TrustAfrica provided support for nearly a dozen African civil society figures to attend the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna. We asked them to share their thoughts and reflections as the week progresses.
Caroline Bowley, Gender DynamiX, South Africa:
Transgender Networking:
"A networking meeting for transgender people was held at the MSM networking zone in the
Global Village. The meeting focused on how transgender people can ensure that their needs will not be overlooked by being included in MSM studies and programs and overshadowed by the focus on MSM. It was agreed that a network of transgender activists and researchers focusing on transgender issues should collaborate to ensure that transgender issues get greater visibility at the 2012 AIDS conference in Washington."
Focus Africa: Trans
"In the LGBT Networking Zone, I presented on the specific needs and problems that transgender people experience and how this contributes to the high rates of HIV amongst this community. Transgender people in Africa experience severe forms of discrimination, and in many countries in Africa gender nonconformity is criminalised or laws have the effect of criminalising them. They also experience high levels of discrimination from within their own communities. Trans men experience the scourge of corrective rape from within their own families in an effort to try prove to them by these perpetrators that the trans men are women. Trans women very often resort to sex work in order to survive. All this results in transgender people being at very high risk of being infected with HIV."
