The biggest challenge for Zee Ngcobo, a 19-year-old trans woman from Winterton in the uThukela District Municipality of KwaZulu-Natal, was going to school. The Grade 11 learner found out the hard way that being in a school that sees gender as a binary can double her problems.
“I dreaded lessons when our teachers would separate boys and girls,” Ngcobo remembers. “I would get confused because I didn’t know where to go: If I went to the boys’ group my classmates would say something, and if I went to the girls’ group the boys would also have something to say about it.”
Ngcobo was the keynote speaker of the Nkosi Johnson Memorial Lecture at the ninth annual South Africa AIDS conference in Durban.
At first, Ngcobo thought she was gay. She didn’t know what being transgender meant — or the difference between the two. Her journey to self-discovery was complicated by her family’s expectations and the lack of organisations her hometown that she could turn to.
“When I realised that I was a girl trapped inside a boy’s body, I became desperate. I even tried to cut my penis off so that I could feel normal,” she says.
It was through her own research that Ngcobo realised that she was transgender. This motivated her and other young women in her village to launch their own organisation to empower other girls and young women. Ngcobo is a founding member of the Leaders for Young Women’s Success, which raises awareness about gender-based violence in our community.
The bigotry of prayer
Growing up as a little boy in rural KwaZulu Natal, Ngcobo says she was often taunted by relatives who said her family will be accepting lobola money for her, instead of paying lobola for a bride. She was also told she was possessed by demons that pastors tried to pray out of her.
“The pastor thought I had demons and tried to cast the demons out of me. I stood there for 45 minutes while the pastor prayed for me,” Ngcobo tells Health-e News. “My community was taking me like a curse and said I was a disappointment to my parents.”
Eventually, Ngcobo fell down and pretended she had been delivered.
“I was tired because I was standing for a long time. I fell and when they asked me what I saw I lied and told them I saw a fire,” she remembers.
These traumas gave her an opportunity to educate her community about LGBTQI rights and through the organisation, she and other young women raised awareness about preventing HIV infections and gender-based violence.
Article by Masutane Modjadji, courtesy of Health-e News.