him because he is crying’ [...] even at school
  those civvies [casual] days, [...] I used to dress like a woman. (Bobbie)

Though not all parents actively facilitate their children’s non-conformity,
some research participants reported that their parents seemed to turn a
blind eye. Akraam distinctly remembers desiring girls’ clothes as a child,
which she often stole from her sister. Raised in a strict Muslim household,
she was aware of the severity of this transgression, but, like Bobbie, she
continued to ‘dress like a woman’ at home. Akraam believes her mother
knew what she was doing. While she did not endorse Akraam’s behaviour,
she did not sanction it either; rather, it was simply never mentioned.
    While families can certainly function as holding spaces for their chil-
dren’s burgeoning gender expression, schools played a particular role as a
site of discipline.

  At school it was more than the dressing. When the teacher used to tell me, ‘[...]
  Be like a real man!’ [...] He used to tell me to put my hands like this [...]
  [masculine gesture] [...] and he beat me [...] with a stick to stop it [feminin-
  ity]. (Akraam)

Her femininity became a clear site of derision and a sign that it was some-
thing that she was doing (as opposed to something she was wearing), over
which she felt she had no control. This kind of disciplining was ostensibly
done in front of other children. This had the two-fold effect of punishing
participants’ gender non-conformity through humiliation while also rein-
forcing the ‘correct and proper’ expectation of gender for the rest of the
class as audience. For Tatenda from Southern Africa, reflecting on a similar
experience, this public berating was doubly demeaning in that not only did

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she feel an excessive visibility, but this visibility was also linked to some-
thing with which she did not identify – being gay.

  According to the community (in country of origin) and my family I was a gay
  man, [...] the impact was huge and painful because [...] I am treated for who I
  am not [...] If someone hits [...] me I cannot go and report it the police
  because the law does not allow gay people [...] so they had that strength to say
  whatever they wanted [...] they know you cannot go anywhere with it. (Ntuli,
  2011)

Ahmed (2000) argues that perceived cultural difference is an anxious space
where social boundaries are reinforced. Within her framework of strangers
and estrangement, recognition based on appearance allows for naming to
take place – Ladyboy or Gay – which signifies that body as unwelcome or
out of place, particularly in the social space. These are the beginnings of
exclusion and the seeds of marginalisation. This initial questioning, a visi-
bility in childhood, develops into a kind of hyper-visibility as they grow
older – a visibility in excess – ‘when it is impossible to pass unnoticed’
(Moreno, 2008, p. 140). Given the prevalence of transgender-identified
women, like Akraam, Stella, and Tatenda, in terms of gender refugees in
South Africa, this hyper-visibility seems to be particularly true but not
isolated to those who eventually come to identify as women or express
femininity. It is in adulthood that these initial issues become more press-
ing. Cleo from East Africa provides some insight into the possible reasons
for this:

  For a man to dress up as a woman with a patriarchy that is our culture [...] it is
  like degrading themselves to a woman [...] You are such a loss to humanity.
  (Transgender in Africa: The great divide, 2013)

Cleo points here to the slippage that gender non-conformity maintains
into adulthood out of the zone of the human, to Butler’s ‘it’. This hyper-
visibility, this shifting space of the de-humanising ‘it’ begins to facilitate, in
the words of Giorgio Agamben ‘a state of exception’ where, in countries of
origin, prior to becoming gender refugees, transgender people experience
existence at the boundary of the contemporary notions of Biopolitical life
(Agamben, 1998, p. 170). Sunera Thobani warns, though, that Agamben
does not recognise the colonial heritage and, by extension, the historically
racialised/racialising power and forms of violence embedded within the
production of exception (2012, p. 3). In bringing together Butler and Agam-

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ben, the historical construction of this state of exception – most readily
visible in the on-going use of colonial era penal codes – and the accompa-
nying colonial racial logics of power cannot be overlooked. This does not
negate their impact but suggests rather that exception, in this case, similar
to the experiences of transgender people within and beyond their familial
homes, must also be understood as shifting in relation to the historically
unstable and dehumanising colonial borders of racialised sexuality.

Shifting into homosexuality: Communities and the lack of
recourse to protection

Victor Mukasa was one of the first ‘high profile’ transgender-identified
activists to seek refuge in South Africa in the mid-2000s. He explains how
the perception of homosexuality eclipses the perception of gender variance
within communities:

  Generally, all gender non-conforming people are ‘automatically’ branded
  homosexuals as in most of our communities, a man who looks or has tenden-
  cies of a woman is the proper picture of a gay man. In the same way, a woman
  who looks like or has tendencies of a man is declared a lesbian. (Mukasa &
  Balzer, 2009, p. 124)

This insight does not mean it is simple to separate what is gender and what
is sexuality – the one often stands in for the other, they intersect in sig-
nificant ways, and are, more often than not, collapsed into one another.
This is partly due to the fact that, in these instances, ‘gender is not simply
mistaken for sexuality or vice-versa; the two are read through one another
and constitute each other’s logic’ (Lamble, 2008, p. 32). This logic of sexu-
ality as gender expression seems to be particularly true for the countries
and communities from which participants hail, where homosexuality is
the most common term deployed to signal their difference, regardless of
self-identity. Vivian Namaste notes that would-be attackers do not ‘char-
acteristically inquire as to the sexual identity of their potential victims, but
rather make this assumption on their own’ (2000, pp. 140-141). For the
majority of participants, their gender expressions were experienced as a
source of unavoidable derision in their countries of origin, a reason for
surveillance and correction. Most often, when they left the family home
and entered disciplinary social spaces like schools, their gender presenta-
tion brought them into a sexualised hyper-visibility, but also situated them

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within a discourse of homosexuality and abjection with no recourse to
protection.
    Julius Kaggwa, a leading intersex activist from Uganda, explains that
issues of sexuality in most parts of Africa are silenced, or at best ‘addressed
only through stigmatising sensational media exposure’ (2011, pp. 233-234).
He relates this attitude to a broader ingraining of patriarchy and hetero-
normativity – both reliant on a deep-rooted societal belief in fixed identi-
ties. Cleo echoes Julius, adding that this issue of fixity can be particularly
pernicious when it comes to presenting in ways that trouble these expecta-
tions:

  African culture is not something you would look at as homogeneous [...]
  cultures are quite different but we are people who don’t really talk about
  sexuality [...] gender is [...] almost rigid [...] anything that tries to change or
  shift that is really seen with a lot of negativity and [...] backlash. (Von Wall-
  ström, 2015; my emphasis)

The shift referred to here by Cleo is one that is geopolitically significant in
terms of transgender African realities because it names what it takes to
speak about the spectre of perceived homosexuality. Arguably, it is this
coterminous link from gender to sexuality that often blocks any recourse
to protection for trans people on the African continent, while forming part
and parcel of the epistemic and ontological construction of their transgen-
der existence.
    Hyper-visibility does not always necessarily provoke a negative re-
sponse from communities, though. For Tricia and Bobbie from Southern
Africa, this hostility was certainly ever-present, but only when they moved
beyond their own communities in their countries of origin. Living in close-
knit communities throughout their adolescence meant that there was a
certain undeniable visibility regarding who they were – as Tricia explains,
she had always looked ‘like a little woman’. This outward display of femi-
ninity signalled a particular understanding with regards to perceived sexu-
ality within both of their families and communities, which extended to a
tacit acceptance on the part of these communities. For Tricia, when new
trainee police officers entered her community, this tacit understanding
regarding who she was functioned as an injunction against the seemingly
standard practice of police harassment of those perceived to be homosex-
ual:

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  These new people [...] they don’t understand what I am, they try to harass me
  but some of the cops they tell them to stop. They tell them that they know this
  person [...] ‘he was born in this country [...] he grew up in this area’. (Tricia)

In every instance, for every participant, gender-transgressive behaviour
was read as indicative of homosexuality, but, in my findings, communities
like families differ in their approaches and responses. Harassment –
whether in schools or on the street – was a common experience, but it is
Tricia’s interaction with local police that provides a crucial clue as to how
transgender people might become gender refugees – in that her protection
as a human being from harassment was not a given.

Discomfort: Conflict, violence, and life in the borderlands

Nelly explains what it was like to live in her Southern African country of
origin, feeling constantly watched in her attempts to perform an adequate
masculinity that would mask her femininity:

  I was not comfortable [...] I was forced to speak in a voice that wasn’t mine, to
  walk in a step that wasn’t mine. To put on clothes that I wasn’t comfortable
  with. (Nelly)

For Nelly, being forced to behave in ways that did not align with her
understanding of self in relation to her environment, together with her
heightened visibility, led to a state of discomfort. Discomfort experienced
on multiple levels – physical, social, and psychological – is a crucial analy-
tic for grasping the geospecificity of trans existence for participants. Gloria
Anzaldúa describes a borderland as ‘a vague and undetermined place cre-
ated by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary where the prohib-
ited [...] reside in a place of discomfort as they negotiate between the
conflicting forces in such margins’ (Aigner-Varoz, 2000, p. 49). For partici-
pants, the unnatural boundary is ostensibly that between ‘man’ and
‘woman’ (embedded within notions of heteronormativity). This is a bound-
ary, which they transgress experiencing the conflicting forces of shifting
states of being. She argues that individuals who live in the borderlands –
physically, epistemologically, or ontologically – negotiate several conflict-
ing cultural representations and social expectations with regards to both
who they are and what they are expected to be.
    Those that find themselves pushed into the borderlands are often open

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to exploitation and extreme exclusion. If, from childhood, it is made clear
that something is not quite right with participants’ behaviour, then they
are set at the border of what is perceived to be correct by some families,
communities, and the State. They are shifted into conflict through outside
forces, trying to negotiate their acceptance from a space of enforced mar-
ginalisation. Returning to Butler’s understanding of bodily subjectivity,
‘shifting’ can be brought into conversation with this life in the borderlands
that similarly requires resilience and survival. The subject experiencing this
discomfort most, because of how they make others uncomfortable, is often
actually enshrined as that individual who is set apart by others by law, the
exemplary figure of the state of exceptionalism, or homo sacer (Agamben,
1998). Describing the lives lived on the margins as ‘lives half lived’, Downey
notes that, for Agamben, ‘these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is
largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life’
(2013, p. 119). Although all participants discuss their journeys as one’s of
survival, Sasha (2008), from East Africa, perhaps provides a summary nar-
rative of what it means to exist thrust into a state of exceptionalism, into a
literal limbo between borders:

  At the border [...] they said ‘you are gay, how do you look like? Here in Tanzania
  we don't want this’ and then I said ‘please, I am not going to Tanzania I am going
  to Mozambique [...] just entry visa I am not going to stay’ [...] I need money
  from Tanzania to Malawi with the bus and visa [...] I spent something like one
  week in Malawi [...] and then I went to Mozambique [...] I spent like two
  months, because I was resting and the money was finished [...] I was waiting
  [...] to go to South Africa. I did not have a visa. So what I do? [...] I negotiated
  with the one person, he said ‘okay, I can take you [...] I will hide you [...] in the
  big truck. (‘Sasha’, 2008)

Borderland existence, with its series of discomforts, necessitates flexibility.
To be clear, the problem for participants – the very reason for their experi-
ences of exclusion – was not that they could not express their genders in
fuller or more ‘correct’ ways, but rather that communities, schools, and
families often inhibited the most elementary level of what was felt as right-
ful gender expression. In instances of reprisal, there was no recourse to
protection effectively placing transgender individuals into a highly precar-
ious relation to the law.

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Necropolitics: Persecution, illegality, and death

Akraam asks ‘Am I a crime to somebody?’, a question that highlights the
shifting coherence between perceived illegality and persecution in relation
to her gender identity and her experiences of harassment in her country of
origin. In recent years, one of the most authoritative narratives that has
come to define the contours of what it means to be African has been the
marking of what it means to be ‘unAfrican’ by utilising the figure of the
homosexual. The doubling down on anti-homosexual discourses has been
intimately linked to the liberalisation of gender identity and sexuality.
South Africa’s transition to constitutional democracy in the mid-1990s has
provoked a continent-wide backlash against gender and sexual minorities.
The very humanity of gender non-conforming individuals is under threat
by being forced into the category of sexual deviant and criminal. In all of
the countries that participants left, same-sex sexuality is considered illegal.
The singular exception relies on public decency provisions to persecute
those considered to be homosexual, though legislation has been suggested
to formalise these persons as behaving in illegal ways.
    Achille Mbembe begins his essay ‘Necropolitics’ with a clear position
that sovereignty, in the present day, is about having the power to be able to
designate the living – those worthy of life and vitality – from the dead
(Mbembe & Meintjies, 2003, p. 11). For Foucault (1998), Biopower is consti-
tutive of modernity, comprised of systems that manage, control, and assist
in facilitating a liveable life for those considered worthy of protection and
investment. Biopower is about not only ensuring life but also maximising
it. Nicholas Mirzoeff posits that ‘death is the point where life escapes and
exceeds Biopower, forcing it paradoxically to produce death to safeguard
life [...] any deployment of “life” also exists in a relation to the “natural”’
(2009, p. 290). Attaching life to the ‘natural’ carries considerable weight
when read against the discourse that continues to link homosexuality to
the ‘unnatural’. As Alex makes clear:

  It’s too much problem in Africa [...] People live in ignorance, people live in
  confusion [...] they don’t want to listen and they don’t want to understand that
  this is natural. That this exists. People cannot force to be who they are not.
  (Alex)

Mbembe troubles the possibility of Biopolitics being fully able to account
for the ways in which contemporary forms of life are subjugated by the
power of death, particularly in relation to refugee experience. He argues

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that Necropower takes into account technologies of power that facilitate
the maximum possibility of life and vitality for some populations, while
pursuing the maximum destruction of other populations (Mbeme, 2001)
These others are funnelled into new and unique forms of social existence:
worlds of ‘living dead’; ‘bare life’ where the only focus can be survival
(Mbembe, 2007). It is a confluence of factors that animate the experience
of shifting in order to survive for transgender-identified individuals, which
might eventually force them to flee. Mukasa makes clear the impact of this
designation of life and death:

  You have a government that has denied our existence [...] faith leaders that
  have demonised you and telling people to hunt you [...] the press calling for
  you to be hanged [...] these laws [...] that advocate for the death penalty for
  homosexuals [...] lesbians and trans men and even in some cases transgender
  women reporting corrective [...] rape [...] arbitrary arrests, exclusion from
  policies [...] This is the day-to-day of being bashed by people in public space
  [...] you don’t know where you belong anymore. (Mukasa & Albert, 2013)

Mbembe, echoing Butler’s shifting space of ‘it’, asks what it might ‘mean to
do violence to that which is nothing [...] Who is a human being and who is
not [...] If one is not a human being, what is one?’ (Mbembe, 2001, p. 174).
This is the raising and reinforcing of the boundary between life worlds and
death worlds, between the stranger and the known, between man and
woman, and between the perceived homosexual and the perceived hetero-
sexual. Those living in states of discomfort in these borderlands experience
a denial of humanity embedded in this question: Am I a crime to some-
body?
   As I have argued, transgender individuals are more vulnerable to vio-
lence and victimisation because they are more visible in terms of their non-
conforming gender expression and, therefore, perceived as homosexuals in
their countries of origin. As Mukasa (2009), speaking at the UN regarding
human rights violations of LGBT people across the African continent, adds:

  My experience might be unique [...] but in the way that African states collec-
  tively negate the basic human rights of LGBT people [...] is a shared experi-
  ence. African states are increasingly committing human rights violations
  against LGBT people, encouraging and inciting violence through leaders’
  homophobic speeches or silence in the face of others’ calls to violence.
  (Mukasa, 2009)

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In almost all cases, the lines are redrawn with the tacit approval/encour-
agement of the State, borders proclaimed, and those not worthy of life and
living are placed at the outer limits – as being not at home in the body of
the nation. It is then that the shift that necessitates leaving is enacted.

  If I go to other towns [...] they don’t understand me [...] people they harass me
  [...] shout at me [...] ‘What do you want here? We will kill you! Go overseas!
  Go to South Africa!’. (Tricia)

  I was tortured [...] those guys were going to cut off both of my arms [...] I have
  to leave [...] to come here in South Africa so that I can get peaceful life.
  (Daniel)

When the State remains actively unavailable as a source of protection or
intervention, transgender people experience violence, deprivation, and
eventually civil, social, and political death. This moment, though, as Da-
niel’s and Tricia’s statements attest to, is also seemingly linked to a parti-
cular notion of South Africa as a space that is correspondent with people
like them.

Imaginaries: The freedom of South Africa

  In that church in [country of origin] [...] praying for South Africa not to get this
  bad thing [...] for the Constitution accepting gays and lesbians [...] for me it
  was like information. ‘Oh my gosh South Africa accepts gays and lesbians!’
  (Ava)

Gender refugees glean prior knowledge of South Africa from radio, televi-
sion, the Internet, and other cultural influences. The country is synon-
ymous with a single word, as Arthur notes about his knowledge of the
country prior to arriving: ‘freedom, freedom, freedom’. Gender refugees,
coming to South Africa, invest this almost mythical space with their ima-
ginings of it as a cohesive, welcoming nation of possibility. Benedict An-
derson (2006) explains this process of identification with ‘nation-ness’ and
desire for a sense of belonging, as part of the socially constructed historical
being of nations, which invests them with particular meaning and ‘pro-
found emotional legitimacy’ (p. 48). For participants, this meaning making
and identification was comprised of three key elements.
   Firstly, the imaginary of South Africa holds out the possibility of a move

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out of the borderlands, into a society which, it is believed, will provide
acceptance, while allowing personal expression. As Daniel, who left East
Africa, makes clear: ‘I came with them (a bag full of dresses) to have the
liberty to do what I want’. Secondly, South Africa is invested with a notion
of belonging. The country is imagined as a space in which to settle –
ostensibly ending the precarious nature and discomfort of a shifting exis-
tence. For Kelly from East Africa, this shifting was the kernel of the narra-
tive of persecution that she hoped to be able to present to a Refugee
Reception Officer in South Africa:

  When you do have your interview you’re going to [...] claim you are persecuted
  because [...] they wanted to kill me three times [...] and I shifted three times,
  [...] every month I had to shift [...] Until I came this side [South Africa]. (Kelly)

Lastly, South Africa represents a place of potential comfort, or at least an
alleviation of prior discomfort. That is, where the lives of gender refugees
might hold the possibility not only of being acknowledged, but also valued,
in the very fact that they are protected by law.
    This shifting state of being, which functions as the epistemological rea-
lity of transgender existence for these participants, is a source of oppres-
sion in their day-to-day existence. While shifting might happen within the
borders of life and death, it also happens between nation spaces and in-
vested imaginings. Bobbie, from Southern Africa, explains the intertwining
of rights, protection, and the ability to dress as she pleases and the pro-
found emotional investment she has in South Africa:

  ’t’s like in [...] [country of origin] [...] we don’t have these rights [...] to expose
  ourselves [...] they (friends) said [...] you have to go to South Africa [...] you
  are free to wear what you want. (Bobbie)

Bobbie describes this imagined space as one where she would have the
right to ‘expose’ herself, enabling who she is. This suggests a belief in being
able to actualise her gender fully, without the threat of marginalisation. For
gender refugees, the expectation is that South Africa will acknowledge
them as human beings, reinstating their humanity, and that there will be
others like them. Unfortunately, this hoped for imaginary is largely not the
reality in the research so far (Camminga, 2017). However, in terms of an
imaginary for gender refugees that acts as a force drawing them across the
borderlands of the African continent, it is clear that South Africa represents
the possibility of no longer being at odds with the law. The forces that pull

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these gender refugees across a metaphoric and literal space of shifting, is
the desire to imagine themselves to be included in the ‘we’ of a nation.
   In conclusion, when the gendered subjectivity of a body is troubled, a
shifting takes place that interrupts personhood, and in the case of gender
refugees, this shift signals the beginnings of danger. Mukasa’s (2013) words,
in an interview with US based organisation Immigration Equality regarding
‘the smell of death’, are poignant here:

  I said I would never seek asylum in my life. I thought it would be cowardly [...]
  When my friend [...] was killed, I started to smell death [...] and I decided I
  was not ready to die [...] It was time for me to leave [...] to save my life.

Death, here, includes the possibility of literal, physical death, but also
social, political, and civil death – the social relations of death, decay, and
dying that emerge from prolonged exposure to violence, neglect, depriva-
tion, and suffering. Mbembe’s reading of necropolitics as ‘the work of
death’ and sovereignty as ‘the right to kill or extinguish’ opens the possibi-
lity of theorising the moment of discomfort, departure, and the nature of
shifting.
    Key to my argument has been this notion of shifting, a state of move-
ment or migration that is present from the very moment gendered assig-
nations – from ‘it’ to ‘he’ or ‘she’ (and back again) – are made. ‘What are
you?’ is a question that signifies the threat of expulsion from the zone of
the human, and elicits the first introduction to shifting, and replicates, in
geopolitical terms, in shifts away from participants’ homes, communities,
families, and countries of origin. Gender refugees evade and creatively
survive day-to-day discomforts and dangers by inhabiting a state of shifting
– navigating physical and metaphorical borders and borderland spaces.
This is in large part due to the fact that their expressions of gender are
not widely understood as indications of transgender identity but rather as
the hyper-visible signals of homosexuality – a site of disruption to the
social order. I offer that the shifting of gender refugees represents an epis-
teme of transgender life on the African continent, which offers critical in-
sight into how transgender identity is experienced and how the discourse
of transgender functions in relation to sexuality, visibility, and violence. If,
for Anzaldúa, the borderlands represent marginality, ambiguity, and con-
tradiction, then participants hope to emerge from the borderlands into
South Africa in order to be part of a protected and acknowledged popu-
lous. This imaginary of freedom is an investment in nation-ness, directly
linked to the perceived materiality of transgender rights in the country, all

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of which are imagined to be available by shifting to the other side of a
borderline.

Notes
1. Section 9(3) of the Bill of Rights affirms the rights to non-discrimination and equality on
   the basis of sexual orientation and gender respectively (R.S.A. Const. Act 108).
2. A 2010 decision regarding the unfair dismissal of a trans person further suggests a
   possible reading of gender to include gender identity/expression (Ehlers v. Bohler Ud-
   deholm Africa (Pty), 2010).
3. In 1996, South Africa became one of the first countries in the world to protect people
   from discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. To what extent
   it was believed that ‘gender’ encompassed transgender in the imagining of the Consti-
   tution is questionable; regardless, transgender groups have slowly won rights utilising
   this non-discriminatory stance since 1996.
4. One exception pertains to Turkey. See Shakhsari, 2013.
5. Asylum seekers and would-be asylum seekers were originally from Eastern, Southern,
   and Central African countries living in Johannesburg and Cape Town (South Africa).
   Some participants were acquaintances of mine prior to beginning the research; others
   were put into contact with me through organisations.
6. Alex’s preferred pronouns are they/them.

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About the author

B Camminga received a PhD from the Institute for Humanities in Africa,
University of Cape Town. Their research interests include: transgender
rights; migration and gender and the history of ‘trans phenomena’ in Afri-
ca; and the impact of the bureaucratisation of gender in relation to trans-
gender bodies and asylum regimes internationally.

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