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Showing posts with label Gender DynamiX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender DynamiX. Show all posts

01 October 2014

Charl Marais (1958 - 2013) teacher, bookkeeper, activist.

Marais was born and raised in Cape Town, in a religious family. As both parents worked, the child lived, until the age of ten, with other family members, and was sexually abused by an uncle.
"I knew that I was a girl because I looked like all the other girls, but why did that make me sad? … The most permanent thought and feeling in me almost all of my life was this feeling of just going though the motions. Medication was the only thing that could bring me out of this feeling of wanting to die and possibly commit suicide."
When in hospital having the appendix removed, a friend suggested that to Marais that she was a lesbian. She knew that she had had crushes on girls but thought that "this was wrong as it's not Christian". At this time, 'lesbian' was the only concept that she had encountered that approximated her feelings.

Marais qualified as a teacher, but did not feel suited to the profession,  and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1978. The uncle who had abused her came to visit and Mrs Marais applied for a court order to keep him away. The lawyer who was assisting met Marais, and straight-away asked: "Have you ever considered having a sex change?". This set her thinking.

Marais obtained a teacher's post in a small school of 50 children in Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape.
"I met a girl there, and it was like an instant attraction for both of us. The sex-change thing didn't yet sit well with me because it was impossible, So we went with the lesbian thing."
In 1981 Marais moved back to Cape Town and found work at a newspaper. When the girlfriend arrived she was pregnant, which led to their breaking up.

In the mid-1980s Charl Marais discovered the Cape Town group, Phoenix, which was a Virginia Prince type group of mainly married cross-dressers. Charl was welcomed to their meetings and parties, and made a fuss of as he was their only female-to-male member, and also their only coloured member (this was still the apartheid era). One of the members was transsexual and told Charl about gender surgeries, and that operations were being done in Durban by Dr Derk Crichton.

In 1992 Charl had a hysterectomy and an ovarectomy, and was able to change the name on his ID card (but not the gender code embedded in the ID number).

One girlfriend left because he didn't have phalloplasty, even though he couldn't afford it. Another committed suicide.

From 2002 Charl worked as a bookkeeper.

After the Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Act 2003, he applied again to change his ID number but each person he saw demanded different documentation. In 2009 he tried again armed with letters from a psychiatrist, psychologist and two GPs, and the Department of Home Affairs lost his application form. He tried again in June 2010, and this time was successful.

He became involved with Gender DynamiX, South Africa's major transgender organization, and for some years was their bookkeeper and newsletter editor. In 2010 he was a co-editor and contributor to Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa.

He died at age 55 after a period of illness.
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Location Cape Town, South Africa

17 April 2014

Simone Heradien (1967?–) secretary, activist.

Simone dressed and lived as female from age 18. She was contingently accepted for surgery but told that she must work for a year as a woman first. She managed to obtain work as a secretary/personal assistant in the Department of Health of the House of Representatives, the Parliament for coloured South Africans in the Apartheid system, while being open about her past.

However, a year later, the surgery program had been suspended. Simone ended up waiting ten further years. Then using her contacts she heard that the program at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town (where Christiaan Barnard had performed the first heart transplant in 1967) had been revived and they were doing operations again. Transgender operations had been done, on and off, at Groote Schuur since 1970 but ironically were discontinued after the end of Apartheid, as was state funding for the operation. Simone, one of the last to have the operation there, was approved in 1994 for state funding but her insurance company stepped in once assured that the operation was medical and not cosmetic. She told her then boss that she was having gender surgery and he thought that that meant that she would become a man.

Simone's elder sister Tammy was also trans but died of AIDS before she could have surgery – 23 days before Simone had her second-stage surgery.
 
Even after surgery, the embedded gender number range in her National ID number kept outing her to banks and government bureaucracies. Working with the Gender Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and with the nerve to make an appointment with the Attorney General himself, Simone was able to threaten to go to the Constitutional Court. The Department of of Justice and the Department of Home Affairs agreed to change her ID book and even her ID number as a one-off.

Simone found a boyfriend who was quite accepting of her past, and they were engaged. However he had a history of depression, and hanged himself in March 2003.

Simone had been working with the Triangle Project, a trans support group in the Western Cape at that time. On the Internet she discovered that the National Assembly was discussing an Alteration of Sex Description Bill. With Estian Smit and Sally Gross (an intersex person), also of the Triangle Project, they prepared a submission to the Assembly committee – even though they had only three weeks to do so. Simone was given three weeks off work to attend portfolio committee after committee. Against opposition from established gay and lesbian organizations, they formed the independent Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Support Group to lobby that surgery not be a requirement and that provision be made for intersex persons.
"Refusing to legally recognize a transsexual person’s reassigned sex serves no purpose. It impedes their ability to live and work in their new gender, in accordance with their medically prescribed treatment. Being able to obtain correct identity documentation is the key to equal participation in employment and educational opportunities for a transsexual person. Rather than erecting additional barriers in the path of transsexual people, the law should encourage and support their successful adjustment by providing them with the legal recognition necessary to be productive members of society."
The resulting Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Act 2003 was voted for by the ruling African National Congress and most opposition parties with the conspicuous exception of the Christian Democratic Party.

Simone later became involved with Gender DynamiX.
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Location Cape Town, South Africa
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