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Leigh Ann van der Merwe: OK, so growing up, the way I envisioned my life was that I would transition from male to female, get married (I already had my partner in mind), adopt a child…or two or three, get a job (maybe in parliament) for myself, buy a house, and buy a car (in my mind this was a Toyota Camry). I would sit and dream about this for hours and hours. All I wanted to do was to leave this small town, travel to the city and start building on my dream. This dream took a knock in 1999 when my sister was killed by her lover. I never got over that. Indeed I moved away, I finished high school and started university. Things didn’t go as planned and I ended up right back at home. I got a job (not my dream job – nowhere remotely close to it), I lost sight of my dreams, I gained weight, I realized how alien the world can be if you don’t fit the “norm”-whatever that might be. I joined the transgender movement and I started fighting for the human rights of people but somehow, somewhere, something was lacking. For some reason, I couldn’t stand the idea of being expected to fulfill certain gender roles (in my newly very affirmed and very accepted gender role at that point in time). I completed an internship at Gender DynamiX and was mentored by a good friend and old colleague. He opened my eyes to the reality of life for women – and now I am a woman, as I have always been in my heart and mind. So, my gender identity and the expression thereof was widely accepted but I felt oppressed by being an educated woman and yet I had to submit to the choices men in my family made. I very publicly took up the feminist label but before I did that, I had to ponder on what cisgender (non transgender) women would say of me being born and socialized as a male (well… socialized as a male … I am not so sure of that but anyway…). I had to reflect on what it meant to be a transgender woman and being a feminist and then it dawned on me that this was an issue to be addressed in the context of formal organizing. The way that I live and breathe my feminism is the fact that I get up each morning; go to an organization that I founded. I haven’t had a salary for the last two years but I have not had a better love than this baby that I am raising. In two years, it has gone from a simple idea to what it is now: S.H.E.
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