Transgender Awareness Week 2013 ..........

from last year's post: 

Continued Trans erasure/invisibility by Jamaican advocates ..............

Our friends at JFLAG still have not yet updated or stepped up the transgender community's page on their website to reflect the changes in image in advocacy as it ought to be done, earlier this year in their "We are Jamaicans" campaign however some attempt was made to bring some faces to the scene but it never went much further. Viewship numbers ought to be larger but I guess the resistance from the Jamaican audience coupled with JFLAG's own credibility issues may have some effect on the sluggish interest. The Videos were one by Whitney and Tiana Miller below and they were brave to come out and become faces for a mostly invisible group under the LGBT umbrella. 

Laura Garcia has made some appearance such as on the BBC recently in the Gay divide documentary and Taboo Yardies to be screened in Jamaica this very weekend again in Kingston and Montego Bay. 

also we can recall the demise of young Dwayne Jones aka Gully Queen at 16 years of age sadly more so due to inexperience in navigating transwomanhood or the female cisgender imperative that was imminent but lost her life due to misaligned homophobia as the ignorant crowd mistook the cross dress appearance as deception to nab heterosexual men which is a real fear for some in Jamaica. Sadly the crisis reporting and the zeal at which some advocates milked the story missed the underlined factors of pre-operative trans persons and their gender issues in navigating everyday life, when who was to teach young Dwayne the ropes? Instead the case was for the most part treated as a homophobic one.

Here is the last video of Dwayne Jones aka Gully Queen inadvertently done by a television crew when they came across the homeless youths at an abandoned housing scheme in Western Jamaica, little did we know in death he would make such international headlines. He is to be remembered on November 20th International Transgender Day of Remembrance and a proposed homeless shelter for youths is named Dwayne's House somewhere soon. 

Meanwhile small entities such as Aphrodite's PRIDE Jamaica have been making inroads quietly on the ground with leading trans advocate Laura Garcia as Co-chair and others in self development workshops and sessions on transitioning, hormone therapy, sexual reassignment surgery and so on and it is hoped that as the momentum grows it will pick up and reach more persons who qualify for such interventions.

Posts on transgender matters can be found on my blogs as well. See: HERE

Peace and tolerance

H