Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa, by B. Camminga

Abstract

T ransgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa explores the growing issue of 'gender refugees,' refugees fleeing violence and persecution because they are perceived to have a gender identity and/or gender expression that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. These refugees might be described as 'transgender' by those in the Global North, but as Camminga points out, this may not be a descriptor with which gender refugees necessarily identify. In recent years, gender refugees have emerged as a distinct group of asylumseekers in South Africa. This book examines how South African policy established the country as a place of imagined possibilities for African gender refugees. From there, it explores the systemic barriers experienced by those who choose to migrate to South Africa in order to actualize these possibilities. To this end, Camminga analyzes the experiences of twenty Black African gender refugees who arrived in South Africa after 2000. Fourteen of these stories were collected through life story interviews. The stories of six gender refugees that had been previously collected and archived by South African LGBT groups are also included. The book received an honourable mention for the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize, an annual prize awarded by the Association for Queer Anthropology to an outstanding single-author ethnographic monograph. South Africa's post-Apartheid Constitution extends rights not just to its citizens, but to all people within its borders. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of 'sexual orientation,' which has been interpreted not just to mean sexuality but could also apply to any number of possible non-normative gender expressions. The controversy surrounding the inclusion of 'sexual orientation' in the Constitution served to spread LGBT human rights discourse around the continent. This development was amplified by news media outlets across Africa