Mark Gevisser
The Pink Line: Journeys Across he World’s Queer Frontiers

Mark Gevisser and Jonny Broomberg - The Pink Line Journeys Across The World’s Queer Frontiers

- Very warm welcome to Mark Gevisser and Johnny Broomberg. It is my great pleasure today to introduce Mark and Johnny who’ll be in discussion. They will be talking about Mark’s latest book, “The Pink Line,” in which themes around transgender rights, politics, and health are expanded. Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s most renowned authors and journalists. His previous books include the award-Winning, “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred,” “Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir,” and “Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa,” in which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron. His journalism and essays appear in The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. He was born and raised in Johannesburg and educated at Yale. He lives in Kalk Bay, outside of Cape Town. Lucky you, Mark, Kalk Bay is certainly one of my favourite villages and I spent a lot of time there.

• It’s a very good place to be locked down.

• And so beautiful. Johnny Broomberg is the CEO of Vitality Health International, which houses Discovery’s international health operations and global head of health insurance for the Discovery Group. Prior to that, he was CEO of Discovery Health and medical doctor who read PPE at Oxford while on a road scholarship. He has played a major role in health policy formulation in South Africa and globally in his career. He has been a ministerial advisor and served as chair of the Technical Review Panel of the Global Fund for two terms. Welcome to our participants. I’m now going to hand the floor over to you gentlemen. Before I do that, I just want to say to all our participants, please will you place your questions in the Q&A and not in the chat box. Thank you. The floor is now yours.

• Thank you, Wendy. Thank you very much for having us both on the show and to all your guests. It’s a great pleasure and a privilege for me. Aside from all of Mark’s very illustrious achievements that you described, he’s also a very old and dear friend. And I was witness to this immense amount of hard work and dedication that he put into writing this book over the last seven years. And so I was very keen to get my hands on the book. I’m the furthest you can imagine from an expert in this field. But I found the book utterly compelling and fascinating. And so the first thing I want to do before handing over to Mark for a short introduction to the book is to really recommend this book very highly to all of you on this webinar and to your friends. It will not disappoint you. These are incredibly relevant and important issues that I think confuse many of us these days. Certainly, they do me and I learned a huge amount reading this book. Not to mention being exposed to just a number of fascinating and very compelling stories of the people that Mark met in his seven years of journey around the world. So Mark will give a short introduction, a bit of an overview of the book. And him and I will then chat about some of the key themes in the book. And of course, we’ll hope to fit in some questions from the audience as we go along. So Mark, I’m going to hand it back to you.

• Thank you so much, Johnny. It’s wonderful to be on this extraordinary platform that you have created, Wendy, with your team. And when Wendy asked me to be on her online university, I thought about who I’d like to be in conversation with. And it just so happened that Johnny had just finished reading my book and told me how great it was. So I thought he’d be a very good person to introduce me. That aside, I wanted to be in conversation with somebody who is an informed generalist. My book is called “The Pink Line, Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers.” And it’s about an explosion, a new debate, a new conversation that’s taken place. And really just a generation in our world over a new human rights frontier that’s been established over what’s called LGBTQ rights or LGBTQA rights. And on, and on, and on it goes. It is, as Johnny said, incredibly confusing to somebody who is not part of this community and not part of this world. And I thought it would be great to be in dialogue with an interested and informed generalist rather than a specialist.

So that’s the second reason I chose Johnny to be my interlocutor, but first being that he told me he liked the book. The third reason has to do with a memory. And it’s a memory I have that’s very strong about being at Johnny’s wedding to my very dear friend, Lauren Segal in 1993. And Lauren and Johnny had met each other at pretty much the same time that my husband, Chetty and I had met each other. The shift into democracy away from the old regime of South Africa in the late eighties, early nineties. I didn’t know Johnny very well. I knew Lauren better. And one of the first times I really met him was actually at his wedding. And I had this incredibly vivid memory, Johnny, of being at your wedding and watching this extraordinary event of two families coming together. Of two communities coming together, of Jewish tradition and history of declaring one’s love and commitment publicly to each other. It was actually the first wedding I attended in South Africa after returning to South Africa from the United States.

And I had this very, very sharp memory of thinking that’s never going to happen for me. It was 1993, I’d already been involved in organising the first gay pride marches in South Africa. There was this possibility that the new Democratic ANC was going to look favourably on gay rights. But really this was still a time when there was a law in the United States called the Defensive Marriage Act, which expressly forbade federal recognition of marriage in the United States. It didn’t really seem possible that I would ever experience marriage. And frankly, Johnny, it didn’t bother me. I loved what I saw but I thought it wasn’t for me, really. I was happy being a little bit on the outside, being perhaps a little bit queer, seeing things sconce from a different angle. Fast forward, South Africa became really one of the world leaders in gay rights thanks to our extraordinary constitution, which outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. South Africa became the fifth country in the world to legalise same sex marriage in 2006. After just a few other path breakers in the world, in Western Europe, and Canada, and North America.

And in 2009, Chetty and I, after having been together for a couple of decades already decided we were going to get married. And we did it because he had just been given a job at the United Nations in Paris. And for me to be able to go with him and get the spouse benefits, I needed to be married. And because South Africa was a country that recognised same-sex marriage, I could have those benefits. So we got married and what this marriage got me was a commitment on paper to something that I was already committed to in my head and in my heart. And it got me a ticket to Paris. Fantastic. The idea for this book came about when I realised, when I read later on in 2009, the same year that I got my ticket to Paris, because I was able to marry Chetty. I read about a couple in Malawi, just north of South Africa in Central Africa, an African country where a couple named Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza decided to hold a public engagement ceremony. And as a consequence of this public engagement ceremony, there was a big headline in the newspaper gays engaged. As a result of this, the police swooped arrested them and they were both charged with carnal knowledge against the order of nature, which is a crime in Malawi. Even though nobody in Malawi, no consenting adult in Malawi had ever been charged with this crime before. They were sentenced to 14 years hard labour in prison.

They endured the most unbelievable, horrendous depredations, both in their trial where they were publicly humiliated every day and in jail. It became a global cause célèbre as gay organisations, as LGBTQ organisations all over the world rallied to help these people who now found themselves in jail. Eventually, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon came on a mercy mission to Malawi. And pleaded with the Malawian President to pardon them and release them, which he did. And he said very grudgingly that the only reason he was doing this was because he was worried that if he didn’t do it, the West would start suspending development aid to him. And he needed the money. So he was releasing these people, but he had absolutely no doubt in his mind that what they were doing was bestial, un-African, and sinful, and perverse. Eventually what happened to Tiwonge who turns out was not gay but transgender is she received asylum in South Africa on the basis of a fear of persecution back home. And she lives in Cape Town, and she’s the very first person I write about in my book. Why am I telling you this story? Because it became clear to me in 2009 that there was a new pink line dividing the world, a geopolitical pink line dividing the world between those places where these rights of people like myself.

And people not so much like myself, people like Tiwonge, transgender people were being extended, we’re being accepted, we’re being celebrated, where such people were becoming full citizens of their countries. A line was being staked between those parts of the world and other parts of the world where things were actually going backwards. Where laws that hadn’t previously been used were now being aggressively used as in the case of Tiwonge. Where leaders like Vladimir Putin in Russia actually invented new laws like an anti-gay propaganda law to prevent any kind of public expression of homosexuality. Now, what was going on here is that gay rights, LGBT politics, whatever you want to call it, and we can talk about terminology a little bit later, was being weaponized geopolitically. And it was a new global culture wars that was being fought from the two sides. On the one side, there were people such as the Malawian President or Vladimir Putin saying, this is a form of neocolonialism. This is a kind of decadent western secular illness that is corrupting our people and we have to defend ourselves against this corruption. Now they were choosing homosexuality as an issue because they wanted to stake a barrier against the inevitable flows of globalisation, which were threatening their power. Which were threatening as they said their traditional values and their cultural sovereignty.

And they did it by making gay rights into the straw man as this threat to their allegedly age old societies that were pure and uncontaminated beforehand. And Johnny, we can talk a little bit later about the myths in that because of course, homosexuality and transgenderism has been in all societies since the beginning of time. So that was on the one side. But on the other side, there was something else I saw that was equally troubling, which is that gay rights became, or LGBT rights became the latest way that people in the West, people in the global North could say we are civilised and they are barbaric. We are the ones who are further ahead in terms of modernity than those backward people there who still persecute others. And there are examples of that, for example, in Western Europe in the way that many far right-wing parties in Western Europe beginning in the Netherlands now actually fight for gay rights because they say that this is the reason why we have to keep Muslim immigrants out of Western Europe because they’re homophobic. So you can see the way these LGBTQ identities have become weaponized. And what I wanted to do in this book, is I wanted to understand this.

And I wanted to understand this not just by telling the big geopolitical stories that I’ve just drawn out for you. But by going onto the pink line, by finding pink lines in 10 different countries all over the world. And by trying to understand what life was like for gay people, for lesbian people, for transgender people. Trying to find their lives, come into themselves, be their true selves in an environment where there was suddenly such contention over who they were. In a world where in the past you might have just done your sexual stuff on the down low. And as far as the law was concerned, as far as custom was concerned, get married, have children. Now there’s a younger generation of people saying, “No, we have our rights. If I’m a woman and I feel for another woman, I don’t want to be forced to marry a man and have children.” And what’s fascinating to me is why this has happened now in our era. And of course, it has to do with globalisation. It has to do with digital revolution, with the way that ideas spread so rapidly around the earth. It has to do with mass migration and the way people move. It has to do with commodity capitalism and the way brands and corporations are identified with certain notions of modernity that have to do with human rights and freedom. So that’s the broad canvas of the book. And I’m really looking forward to getting into some of the detail with you tonight.

• Thanks, Mark. That’s a very helpful introduction for the audience. And I must say as a reader one of the first things that struck me as I read it, and knowing how much time you’d put into it, was it seemed to me that you’d made quite a careful choice about how much to write yourself into the story or to stay outside the story. Different writers make different choices along that spectrum. The way I read it, you’re present but with quite a light touch. And I wondered if you could share with us your thought process. And how you chose to pick that particular point of being in the story while also writing the story.

• Well, thanks, Johnny. Let me take a step back to answer that, which is to say that as anybody who knows my work, going back to the columns that I used to write for The Weekly Mail in the early 1990s. Or the biography I wrote of “Thabo Mbeki, The Dream Deferred,” I’m somebody who believes as a journalist, as an nonfiction writer, that the best way of understanding change, the best way of understanding the complex dynamics of political transition, of society and transition is to sit on the shoulder of somebody undergoing this transition. And to look at how this person is affected by change, but also how they affect change, what their agency is in making change happen. And I think that’s a brilliant way to try and make social or political transition legible for readers too. Because as we all know, those of us who read fiction, what gets you to turn pages is to follow the narrative arc, the journey, the story of a person, or a family, or a group of people.

This is at the absolute core of storytelling. Now, who am I to tell somebody else’s story? How do I engage with the people whose stories I’m going to tell? People who I might have something in common with, we might both be gay for example. But I have a lot that’s really different too. I was born in a very middle class, comfortable, well off Jewish northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Michael Bashaija, the Ugandan kid I write about was born in a rural part of Western Uganda. How can I have a connection with him so that I can make him come alive for you? One way is to be God and sit above the story and move everybody around the story like little puppets. But I find that ethically troubling, and also unsatisfying as both a writer and a reader. I think the best way for you to trust me as my guide, as your guide through these stories I tell you is for me to be present as the guide. If I’m your guide, you need to know about me. Why am I interested in these things? Why does this matter to me? Not only do you need to know about me, but you need to know a little bit about my dynamics with the people who I’m writing about. Particularly, if those dynamics replicate the pink line politics I talk about.

So for example, in the case of Michael, who I just mentioned, when I first met him, he had been through, again, a really horrendous time. He’d been thrown out of his family because he was caught having sex with a classmate. He’d fled to Kampala, the capital of Uganda where he’d been homeless for a while. Through Facebook he’d found people who protected him but he also found somebody who extorted him and sexually abused him. He was a real mess. Now when I met this kid, he was 17 and my heart went out to him. I couldn’t be the archetypal, cold, stony publish and be done journalist. I really felt for him. I thought about how difficult it was for me to come out of the closet as an adolescent despite the comfort, despite a generally supportive family. And I thought about how difficult it must be for him, and in feeling that I found myself contributing towards a plan for him to be educated. So I helped get him back to school where he would be safe. Now I decided since I did that, I needed to write about it.

And I needed to let you, the reader understand a little bit about how, if I’m talking about how the pink line is a consequence of these vectors of globalisation, I’m one of those vectors myself. I come from the global North with certain ideas about gay rights or gay identity in my backpack, in my computer. I have a wallet in my pocket. Whether I use that money or not, I’m perceived as as having money to chuck around. This is exactly what the homophobes say about gay rights activists from the West. That they come to places like Uganda and Russia and pay innocent and unsuspecting people to be gay. Now I wasn’t paying Michael to be gay. I certainly wasn’t having sex with him. But I had to see how the other side might see me that way and understand myself that way. So I put myself into the story to help you understand the empathy that I create with the people, but also to help you understand the dynamics that I’m writing about. That being said, it’s not my story, it’s their story. And I really want their stories. And as I tell these nine stories through the course of this book, I want to be absolutely clear that it’s about their agency in the world. And what they do and what they undergo to be able to be true to themselves, to be able to be open about who they are.

• [Johnny] Thanks. Certainly to me, it seems like you got that balance exactly right. But sticking with you and the writing for just one more question. As you’ve told the audience, you’ve got these nine stories. And between them, this very powerful and very insightful analysis of the issues that are more political and policy level. So, so much to learn from that. But one of the things that struck me is many of the stories, Mark, are very sad and painful or at least aspects of the stories are. And you exposed yourself, it’s very clear, very involved with these people and their stories over a very extended period. So that made me think about you and how did these experiences impact on you? And how did you deal with all this pain and trauma and suffering and did that leave a mark on you?

• Johnny, one of my earliest mentors in the newsroom, somebody I really respect said to me at one point in my early twenties. ‘Cause my background is in journalism, “If you want to be a good journalist, you have to develop a very thick skin.” And after working for 30 years as a journalist, as a narrative long form writer, I could not disagree more. I really believe that to do the kind of work I do one needs a very thin skin. One needs to have empathy. And sometimes having empathy is difficult because people sometimes really irritate you, or bother you, or make choices or decisions that you don’t like or disapprove of. But if you’re going to do the job of trying to understand them and their world, you have to keep that empathy going. And of course, it comes at a cost. It can be overwhelming, particularly when I tell stories of people who have undergone such suffering because they have come out as gay or lesbian or transgender in places such as Uganda or Egypt or Russia. I guess what that’s balanced with and what kind of keeps me balanced. And what I hope keeps the book balanced in the end is an extraordinary admiration I have for these people.

And a sense of hope in the way that they have chosen to fight the battles that they fight and the ways that they do. And in so doing, the way that all of them, even those in the most dire circumstances have developed pools of affirmation and support around them. Pasha, the transgender woman in Russia who lost access to her son because a court decreed that she would be promoting homosexuality by seeing him. Because the Russian law says that it is illegal to promote homosexuality, to talk about homosexuality around a minor. And since she was transgender and to have a child, her ex-partner alleged she would be promoting homosexuality to this child. Which is, of course, nonsense. Because homosexuality and transgenderism are two very different things as we can talk about. But that’s what happened. Since her child was taken away from her four years ago, she hasn’t seen him and she probably won’t see him again unless he decides he wants to see her when he’s 21. And she’s devastated. She can’t get off the couch from the depression of it.

And yet she has this extraordinary stepmother who absolutely loves her and supports her and will go to the brink for her. And she has neighbours who make sure she’s all right. And who accept that even though they don’t understand it, that the person who used to be a man is now a woman. And it’s fine because she’s such a lovely woman, just like she was such a lovely man. Those pools of support and love around the people I write about counteract a lot of the horror I witnessed in their lives.

• And it’s very clear that the hope and the progress in many of those situations does come across in the book. But that brings me exactly to moving from this personal angle to the more political parts of the book, Mark. And you did touch on them earlier, but I was very fascinated by your rendition of how these political struggles over gender and sexual rights and identities in different parts of the world have been as you say weaponized, used for political purposes. And as you’ve said, both on the right and on the left. So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about those? You touched on them but I think this is a fundamentally interesting part of the book. And maybe the audience would really like to hear a little bit more about some of those examples on both sides of the political spectrum.

• It’s a very complicated dynamic and it’s got to be said that what politicians and leaders do in fighting these battles is only part of the story because we live in the digital age. And because there’s so many ways that messages get transmitted that politics or formal politics of… The old way that hegemons were established through political power, those old ways have passed in the age of globalisation. So sure, political power is still very important. But there’s so many other ways that a dominant discourse or that ideas are established. Through mass media, through the entertainment industry, as I said through commodity capitalism. So there’s a battle in many parts of the world where leaders who you could call populist or nationalist are trying to assert their power in a world that doesn’t respect borders so much anymore, in a world where borders are less relevant. And we’ve seen that. It’s a big story of the 21st century, the reaction to globalisation from people like Donald Trump with his war. People like Viktor Orbán of Hungary who has said he won’t have migrants, immigrants in Hungary.

What people like Trump and Orbán have also done, is they have also drawn boundaries against transgender people. So Hungary, for example, has a new law that makes it no longer possible to change your gender. Donald Trump is rolling back all the rights that transgender people had or many of the rights that transgender people had that were gained in the Obama administration. Now what’s this about? What it’s about is calling on voters basis fears of the other and finding an easy scapegoat. Somebody or something that people are uncomfortable with or not sure about or seems new. And making it seem like that thing is the threat that is going to contaminate or corrupt society. And pulling people to your side in the name of a new nativist politics by fighting against this secular, decadent, liberal, modern concept. Now, that concept used to be gay rights. But in the West in particular as homosexuality’s become normalised… In the United States, we could well have had a gay democratic party candidate.

The dial has shifted to a new battleground, which is transgender rights. And this is put up as a way of saying, we’re going to protect what we believe are our rights against this modernity. And it’s a hiding to nothing. It’s a battle that inevitably cannot but be lost because of the way ideas and people travel in our world. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be lost easily and quickly. And the kind of stories I tell in my book are stories about what happens in places where there is backlash, where there is some opening up and then there is some backlash such as Egypt, such as Russia. So you see these politics being, all the places I visit you see these politics being played out in different ways. So I have a chapter for example, one that might be interesting to the people on this webinar about Israel and Palestine. And I’m fascinated about the way in Israel and Palestine, the pink line is traced over the green line. And what do I mean by that? Well, on the one side of the green line in Tel Aviv, you have one of the world’s greatest pride marches. Tel Aviv is really perhaps one of the gayest cities I’ve ever been to. And on the surface this looks amazing.

How incredible that gay and lesbian and even transgender people are so free in Israel. But if you look at it more closely, you see that even though those rights have been gained by activists who’ve really fought for it in Israel. There’s a particular reason why the state is so interested in promoting this vision of Israel as a very tolerant place. And this is so that at least in part it can present itself to an increasingly sceptical world, particularly in Europe. But also in North America as an oasis of tolerance and liberalism in an otherwise hostile and anti-democratic world. And you can imagine if this is how Israel uses gay rights, what people on the Palestinian side of the green line think about gay rights. Above and beyond what their religious issues or cultural issues might be, they see it as a way that Israel is attacking them. So there’s a particular antipathy around gay rights because it’s seen as an Israeli weapon. Now, we don’t need to take sides in this debate over who’s right and who’s wrong about that.

That’s not what I want to do. What I want to look at is what this means for gay or queer Palestinians, both in the West Bank and Tel Aviv. And I tell the stories of two couples, Fadi and Nadav who live in Tel Aviv and Nabil and Dan who live in Ramallah. And what they go through as mixed couples having to deal with these national politics around them. And what Fadi describes as a split identity he has. So Fadi is a Palestinian nurse, an Arab nurse who works at one of the major hospitals in intensive care as so many Arabs do in Israel, in South Tel Aviv. And he describes very eloquently what it likes to be… And he’s Israeli 'cause he’s born in the north of Israel, so he has an Israeli passport. He describes very eloquently what it’s like to be celebrated for being gay while being denigrated for being Arab or Palestinian at the same time. And the dissonance that creates in him. So that’s another place where I write about the way these politics affect people on the ground.

• You used the term backlash a couple of minutes ago and I just want to take you back to that for a minute. Just tell us maybe a little more about the Egyptian story as an example of how there’s progress on the one side of the Tahrir Square and then the backlash 'cause I think that was also very…

• The Egyptian example is perhaps the clearest example of the dynamics of the pink line. And that chapter is my favourite chapter, and really perhaps one of the more heartbreaking. It’s the story of a couple, Maha and Amira who meet each other and fall in love during the Arab Spring on Tahrir Square at a time where there was such incredible hope and possibility. At a time where as one of them said to me, “We could be our full selves on the street finally. Our political selves, our sexual selves, everything.” And in the spirit of possibility, they set up an amazing sidewalk cafe in downtown Cairo that was the heart of queer Cairo. And it was just absolutely wonderful to sit there smoking a shisha in 2013. And watch Egyptians out of the closet on the street. Some of them very camp and a little bit edgy because they were certainly getting looks.

But really exploring what it meant to be public and on the street and to be able to be themselves. And claim public space, which is so much what this is about. Then what happened, of course, in 2013 was the coup d'etat of al-Sisi. And one of the ways that the military, when it reestablished control, one of the ways that it said we’re in command now and we’re in control. And we are now going to bring law and order to the society that was going off the rails under democracy, under the Muslim Brotherhood, under this craziness of the Arab Spring is we are going to clamp down on debauchery. And debauchery is actually a crime in Egyptian law. And the way the military showed that it was back in charge, and also that even though it had dislodged the Muslim Brotherhood it really was going to protect family values is it started imprisoning really large numbers of homosexuals.

Doing things like using the new technology available. Hookup sites such as Grindr, which is a site that homosexuals find each other on. And it’s not just about sex Grindr. Grindr is a way that isolated people can find other people supposedly with some safety when it’s unsafe to be finding people on the ground in real life. But the Egyptian authorities became ad adapted using Grindr to entrap and imprison homosexual men. And in this context Maha and Amira, because they were activists and because they were well known for having started the sidewalk cafe had to go into exile and they now live in the Netherlands.

• It’s a story of such hope and then such sadness. You get the sense of forward movement and then backwards and almost like it’s gone even further back than it was perhaps before, Tahrir Square.

• Well, this thing about going further back I think… Go ahead, Johnny.

• No, you carry on, no, please, you carry on.

• It’s an interesting comment because those of us who believe in human rights. And those of us who really want the world to be a better place, and I’m sure there are many such people on this webinar. Really ascribe to that statement made so famous by Martin Luther King, which is that the long arc of history bends towards justice. And maybe it does, but certainly not in a straight line. And one of the things that we’ve really got to grapple with when one’s dealing with LGBT rights or gay rights, is that… I mentioned this, I said something that was previously not spoken about. Something that was in many cultures and societies done on the down low. Or was something you did but it wasn’t your identity, has become public for the first time. In African and in Muslim societies, in countries where you don’t talk about sex. And suddenly you’ve got a whole new group of people claiming a set of rights that are very challenging to the patriarchy. If a man can be with a man and a woman can be with a woman, what does that mean about the hierarchical relationship between men and women?

So you can see why patriarchs and priests are so threatened by this notion. But also we have to reckon with the fact that as this new debate and conversation has been happening. And as people have been claiming their rights, and I want to be very clear about that. Even if they are supported by organisations or ideas or concepts that come from the West, the people claiming these rights are Egyptian or Russian or Palestinian or Senegalese themselves. It’s not a foreign thing that has been exported. That being said, by claiming these rights, there’s no question that in some societies space that was there has been shut down or threatened. And that’s a consequence I think we really have to understand. So I tell the story about the goordjiguene in Senegal, which is a fascinating story. So Senegal became one of the first countries in Africa where it was understood that men who have sex with men are the prime vectors of the AIDS epidemic. And as a result of which there was a lot of funding that went to Senegal to reach homosexual men.

Or bisexual men and organisations of homosexual and bisexual men were set up under the cover of public health, which is something that has happened all over the world. And this is something you know well, Johnny from your work in public health. But suddenly because of this, the notion of homosexuality and gay rights became public in Senegal. And for the first time there was this new community, this new group of people claiming rights. And a moral panic was enjoined against them by Imams taking harsh new Wahhabi doctrines that were coming from Arabia. Because if globalisation was bringing ideas of gay rights from the one side, globalisation is also carrying notions of religious fundamentalism, Christian and Muslim all over the world. And this was a perfect storm and a safer sex workshop in 2009 at the time I started researching this book was raided and a group of men were arrested.

And sentenced to harsh jail sentences, and there was this moral panic against homosexuality. And what happened because of this was a group of people who had always existed in Senegalese society, goordjiguene, which means men-women, and who had their place in Senegalese society. They were decorators, they were entertainers, they were respected. Suddenly, overnight they disappeared. They were men who presented publicly or male bodied presented publicly as women. And overnight they disappeared. And you will not find them if you go to Dakar today, because something was now named as a threat to that society. And what had previously been a gender identity, very acceptable in the society, now became a sexual orientation that was seen to come from the West and was very threatening.

• Mark, I’m very conscious of time. And I want us to turn to some of the questions you help readers navigate around transgender rights and issues. And all of those very complex questions. You use the term transgender culture wars and you tell stories of kids navigating these issues and their families. And their families I think in particular are very interesting and all of those dynamics. But many on this call, maybe most and certainly myself, I count myself in that group. I find these issues very complex. This question of transgender identity and right seems to have exploded out of nowhere really in the last few years.

And it’s now such a major issue. And this may come across, I don’t know, as naive or ignorant, but could you just explain to us what has happened that’s led to this? In my mind, not as an expert at all. I ask myself have there always been as far back as time goes kids struggling with these issues but now we’re living in a more permissive environment? And they can express these struggles or are there more kids like this? Something happened that’s changed literally what epidemiologists would call the incidents of this or the number of kids like this. So maybe you could help us a little bit with, think through those issues.

• In what? In 10 minutes? We might need another five minutes. We might need another whole webinar for this. Look, let me just put that into the context of my book, which is that I watched the way over the course of a decade from when I started doing this research in 2009 to when I was finally forced to put a full stop at the end of the last sentence in 2018. I watched the way the pink line shifted from gay rights to transgender rights. And a lot of this had to do with, as I’ve said, the normalisation of homosexuality, particularly in the West. So the religious right wing was looking for new battlegrounds, new ways to fight this evil perverse secularism. But at this time, taking courage from the battles that had been won by gay people around gay rights, transgender people themselves were fighting a major battle. And it was a battle against pathologization.

The same way that gay people had to fight in the medical establishment against that homosexuality is an illness. Transgender people were beginning this battle too in the West. To get the medical establishment to see transgenderism as a natural and non-pathological human variance. And you can see how that’s shifted in the terminology. So the terminology has shifted from gender disorder to the term that’s now used by the WHO in its diagnostic manual gender incongruence and gender congruence. So what that means now is that it’s not an illness you have, but it’s a condition you have where is the gender you feel congruent with the way you look to the world and the way the world sees you? Or is it incongruent? And this is a way of capturing the condition of people who are gender non-normative. And who have always been there ever since the beginning of time. In all cultures and in all societies, there have been people who do not fit neatly into the gender binary, male and female.

And in fact, there’s much evidence that in pre-colonial societies, there was more of an acceptance of a gender spectrum as opposed to a binary. And you see that now still in many parts of the world, such as South Asia and Southeast Asia. Where there are third gender categories that even post-colonial, post monotheism, post this notion that God created man and women, these two categories, there are still third genders. There is still a spectrum And increasingly Western culture has come to understand, Western culture and Western science have come to understand gender as a spectrum. There is not necessarily this binary. That most people might find themselves very much at one point or another point on the binary. But there are some people, many people who don’t. Now in previous eras, if I was a very feminine man, I might find myself some space, in old London was called the Molly culture. Or I might define myself as a queen or a queer. Previously, if I was a very masculine woman, I might define myself as a stone butch and become a butch and find space for myself as a butch lesbian. Now as a consequence of the transgender rights movement, there are more options.

There’s the possibility in terms of my rights but also my access to care, to medicine, of transitioning if in fact I rarely feel myself to be a male. Now, it’s very controversial. Because there are many people, particularly a strong lobby of feminists. And particularly a strong lobby of feminists in Britain who believe that women becoming men is a form of selling out to the patriarchy. And that why can’t you be a strong, assertive masculine woman? Why do you have to become a man if you have those characteristics? There’s a strong lobby as well from the left that agrees with those on the right wing that transgender women can be threatening to what are known as cisgender women. That’s women who feel that they have the gender that they were assigned at birth could be threatening to them in women’s only places. So transgender rights has become very controversial. And if you’re transgender, you have to fight this battle not only against the religious right wing. But against a strong lobby from the left as well. So that’s a key way that the pink line politics have shifted in this time around transgenderism.

There are many reasons, beyond what I just said about the successes of the gay movement and the religious right needing to find new battles, for why this has happened now. A lot of it really has to do with shifts in the culture away from more generally… And you’ll know this as somebody who works in healthcare away from illness to wellness. New concepts of self-actualization, becoming the best me I can be, improving myself, making myself be the real me. Whether this means having plastic surgery, or dieting and doing exercise, or changing my gender. There’s this notion… What’s very helpful for me in unpacking this is looking at two kind of metaphors for the body. And one metaphor for the body, which is the age old metaphor. And those of us who are observant Jews on this webinar will be familiar with it, is that the body is a tempo that you cannot defile. Even though my father was an atheist, God forbid I should get a tattoo. Because that is just something you cannot do to your body.

You cannot defile it. So the body is a temple, it’s divinely ordained and you have to respect it above all else. That’s one model. And it’s a beautiful model, But there’s another model which has developed in modern times, which is a body is a house that we have the power to adapt, to make ourselves feel most comfortably resident in it. And this is a notion that is really not just from the transgender movement. This is a notion that we see manifest in so many ways, in so much of the medical technology that is about body modification at the moment. That is about not accepting that your body is your destiny or that your biology is your destiny. But rather as one very brilliant psychoanalyst puts it that your body is a canvas. That it can be a place of experimentation. Now once more, this is particularly threatening, particularly if you are watching your children experiment. And you are worried that the experimentation might be permanent. So these are very, very troubling, very difficult debates that we are now all having as we begin to think of gender in these more complex ways.

As contemporary medicine finds ways of protecting and helping young people who really are at risk of great self-harm because of a transgender identity that they’re not able to express. And the data about that is very clear, about what happens to people who are gender incongruent when they hit puberty and their body starts sprouting in all these ways whether it’s hair or breasts that causes such dysphoria and confusion. And leads to self harm, and suicide, or homelessness as well as once they begin acting out as gender nonconformity, they’re thrown out of their homes.

• Mark, as you said, we could have another whole webinar on this particular issue. We’ve come to the end of our time and I want to just end before handing back to Wendy by thanking you. Not only for this evening, but more importantly for just an incredibly important contribution through this enormous amount of work you’ve done. And I really want to highly recommend to those on this webinar to get this book, get your book. You will not be disappointed. You will learn a huge amount and be very moved. So thank you, Mark. It’s been a great conversation. I wish we had longer and Wendy, let me hand back to you now. Thank you very much.

• Mark, Johnny, thank you for that very, very interesting presentation. I’m sure that our audience still have many questions. Looking back at history and statistics we see that in 1996 when Bill Clinton signed DOMA, one third supported same-sex marriage while two thirds were against. Only 13 years later, the ratio changed from one third opposing to two thirds supporting. We have heard from Mark how queer lives and queer lives cross the four frontiers of race, rights, discrimination, and degeneration to transition from agony to agency and isolation to community. Booklist reports and I quote, “Gevisser’s monumental effort in this global deep-think of a text outlines how much work remains ahead. This timely intelligent book remains and should belong in every library the world over. It’s a must-read for all of us.”

Today, more than a decade later, we are still only scratching the surface of these conversations. It’s vital that we remain committed to educating ourselves and our children so that we can be informed and supportive toward the LGBGT communities. Mark and Johnny, thank you so much for joining us today and we look forward to continuing this very important topic. And to our participants, please buy the book, have a read, educate yourself, and thank you all for joining us tonight. Thank you, Mark and thank you, Johnny. Good night.

• Thank you so much, Wendy. Thanks very much.

• Thank you very much. Thanks, bye-Bye.