GCN__February_2018

CHARLOT JEUDY (Haiti)
PRESIDENT
Kouraj
FARZANA RIAZ (Pakistan)
PRESIDENT
TransAction Alliance
“Between 2015 and 2017 there were 400 reports of abuse
against trans people in Pakistan, much of which involves hair
cutting. Sixty trans people have been killed in this period. A
board member of my organisation was raped and her hair
and eyebrows were cut. These types of abuses are common
and are carried out by locals. When we go to report these
incidents, the police often refuse to take the reports and
rarely act on them when they do.
When trans people are injured from these attacks they are
taken to hospitals, which refuse to admit them either in the
male ward or the female ward. The hospital denied our board
member admission and she died because of this.
We want to address all these issues but there are huge
restrictions here and many challenges. When we worked
with the local government, they faced threats from locals.
Anybody who supports our work is being threatened by
extremist and other political actors.
I got the first third gender passport issued because I went
to court. I’m driven by the large number of trans people with
nobody coming out to fight for us. Within our organisation we
have 11 staff, but in the network we have 45,000 members.
Many of our members have been shunned by their families
and they are not getting education or other types of support,
so this is a big priority of ours.
Our main focus for the future is to create employment so
that trans people can lead normal lives. I plan to work on
providing a building to house trans people who often face
huge barriers to accessing housing.
By fighting we could get equal rights and the respect we
deserve. Local, national and international media coverage
can help by bringing our story to the masses.”
“The levels of discrimination we face in Haiti has a
relationship to socioeconomic factors. LGBT people
from less educated backgrounds are more likely to be
discriminated against by their families. Families can be very
religious and this can add an extra layer of misunderstanding
and discrimination. It doesn’t mean that there is no
discrimination among the more affluent parts of our society,
but it’s less pronounced.
The main strategy of our organisation is to use
communication to raise awareness within the wider
population. The main media we utilise is social networks;
traditional media doesn’t give us a voice. We have very
popular social pages through which we raise awareness
on different issues. We also provide legal assistance to the
victims of transphobic and homophobic violence and raise
awareness amongst our own community in regards to our
rights to health.
It is extremely hard to get the general population in Haiti
interested in our issues. When people cannot eat, don’t have
proper shelter or can’t get their kids into school our rights are
not a priority. The earthquake has also made our issues less
important to the mainstream.
Human rights are not a buffet. though. You can’t pick and
choose the rights you want to defend. Rights to food, shelter
and accommodation are important, but so are our rights.
Rights to health and housing need a big budget, whereas the
right to respect needs political will. This is not here.
Promises made to improve our situation are seldom
respected unless they serve the government’s political
interests. I am proud that we are a well established
organisation which couldn’t have existed ten years ago, and
now more and more young people are interested in this
movement. That makes me hopeful for the future.”
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