“Is it safe to do their work?” Renaè Green and Donique Givans go silent for several seconds. “I am still scared,” says Ms Green, the Associate Director for Policy and Advocacy at TransWave Jamaica. “I don’t like to go to certain spaces. If anyone wants to participate in one of our campaigns, we explain the risks. You don’t know what kind of backlash you might experience.”
Ms Givans, who is the organization’s community liaison officer, knows this all too well. She wasn’t up front about her gender identity with her father when she began becoming more visible in her advocacy work.
“He doesn’t want anything to do with me now,” she says, her voice shaking a little. “He told me to go and not to come back to his house. So, we do let people know they might have difficulties.”
TransWave was formed in 2015 following a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health and gender-based violence training, conducted by WE-Change and supported by the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays and Jamaica AIDS Support for Life.
TransWave’s Executive Director, Neish McLean, is the only transgender man at the helm of a Caribbean transgender organization. Recently Mr McLean discussed his personal journey publicly, exploring issues ranging from the distinction between gender identity and sexuality to top surgery. This is largely unchartered territory in a Caribbean nation famed for its social conservatism.
“For a long time, people actually said that transgender people didn’t exist in Jamaica because people could not put a face to them or identify anyone who was transgender. Now we have so many people who identify. It has helped in terms of explaining who transgender people are,” explains Ms Green.
In addition to increasing transgender visibility, TransWave advocates on a wide range of subjects that affect the community—the lack of access to transgender-oriented housing, education and employment, for example, as well as initiatives to reduce poverty and violence. HIV is a huge challenge. A 2018 Integrated Biological and Behavioral Surveillance Survey conducted by the University of San Francisco found that 51% of Jamaican transwomen tested were living with HIV.