Where homophobia and transphobia meet

is a bad, bad place to be.

This is a quick post to link to this very good analysis of the reportage on the Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza case, in Malawi, which has been all over the Western press lately. Ms Chimbalanga is female-identified and in a relationship with Steven Monjeza: they held an engagement ceremony in December 2009, and have been found guilty of 'performing unnatural acts and gross indecency' and sentenced to 14 years in prison with hard labour. The courts are proceeding on the basis that Ms Chimbalanga is male and that her relationship with Mr Monjeza is therefore homosexual. The Western press is also reporting the case as if Ms Chimbalanga was a man, and as if the only issue here were the right to same-sex relationships (and, in particular, same-sex marriage). This means that a whole dimension of the suffering and mistreatment that Ms Chimbalanga is going through - her being persistently misgendered as male and subject to invasive procedures to establish her biological sex - is being erased by the Western press, in order to make the predicament of this couple fit more neatly into our current obsession with the right to same-sex marriage.