The International Transgender Day of Visibility is observed on 31 March, and is dedicated to recognising the resilience and accomplishments of the trans community.

Rachel Crandall, a US-based trans activist, founded this day in 2009 not only to raise awareness of the burden of discrimination that the trans community faces in multiple settings, but also to celebrate trans lives and stories.

To be “visible”, it can be argued, is to make a personal and political statement that one’s existence is a reality, and that survival requires society, literally, to “see” trans people. What is visible cannot be ignored or wished away. If state and non-state actors concede that trans people exist then, in theory, their needs should be met. This could be needs for education, health and employment; partnering and family making; the need to have legal identity documents; and the need to thrive and take a rightful place in political, civic and social life.    

Ironically, what is a strategy for survival by trans people has been taken as a provocation by what is now being called the “anti-gender movement” (AGM).

According to Global Action for Trans Equality, the AGM is an international movement that opposes what it refers to as “gender ideology, gender theory or genderism” – that is, progressive ideas on gender.

The AGM sees “gender ideology” as an attempt to instil a global order that is anti-social, anti-family, unnatural, irreligious and harmful, especially to young people who must be “protected” from ideas which challenge notions that sex is unproblematically binary and promote the belief that gender identity can differ from one’s sex assigned at birth.

It is ironic that the AGM positions itself as wanting to “protect” young people. In the South African context, there is mobilising and organising under the broad umbrella of the AGM to “protect” learners from Comprehensive Sexualities Education (CSE) and to prevent the implementation of draft school guidelines of the national Department of Basic Education on gender. These guidelines aim to make schools more inclusive – for example, they acknowledge gender diversity among young people and suggest that schools make provision for bathrooms for gender-diverse youth.

AGM proponents in South Africa have argued that these measures will make schools unsafe for young people, citing unproven ideas that attacks in bathrooms will be inevitable.

In fact, the opposite is true. Attacks on trans and gender-diverse young people in schools (and indeed on lesbian and gay youth) are much more commonplace, yet their needs are completely ignored. Harms directed at them are “invisible” to the AGM.