The Centre for Human Rights (CHR) and the Centre for Sexualities, AIDS, and Gender at the University Pretoria together with the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Futures and the Center for Conflict Studies at the Philipps-University Marburg launched the second edition of the Pretoria-Marburg Queer Conversations.
The conversations emanate from a convergence of interests in the work on LGBTIQ+ and queer identities among the centres. This year, the series is embedded in the Marburg Lecture series themed: 'De-and Reconstructing LGBTIQ+ Politics in a Postcolonial World', with lectures taking place in-person at the Philipps-Marburg University.
On June 22, 2023, at the first event of the series titled 'Parenthood, parental perceptions, and struggles among LGBTIQ+ individuals' - Dr Madeleine Muller (she/her) and Landa Mabenge (he/him) led a conversation on navigating parenthood for people with queer children.
Muller is a family physician specialist and senior lecturer at Walter Sisulu University, providing clinical services and teaching at Cecilia Makiwane hospital in Mdantsane, East London. She is on the executive board of SASHA (Southern Africa Sexual Health Association) and PATHSA (Professional Association of Transgender Health) and is one of the facilitators on the HIV clinician Society Gender Affirming Healthcare online training. Locally, she is one of the founding members of the Gender & Sexuality Alliance in East London.
Mabenge is a PhD candidate in Public Health (UCT) and holds a MA cum laude from Sussex University. He is an educationalist through his independent consultancy, Landa Mabenge Consulting; and is the author of Becoming Him-a trans memoir of triumph. His research focuses on access to inclusive therapies for trans and gender diverse populations at public university clinics in South Africa. Landa is the first known transgender man to successfully motivate a medical aid for the payment of his gender affirming surgeries in South Africa.
Both speakers drew on their life personal and professional experience to show the importance of creating a supportive and safe environment for queer children.
Muller says what she has really found useful as a parent is three A's - affirmation, allyship for children and advocacy.
"... [A]ffirmation is such a great word. And actually isn't that what we need as human beings? Every single one of us needs to be affirmed for who we are, and how we present in the world no matter what dimension we are looking at. And we want to build communities where we affirm each other and where we are build affirming communities around us. And our first role as a parent is to affirm our child and to help the world around affirm our child," says Muller.
According to Muller, there are different ways in how we can affirm people, firstly by using their true name, using the pronouns and allowing whatever gender expression or whatever expression they want to have as human beings and affirming people that you see them and they are great just as they are.
"So for example, I'm helping our kids with pronoun badges and pronoun pins, being able to do all the negotiation with various family members that need to be talked to, friends, etc. And as a parent, we sometimes have to help take that in-between role to help smooth the way for our children. Psychologically, quite often, we want to be able to create this authentic identity and it's difficult in a world which is not always affirming".
"So having access to counselling and affirming counselling, and again, as a parent, you've got to find the right psychologist, you've got to find the person who's going to be on your on your child's side ... As a parent, it's quite important to make sure your child have access to healthcare professionals that are sensitive to the kind of sexual health needs and conversations that they're going to need to have".
"And that means calling ahead to your general practitioner and trying to find general practitioners that are able to actually provide appropriate care for your child and be affirming for your child no matter how they present, and of course for transgender children and particularly in accessing hormone therapy and gender affirming surgery," says Muller.
Muller says, with transgender children as a parent one quite often has quite odd work in terms of all the legal name changes and being able to negotiate with Home Affairs and figuring out all the processes for that. In terms of advocacy, as a parent, she found herself pulled into allyship where she has to help negotiate for her children through the different things they need to be helped with.
"...when we talk about fostering, inclusive communities, we decided to create our own community based organisation. And I really I think this is actually quite easy to do. My eldest child and I just put together a plan. We got together a bunch of invited people who are keen to join us and we put together a little startup group. I'm not even going to call it a committee because we don't have any financials, we don't have a bank account. There's no financial money that changes hands, we literally run off a Facebook group, and we've been used to doing different things through it. So you can see there's all the various events that we've been running with our movie night, which was great, and just creating events where people can feel safe and where we can meet other other families. And particularly in our setting, it ended up being quite a lot of families. It's open to both gay and straight. And it gave us the opportunity to create a little community within East London, that then gives us the possibility to advocate for different rights," says Muller.
Mabenge shared his experiences of being parented as someone who was developing, evolving and growing in various sort of spaces, particularly in what he calls dogmatic homes and communities, and how he had to navigate the landscapes he found myself in on the home level and also talked briefly about his journey as a black transgender man.
"...I was born in 1981 when there was a clear narrative or script, which I call the biblical and theological normative, where there was a belief centered belief, an absolutist view of what a human being looks like, how they're going to evolve. There were two markers at the time for anyone who was born, pretty much what happens now, the blue or the pink. It's either you are a blue or pink, and the specific sort of characteristics that marry a blue and specific characteristics of marry pink and the path to evolution is very clear.
"Very sort of limited, I feel because it erases lots of diverse beings who may or may not have clear sort of characteristics defining biological features at birth, that will not marry what a blue or pink looks like. And for those of you who may not sort of quite get my coding, a blue is a boy, a male and they will grow up to be a husband a father, they've got clear sort of natural biological sex characteristics, same thing with a pink. A pink will grow up to wear dresses, will probably marry a blue, and at some point will become a mother and so in my case the script I was born into was a pink script, born into very religious families," says Mabenge.
Mabenge said his parents gave him to his maternal grandparents when he was two days old and he found living with them to be very restricting, even as he started thinking and owning himself as a young child, which for him, happened around the age of seven. When he felt that there was somewhat of a disconnect between this narrative that he was born into, the expectations that marry that and who he was becoming. He said at the time he didn't have a language and an understanding. The only thing at his disposal, were the people that were charged with his upbringing, which he felt limited him to what was the physical element or the nature of who he was.
"In other words, the other aspects of my humanness will silence the fact that I was developing emotionally, socially, spiritually, intellectually, that was, it had to be forced to marry the physical which was then mapped onto a pink script. And so outside this, I could not assert myself and I found that I had to relate to my grandparents in Umtata based on what they expected of me. I had to then relate to my parents when I moved to stay with them in Gqheberha, in terms of what they expected, or what they wanted or what they dictated of me.
"And what I realised early on, even as a child back then, is that with my grandparents, I could push back a bit. So even though I didn't have the language, I didn't have the full scope of comprehension. I didn't understand what I thought was happening with me, but I could find pockets of reprieve. They were older, or probably in their reflective years, but even that had to happen within sort of carefully constructed pockets of safety," says Mabenge.
At home he could dress and express himself how he felt, which was for the most part in shorts, but when it came to church, or when he had to go to school, there was a clear dress code. He could not find wiggle room there. When he got to his parents he could not find any sort of reprieve or any type of wiggle room because his parents were entrenched in their religious beliefs. Mabenge found that there were multiple layers of being silenced because there were no conversations outside of the child needing to bend to what their parents expected.
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Mabenge said his experiences of his parents and being parented by them, as a child who was evolving and developing were quite brutal and isolating. He felt that he had to exist in silos in his head. He had to please his parents so that they wouldn't notice. He says he had to perform based on what they dictated and they narrated to him at the time. He couldn't discuss puberty with his parents because it was very confusing for him. He feels there was no pocket of safety on the home level, to talk about the fact that his body was developing which was much silencing for him.
When he was in his teen years and started developing sort of emotionally and finding others attractive, he found himself attracting other pinks or being attracted to other pinks - which was another layer of a no-go area. Because not only did they not speak about romantic attraction on the home level, but the fact that he would now be trying to negotiate access to talk about having been branded a pink that is now attracted to other pinks. He realized early on that this was probably another layer of of being known as an abomination as a young person, and more than that at the time - in the early 90s - where there's a lot of violence and discrimination towards homosexuality.
As a person who has flirted with the idea of becoming a parent, Mabenge said he battled with internalized stigma, because there's a clear narrative of what a nuclear family or a family should look like - still rooted in the nuclear structure of a father and a mother. He dated women who have children, who have sort of introduced him to their children, and who have encouraged him to play an active "role" in parenting the children. He also toyed with the idea that perhaps parenting is not for him, given the complexities.
Mabenge said if he chooses to become a parent, he'll be an enabler of a safe space, a healthy space where a young child will be able to assert themselves and grow and emerge with their own voice, with their own agency and autonomy, without needing to heal from him and the impositions he might place on them.
