Competing marginalities and precarious politics: a South African case study of NGO representation of transgender refugees

On the 26th of November 2012, the South African transgender rights organisation Gender Dynamix (GDX), Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) met with the South African states Portfolio Committee for Home Affairs. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss issues regarding the Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Act 49 of 2003, statelessness and the closure of Refugee Reception Offices in metro areas. The organisations involved play a critical role in representations and understandings of ‘transgender’ and ‘refugees and asylum seekers’ in South Africa, respectively. The meeting offered, I suggest, the perfect platform for organisations who, in their day-to-day work, assist transgender people seeking asylum in South Africa to come together, using the transgender refugee as an intersectional subject, around which their separate presentations might have easily coalesced. Yet, curiously, this did not happen. Extending transgender geographies in the Global South and offering an opening towards a broader conversation regarding advocacy for transgender refugees, I argue that transgender refugees represent a zone of precarious politics for organisations in South Africa dealing with competing marginalities. Indeed, it is not simply that transgender refugees are transgender but transgender and migrants, a dual precarity. This alignment with the migrant body is perceived as threatening by transgender organisations to the already precarious nature of transgender visibility. At the same time, given the increased global precarity of transgender rights, the inverse is true for refugee organisations.