How Black South African Transfemmes Articulate Similar Experiences Across Socioeconomic Contexts
Around 2023, I saw a tweet where the author and the people replying under it were laughing at Dabulamanzi’s English. For context, Dabulamanzi is a star from Moja Love’s Umndeni, a show that followed the lives of sangomas in a relationship with a polygamous/polyamorous sangoma. The central figure in the polygamous household is Enoch “Mkhulu” Kolobe, a twice-married gay pastor and sangoma. On the show, he was in relationships with multiple feminine gay men and gender diverse people, including Dabulamanzi.
The clip that was circulating on Twitter at the time was an out-of-context clip of Dabulamanzi talking about the tension between him and Fezile (a transgender woman). Amidst the camaraderie among the people under that tweet, Nkuley Masemola quoted the tweet and elaborated on how the language used by the gays and dolls in the township may differ, but the experiences are often similar – this was the crux of the thread; I cannot find it right now, but I do recall a lot of what was said.
That thread, alongside my personal experiences as a Black, South African transfemme, made me think about a particular difficulty in describing the experiences we go through: the language available to describe an experience is not always the language in which the experience itself was lived. I also briefly touched on this on my TikTok page, but this article expands on what I said there.
One person may describe herself as a trans woman. Another may describe herself as a transfemme, sister, queen, femme, m*ffie (mora if you are from Cape Town), butch, gay, or a combination of indigenous-language, queer, and gendered vocabularies. Another may have no sophisticated terminology for her gender at all, while nonetheless possessing sophisticated ontological knowledge of what it means to move through the world as a feminine person who was assigned male at birth.
The distinction between terminology and knowledge is important.
Contemporary conversations about transgender identity can sometimes appear as though access to particular words produces transgender consciousness. However, the converse is also true: people can have an intimate understanding of gender, femininity, social policing, embodiment, and belonging before they have the vocabulary academics, activists, or social media have developed to describe those experiences.
For Black South African transfemmes, this question becomes even more complicated, because – and I always say this – gender does not exist separately from class, language, race, geography, religion, and economic position. Research on Black trans women in South Africa has shown that experiences differ across urban, peri-urban, rural, and township settings, as well as across employment and socioeconomic circumstances, while still revealing recurring structures of gendered and racialised vulnerability (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
The result is not necessarily different experiences. It can be different languages used to articulate related experiences.
Language is more than just vocabulary.
When speaking about “language”, it is tempting to think only about whether someone speaks standardised Setswana, Sepedi, isiXhosa, English or Afrikaans. However, language can also mean the social vocabulary people use to make sense of themselves and their experiences.
I, as a trans university student who spends a considerable amount of time on social media, comfortably use terms like “transfeminine”, “gender dysphoria”, “gender expression”, “transmisogyny”, “misogynoir”, or “intersectionality”. Someone with less exposure to this kind of language (and overall contemporary internet discourse that pertains to trans issues) may never use these words at all. This does not mean they lack an understanding of the phenomena these words describe, and any person who contends otherwise is paternalistic and elitist.
South African research provides a useful illustration. Studies of transfeminine and gender-diverse people have found that participants identify themselves through a range of categories that their experiences of stigma intersect with socioeconomic status, employment, family structure, geographic location, and other aspects of their social identity (de Villiers et al., 2020).
Consequently, the question should not simply be: Who knows the correct terminology?
A more interesting question is: Who gets to define what counts as knowledge?
Academic and activist vocabulary is valuable because it gives people tools to communicate experiences that might otherwise be hard to explain. However, terminology is not the same as consciousness. A person can understand that she is being treated differently because people perceive her femininity as illegitimate without knowing the term cissexism (I discuss what this term means in my previous article). She can understand that poverty makes transition-related healthcare inaccessible without describing the situation as the commodification of gender affirmation. She can understand that her family treats her differently after she becomes visibly feminine without knowing the language of gender policing. Two things become clear: Context matters, and knowledge precedes terminology.
The socioeconomic question
This becomes particularly important when examining Black transfemmes across socioeconomic positions.
Class changes the resources available for responding to gendered marginalisation, i.e. transmisogyny. A financially secure person may access private healthcare, move out of an unsupportive household, travel to another city, consult professionals, buy gender-affirming clothing and cosmetics, or build an independent social network.
Someone who is unemployed, financially dependent on family, living in a township or rural area, or reliant on public healthcare may have far fewer options.
Research on healthcare access among Black trans women in South Africa demonstrates this relationship between gender, race, class and geography precisely. Participants in one study described how gender-affirming services are prohibitively expensive in the private sector while public services are geographically concentrated.
For example, a friend of mine grew up in and is based in George, but she cannot readily access public gender-affirming healthcare services in the town. To do so, she must travel to Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, which is 430km away. Another example: my other friend grew up in Warrenton and is based in Galeshewe, Kimberley. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Hospital in Kimberley and Gordonia Hospital in Upington are the only public hospitals in the Northern Cape, the largest yet most sparsely populated province in South Africa, that provide generic gender-affirming healthcare such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT). To access gender-affirming healthcare specialists like endocrinologists or urologists, she has to travel to Bloemfontein, which is some 150km away.
This shows that for people living in rural or township areas, travelling for specialised services can itself become an economic barrier (de Villiers et al., 2020).
Similarly, Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s study of Black trans women found that socioeconomic position mediated experiences of gender-based violence and transfemicide. Their participants included women living in rural, township, urban, and peripheral areas, with differences in employment and economic circumstances. The study consequently demonstrates why “Black trans women” cannot be treated as a homogeneous and monolithic group (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
Socioeconomic differences do not necessarily eliminate common experiences. A wealthy Black trans woman and a poor Black trans woman may have radically different capacities to respond to gendered discrimination (with their nuances). However, both of them understand what it means to have someone question their Black trans womanhood. One may respond by leaving, another by negotiating, and another by enduring. One may become financially indispensable to the family, while another may construct a chosen family outside of the household. The strategies differ; the social knowledge converges.
This is where the phrase “different languages, shared knowledge” becomes useful. Socioeconomic stratification may shape the vocabulary, resources, and strategies through which a person articulates her experience, without necessarily determining whether she recognises or understands the underlying phenomenon.
The Way Ngingakhona: television as a vernacular archive
South African popular culture provides an unusually interesting site for observing this process.
I have my qualms with Moja Love 157. However, the impact of its show, The Way Ngingakhona, the title whose one-to-one translation is “The way that I am,” cannot be overstated, at least for me. It is particularly relevant because the program places LGBTQ+ South Africans’ everyday lives, relationships, identities, and families within a mainstream television environment. The original cast included Tholang Motsumi, Innocent Matjiane and MJ Maponya, among others. These three represented gay, bisexual and transgender experiences, respectively (IOL, 2020).
The programme’s importance is not simply that it puts trans people on television. Representation is more complicated than visibility.
What makes The Way Ngingakhona valuable as a cultural text is its emphasis on ordinary life. Transness appears alongside friendship, romance, family disagreements, ambition, beauty, employment, vulnerability and sociality. In this sense, the programme disrupts the assumption that transgender existence is primarily a medical or political subject.
Tholang Motsumi’s public advocacy around transgender healthcare illustrates this further. Her visibility on the programme became connected to efforts to educate parents and communities about LGBTQIA+ people and to advocate for greater accessibility to hormone replacement therapy (TimesLIVE, 2022).
Later seasons expanded on this archive of experiences. Elle Khobi, for example, spoke publicly about taking years to understand and undertake her transition and about receiving support from her sister (Zimoja, 2022).
These narratives demonstrate something important about articulation: the language of identity can be simultaneously personal, familiar, televisual, and political.
A person may speak about herself differently when talking to a sibling, a friend, a television producer, a doctor, or an academic researcher. None of these versions is necessarily more “authentic”; they are different registers through which the same person makes herself intelligible.
Umndeni and the Instability of categories
Umndeni provides another interesting cultural text.
The Moja Love programme follows unconventional family and household structures involving sexuality, gender, spirituality, traditional healing, and relationships. Moja Love describes the programme as following the Maseko family and its evolving household. In contrast, contemporary reporting on earlier seasons described the show’s exploration of polygamy, gender, sexuality, and traditional practices.
The significance of Umndeni is not that it provides a perfect representation of Black trans or queer life – it does not – and it should not be treated as ethnographic evidence.
Its importance lies elsewhere: it demonstrates that African gender and sexuality cannot always be neatly divided into Western categories of “gay,” “straight,” “transgender,” “religious,” and “traditional.” The programme’s worlds are messy because real social worlds are messy.
A person can participate in traditions while navigating gender variance. Someone can be spiritually gifted while also being queer. A family can simultaneously reproduce cisgender heteronormative gender and create unconventional forms of belonging.
This complicates the assumption that the adoption of contemporary transgender terminology represents a simple progression from “primitive” ignorance to “modern” knowledge. There are many ways of knowing oneself.
The Black trans ballroom connection
On 26 March 2022, I attended my first ever VNJ (formerly known as Vogue Nights Jozi) Ball. It was probably one of my earliest recollections of me tapping into my transfemininity. I identified myself as non-binary before that night and still did afterwards. Back then, I had not been exposed to the term “transfeminine”. I still was attached to my non-binarity, but as the year progressed, I started cultivating a strong relationship with my femininity. I was gravitating towards identifying as a trans woman, but I still held onto what I imagined was the last scintilla of respect and “privilege” of being non-binary.
In the early stages of my transfemininity, my life was somewhat analogous to that of a drag queen. I would dress femininely (disclaimer: my fashion sense back then was incredibly atrocious) and put on makeup when going out with my homegirls, then take the makeup and clothes off and relegate myself to survival masculinity when leading my daily life, such as going to school or existing around extended relatives who back then might have received me differently or perceived me as “too radical”.
I was Kabelo Nchabeleng by day, and “enbyfatale_” by night. However, the latter was not my alter ego; it is who I am to this day. My transfemininity makes up a large part of who I am as an individual, and if it is suppressed or taken away from me, my entire existence falls under siege; my entire being is erased.
The United States provides another useful comparison through Black and Latino ballroom culture.
My first exposure to ballroom culture was through the 2018 television show POSE and the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. Ballroom developed in the 1960s (though it arguably hit the mainstream in the 1980s) as a space where Black and Latino LGBTQIA+ people could build community, kinship, performance, and recognition in response to exclusion from dominant institutions. Scholarship on ballroom describes “houses” as forms of kinship and balls as spaces of ritualised performance through which marginalised people create alternative societies (Bailey, 2014).
The language of ballroom is therefore not merely slang, or “female lingo” as many South African men on Twitter obnoxiously claim. Terms such as house, mother, father, realness, fem queen, butch queen, serving face, serving, category, fish, legendary, and c*nt emerged within particular cultural histories and social practices.
Their meanings are inseparable from the communities that produced and developed them.
Below are their definitions:
- “House” refers to a chosen family within ballroom. Houses function as communities of support, mentorship, and belonging, and members compete together at balls. A mother and/or father traditionally leads them. Examples include the Houses of LaBeija, Revlon, Lanvin and Balenciaga.
- “Mother” refers to a senior/respected member who provides leadership, nurturing, advice, mentorship, and sometimes practical support to the house’s “children”. A house mother is not necessarily a biological mother and, in most cases, is a trans woman.
- “Father” refers to a senior house leader who also provides mentorship, advice, discipline and leadership. The mother/father distinction historically reflects gendered ideas about parenting, although actual house structures vary. A house father is usually a gay man, though a trans man can also be a house father.
- “Shade” is an indirect, often witty or cutting insult. Rather than saying someone performed badly or looks bad, the speaker communicates the insult or criticism indirectly. Shade can be playful, competitive, and highly stylised.
- “Reading” is a more direct form of humorous verbal critique in which someone’s appearance, mannerisms, clothing, or other characteristics become the material for an insult, initially coined in the documentary “Paris Is Burning”. “Reading” and “shade” overlap, but reading is generally more explicitly about verbally dissecting someone’s flaws.
- “Ball” refers to a ballroom competition and cultural event where participants gather to compete in different categories, often involving fashion, appearance, performance, gender presentation, dance and realness. Participants “walk” or compete in categories while judges evaluate their performances. Balls are also important social spaces for community-building, recognition, and celebration.
- “Category” refers to a specific competitive division within a ball that establishes what participants are expected to demonstrate or present. Categories can focus on face, realness, runway, fashion, body, performance or vogue. Each category has its own criteria, and competitors “walk” that category before judges. Categories can differ considerably between balls and ballroom scenes.
- “Realness” refers to the ability to convincingly embody a socially recognisable identity or role associated with the category being walked. Historically, this meant appearing sufficiently as a heterosexual man/woman or fitting convincingly into a particular social world. It reflects the complicated relationship between performance, survival and social acceptance.
- “Face” refers to the ballroom category and aesthetic that is centred on the appearance and beauty of a participant’s face. Competitors in a Face category are judged on qualities such as facial features, complexion, grooming, expression, and overall facial appearance. The emphasis is on creating a compelling, attractive or memorable “face” rather than simply having conventionally attractive features.
- “Fem(me) queen” refers to a transgender woman or a transfeminine person. I can be considered a fem queen by virtue of this. In traditional ballroom classification systems, fem queens occupy particular gender categories and may compete in fem queen categories.
- “Butch queen” refers to a gay or bisexual cisgender man. It is particularly important to distinguish a butch queen from a fem queen: within the ballroom gender system, these terms describe different categories of participants.
- “Fish” is a gendered ballroom/drag term describing an extremely feminine presentation, particularly one perceived as convincingly resembling conventional cisgender femininity. The term has been used differently across drag and ballroom contexts, so it should not be simply treated as synonymous with “trans woman”.
- “Brick” refers to someone who is presenting femininely but can be seen as somewhat masculine. In essence, they fall short of presenting femininely, and the term is an antonym for “fish”.
- “C*nt” functions as high praise for extreme femininity, sexual confidence or a particularly powerful feminine performance, rather than simply carrying its ordinary vulgar meaning (Bailey, 2011).
- “Serving” refers to performing or presenting something exceptionally well – particularly a look, attitude, movement or overall aesthetic. Saying someone is “serving” means they are convincingly delivering what the category or moment demands.
- “Legendary” is a status associated with exceptional recognition and accomplishment within ballroom. “Legendary” is not merely “very good”; it denotes someone whose sustained contribution and achievements have established significant standing within the scene (Telander et al., 2018).
- “Voguing” is a stylised form of dance and performance originating in Black and Latino LGBTQIA+ ballroom culture. Characterised by highly controlled poses, lines, hard movements, footwork, and dramatic performance, contemporary vogue encompasses several recognised styles, including the old way, the new way, and vogue femme, although terminology can vary between communities. Though the term “voguing” may come from the name of the popular Condé Nast magazine, Vogue, it is not simply “dancing like a model”. It is developed within ballroom as a culturally specific form of expression, competition, and performance.
- “Trade” refers to a masculine-presenting man, often understood as a straight-identified or conventionally masculine man who has sex with other men. In ballroom and Black queer usage, trade can also describe a particular ideal of rugged, masculine male attractiveness. The term is used to refer to Black and Latino men exclusively.
- “Clocking” refers to noticing, identifying, exposing, or calling attention to something about another person’s appearance, presentation or performance. Someone might “clock” another person for their gender presentation, clothing, makeup, technique, or behaviour. It can be playful or critical, depending on context.
- “10s across the board” means a contestant received the highest possible score from every judge. In a traditional scoring system, where judges award 10s, “10s across the board” means every judge gave the competitor a 10. Therefore, it signals an exceptionally strong performance and often leads to the contestant winning in a category.
Contemporary scholarship on Black trans language in the United States similarly demonstrates that Black trans speakers may distinguish between forms of Black queer/trans language and other forms of contemporary gender terminology. One recent linguistic study found participants associating Black trans language with expressions such as “sis” and “queen”, while contrasting this with highly specialised gender terminology more commonly encountered in other queer contexts (Crowley, 2025).
This comparison should not be used to claim that South African queer language is simply an African version of ballroom language from the US; it is not.
Rather, ballroom demonstrates a broader principle: marginalised communities create languages that do social work.
They create ways to identify one another, build kinship, celebrate expression, establish status, communicate criticism, celebrate femininity, and survive exclusion. The language is therefore knowledge.
From “correct terminology” to situated knowledge.
This raises an uncomfortable question about class: What happens when one person’s vocabulary is treated as more legitimate than another person’s?
A university environment may privilege words such as intersectionality, cisnormativity, gender performativity, and transmisogyny. Social media may privilege another vocabulary. Family environments may use completely different expressions. Township queer communities may develop their own registers. Religious communities may frame gender and sexuality through spiritual language.
These languages are not interchangeable, but they should not be automatically ranked.
The Black trans woman who says, “They do not respect me as a woman,” may be describing a phenomenon an academic would describe as gender invalidation. The woman who says, “They only respect me because I make money,” may be describing the relationship between economic power and gender recognition. The woman who says, “My family accepted me once I could stand on my own,” may be articulating a complicated relationship between financial independence, kinship, and gender. The terminology changes, but the knowledge remains recognisable.
Indeed, South African research has documented precisely these relationships. One participant in Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s study described how becoming educated and economically resourceful changed her position within the family and altered the intensity of some forms of violence she experienced. The study’s broader conclusion is that Black trans women’s experiences of violence are shaped by intersecting structures of gendered, racial, and socioeconomic marginalisation (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
This suggests that class does not simply produce different trans experiences. It produces different conditions for negotiating trans experiences.
Family as a site of translation
Family is perhaps where these different languages become most visible. For many Black South Africans, identity is not experienced exclusively as an individual project. It is negotiated through kinship. Consequently, coming out or transitioning may require translation.
“I am transgender” may not be the language through which a grandmother understands the situation. I mean, my late grandmother still appreciated my gender expression and identity. However, it took her a while to reconcile singular they/them pronouns with Setswana/Sepedi, and to grasp what “non-binary” means.
My siblings understand; my mother understands the change through femininity. Some relatives I do not fraternise with in any capacity think of it as sin. My friends, particularly Gomolemo, understand it through Ballroom language. A television audience understands it through representation. I encounter these different interpretive systems as I navigate my gender identity.
Research on transfeminine women in the Western Cape has found that social support networks can function as alternative forms of family, particularly where conventional family structures do not provide adequate support. The study explicitly conceptualises these networks as important resources for navigating intersectional stigma (de Villiers et al., 2024).
This resonates strongly with the concept of chosen family in Black queer and ballroom histories, even though South African kinship forms must be understood on their own terms.
The central point is that belonging is itself a form of knowledge. People learn where they are safe. They learn who understands them. They learn when to explain themselves, when explanation is necessary.
Beyond the idea of one Black trans experience
The danger of discussing “Black transfemmes” is that the category may become too broad.
A Black trans woman in Sandton, a Black trans woman in Tembisa, a Black trans woman in Ganyesa, a Black trans woman living in Kimberley, and a person living in Mthatha may inhabit radically different socioeconomic and linguistic environments.
Their access to healthcare, employment, education, technology, queer communities, and family support may differ entirely.
South African research has repeatedly shown the importance of these differences. Studies have documented how socioeconomic status, geography, race, and gender interact to shape healthcare access and exposure to stigma (Shabalala, 2023), yet these differences should not lead to fragmentation. After all, recurring patterns still matter.
Across socioeconomic positions, Black transfemmes may encounter questions about the legitimacy of their femininity, the acceptability of their bodies, their being recognised by their families or institutions, or the space communities have for them.
What changes is the answer available to each woman. Money can provide upward socioeconomic mobility, but cannot completely or automatically eliminate transmisogynoir. Education can provide vocabulary, but cannot guarantee belonging. Urbanity can provide community, but cannot guarantee safety. Visibility provides representation, but does not protect you from scrutiny.
This is why a class-sensitive account of Black transfeminine life should resist both extremes: the idea that all Black trans women experience exactly the same thing, and the idea that socioeconomic difference makes their experiences incomparable. They are neither identical nor stratified; they are differently situated.
Conclusion: Toward a South African transfeminist epistemology
Ultimately, the question of language leads to a larger question: Who is allowed to produce knowledge about Black transfeminine life?
If only academics can produce legitimate knowledge, then the everyday language of transfemmes becomes merely anecdotal. If only activists can produce knowledge, then people outside organised queer politics become invisible. If only media representations count, then television becomes an inadequate substitute for lived experience.
A transfeminist approach offers another possibility: lived experience itself can be a source of knowledge.
South African transfeminist scholarship explicitly argues for centring trans people’s stories and histories in producing trans epistemologies. Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s research is particularly important here because it treats Black trans women’s narratives not simply as evidence of victimisation, but as sites through which gender, race, class, and power can be understood (Shabalala, Boonzaier, Chirape, 2023).
This means listening carefully to the different vocabularies through which Black transfemmes express themselves.
The epistemic vocabulary matters. The activist vocabulary matters. The township vocabulary matters. The family vocabulary matters. The spiritual vocabulary matters. The language of television matters. The language of ballroom matters. And the silences matter too.
Because sometimes the most significant evidence of knowledge is not whether someone knows the word transmisogyny. It is whether she knows what it feels like to be treated differently because she is perceived as a feminine person who is not supposed to exist in that way.
Different women may name that experience differently. They may interpret it differently. They may survive it differently. They may have entirely different socioeconomic resources to respond with. But across these differences, they can still recognise something in one another. That recognition itself is a form of knowledge.
Perhaps, then, the project is not to discover a single “Black trans experience” in South Africa. It is to understand how Black transfemmes produce, inherit, translate and circulate knowledge across different social worlds.
Different languages do not necessarily mean different realities. Sometimes they are different routes towards articulating the same underlying social knowledge.
Different Languages, Shared Knowledge
How Black South African Transfemmes Articulate Similar Experiences Across Socioeconomic Contexts
Around 2023, I saw a tweet where the author and the people replying under it were laughing at Dabulamanzi’s English. For context, Dabulamanzi is a star from Moja Love’s Umndeni, a show that followed the lives of sangomas in a relationship with a polygamous/polyamorous sangoma. The central figure in the polygamous household is Enoch “Mkhulu” Kolobe, a twice-married gay pastor and sangoma. On the show, he was in relationships with multiple feminine gay men and gender diverse people, including Dabulamanzi.
The clip that was circulating on Twitter at the time was an out-of-context clip of Dabulamanzi talking about the tension between him and Fezile (a transgender woman). Amidst the camaraderie among the people under that tweet, Nkuley Masemola quoted the tweet and elaborated on how the language used by the gays and dolls in the township may differ, but the experiences are often similar – this was the crux of the thread; I cannot find it right now, but I do recall a lot of what was said.
That thread, alongside my personal experiences as a Black, South African transfemme, made me think about a particular difficulty in describing the experiences we go through: the language available to describe an experience is not always the language in which the experience itself was lived. I also briefly touched on this on my TikTok page, but this article expands on what I said there.
One person may describe herself as a trans woman. Another may describe herself as a transfemme, sister, queen, femme, m*ffie (mora if you are from Cape Town), butch, gay, or a combination of indigenous-language, queer, and gendered vocabularies. Another may have no sophisticated terminology for her gender at all, while nonetheless possessing sophisticated ontological knowledge of what it means to move through the world as a feminine person who was assigned male at birth.
The distinction between terminology and knowledge is important.
Contemporary conversations about transgender identity can sometimes appear as though access to particular words produces transgender consciousness. However, the converse is also true: people can have an intimate understanding of gender, femininity, social policing, embodiment, and belonging before they have the vocabulary academics, activists, or social media have developed to describe those experiences.
For Black South African transfemmes, this question becomes even more complicated, because – and I always say this – gender does not exist separately from class, language, race, geography, religion, and economic position. Research on Black trans women in South Africa has shown that experiences differ across urban, peri-urban, rural, and township settings, as well as across employment and socioeconomic circumstances, while still revealing recurring structures of gendered and racialised vulnerability (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
The result is not necessarily different experiences. It can be different languages used to articulate related experiences.
Language is more than just vocabulary.
When speaking about “language”, it is tempting to think only about whether someone speaks standardised Setswana, Sepedi, isiXhosa, English or Afrikaans. However, language can also mean the social vocabulary people use to make sense of themselves and their experiences.
I, as a trans university student who spends a considerable amount of time on social media, comfortably use terms like “transfeminine”, “gender dysphoria”, “gender expression”, “transmisogyny”, “misogynoir”, or “intersectionality”. Someone with less exposure to this kind of language (and overall contemporary internet discourse that pertains to trans issues) may never use these words at all. This does not mean they lack an understanding of the phenomena these words describe, and any person who contends otherwise is paternalistic and elitist.
South African research provides a useful illustration. Studies of transfeminine and gender-diverse people have found that participants identify themselves through a range of categories that their experiences of stigma intersect with socioeconomic status, employment, family structure, geographic location, and other aspects of their social identity (de Villiers et al., 2020).
Consequently, the question should not simply be: Who knows the correct terminology?
A more interesting question is: Who gets to define what counts as knowledge?
Academic and activist vocabulary is valuable because it gives people tools to communicate experiences that might otherwise be hard to explain. However, terminology is not the same as consciousness. A person can understand that she is being treated differently because people perceive her femininity as illegitimate without knowing the term cissexism (I discuss what this term means in my previous article). She can understand that poverty makes transition-related healthcare inaccessible without describing the situation as the commodification of gender affirmation. She can understand that her family treats her differently after she becomes visibly feminine without knowing the language of gender policing. Two things become clear: Context matters, and knowledge precedes terminology.
The socioeconomic question
This becomes particularly important when examining Black transfemmes across socioeconomic positions.
Class changes the resources available for responding to gendered marginalisation, i.e. transmisogyny. A financially secure person may access private healthcare, move out of an unsupportive household, travel to another city, consult professionals, buy gender-affirming clothing and cosmetics, or build an independent social network.
Someone who is unemployed, financially dependent on family, living in a township or rural area, or reliant on public healthcare may have far fewer options.
Research on healthcare access among Black trans women in South Africa demonstrates this relationship between gender, race, class and geography precisely. Participants in one study described how gender-affirming services are prohibitively expensive in the private sector while public services are geographically concentrated.
For example, a friend of mine grew up in and is based in George, but she cannot readily access public gender-affirming healthcare services in the town. To do so, she must travel to Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, which is 430km away. Another example: my other friend grew up in Warrenton and is based in Galeshewe, Kimberley. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Hospital in Kimberley and Gordonia Hospital in Upington are the only public hospitals in the Northern Cape, the largest yet most sparsely populated province in South Africa, that provide generic gender-affirming healthcare such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT). To access gender-affirming healthcare specialists like endocrinologists or urologists, she has to travel to Bloemfontein, which is some 150km away.
This shows that for people living in rural or township areas, travelling for specialised services can itself become an economic barrier (de Villiers et al., 2020).
Similarly, Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s study of Black trans women found that socioeconomic position mediated experiences of gender-based violence and transfemicide. Their participants included women living in rural, township, urban, and peripheral areas, with differences in employment and economic circumstances. The study consequently demonstrates why “Black trans women” cannot be treated as a homogeneous and monolithic group (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
Socioeconomic differences do not necessarily eliminate common experiences. A wealthy Black trans woman and a poor Black trans woman may have radically different capacities to respond to gendered discrimination (with their nuances). However, both of them understand what it means to have someone question their Black trans womanhood. One may respond by leaving, another by negotiating, and another by enduring. One may become financially indispensable to the family, while another may construct a chosen family outside of the household. The strategies differ; the social knowledge converges.
This is where the phrase “different languages, shared knowledge” becomes useful. Socioeconomic stratification may shape the vocabulary, resources, and strategies through which a person articulates her experience, without necessarily determining whether she recognises or understands the underlying phenomenon.
The Way Ngingakhona: television as a vernacular archive
South African popular culture provides an unusually interesting site for observing this process.
I have my qualms with Moja Love 157. However, the impact of its show, The Way Ngingakhona, the title whose one-to-one translation is “The way that I am,” cannot be overstated, at least for me. It is particularly relevant because the program places LGBTQ+ South Africans’ everyday lives, relationships, identities, and families within a mainstream television environment. The original cast included Tholang Motsumi, Innocent Matjiane and MJ Maponya, among others. These three represented gay, bisexual and transgender experiences, respectively (IOL, 2020).
The programme’s importance is not simply that it puts trans people on television. Representation is more complicated than visibility.
What makes The Way Ngingakhona valuable as a cultural text is its emphasis on ordinary life. Transness appears alongside friendship, romance, family disagreements, ambition, beauty, employment, vulnerability and sociality. In this sense, the programme disrupts the assumption that transgender existence is primarily a medical or political subject.
Tholang Motsumi’s public advocacy around transgender healthcare illustrates this further. Her visibility on the programme became connected to efforts to educate parents and communities about LGBTQIA+ people and to advocate for greater accessibility to hormone replacement therapy (TimesLIVE, 2022).
Later seasons expanded on this archive of experiences. Elle Khobi, for example, spoke publicly about taking years to understand and undertake her transition and about receiving support from her sister (Zimoja, 2022).
These narratives demonstrate something important about articulation: the language of identity can be simultaneously personal, familiar, televisual, and political.
A person may speak about herself differently when talking to a sibling, a friend, a television producer, a doctor, or an academic researcher. None of these versions is necessarily more “authentic”; they are different registers through which the same person makes herself intelligible.
Umndeni and the Instability of categories
Umndeni provides another interesting cultural text.
The Moja Love programme follows unconventional family and household structures involving sexuality, gender, spirituality, traditional healing, and relationships. Moja Love describes the programme as following the Maseko family and its evolving household. In contrast, contemporary reporting on earlier seasons described the show’s exploration of polygamy, gender, sexuality, and traditional practices.
The significance of Umndeni is not that it provides a perfect representation of Black trans or queer life – it does not – and it should not be treated as ethnographic evidence.
Its importance lies elsewhere: it demonstrates that African gender and sexuality cannot always be neatly divided into Western categories of “gay,” “straight,” “transgender,” “religious,” and “traditional.” The programme’s worlds are messy because real social worlds are messy.
A person can participate in traditions while navigating gender variance. Someone can be spiritually gifted while also being queer. A family can simultaneously reproduce cisgender heteronormative gender and create unconventional forms of belonging.
This complicates the assumption that the adoption of contemporary transgender terminology represents a simple progression from “primitive” ignorance to “modern” knowledge. There are many ways of knowing oneself.
The Black trans ballroom connection
On 26 March 2022, I attended my first ever VNJ (formerly known as Vogue Nights Jozi) Ball. It was probably one of my earliest recollections of me tapping into my transfemininity. I identified myself as non-binary before that night and still did afterwards. Back then, I had not been exposed to the term “transfeminine”. I still was attached to my non-binarity, but as the year progressed, I started cultivating a strong relationship with my femininity. I was gravitating towards identifying as a trans woman, but I still held onto what I imagined was the last scintilla of respect and “privilege” of being non-binary.
In the early stages of my transfemininity, my life was somewhat analogous to that of a drag queen. I would dress femininely (disclaimer: my fashion sense back then was incredibly atrocious) and put on makeup when going out with my homegirls, then take the makeup and clothes off and relegate myself to survival masculinity when leading my daily life, such as going to school or existing around extended relatives who back then might have received me differently or perceived me as “too radical”.
I was Kabelo Nchabeleng by day, and “enbyfatale_” by night. However, the latter was not my alter ego; it is who I am to this day. My transfemininity makes up a large part of who I am as an individual, and if it is suppressed or taken away from me, my entire existence falls under siege; my entire being is erased.
The United States provides another useful comparison through Black and Latino ballroom culture.
My first exposure to ballroom culture was through the 2018 television show POSE and the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. Ballroom developed in the 1960s (though it arguably hit the mainstream in the 1980s) as a space where Black and Latino LGBTQIA+ people could build community, kinship, performance, and recognition in response to exclusion from dominant institutions. Scholarship on ballroom describes “houses” as forms of kinship and balls as spaces of ritualised performance through which marginalised people create alternative societies (Bailey, 2014).
The language of ballroom is therefore not merely slang, or “female lingo” as many South African men on Twitter obnoxiously claim. Terms such as house, mother, father, realness, fem queen, butch queen, serving face, serving, category, fish, legendary, and c*nt emerged within particular cultural histories and social practices.
Their meanings are inseparable from the communities that produced and developed them.
Below are their definitions:
Contemporary scholarship on Black trans language in the United States similarly demonstrates that Black trans speakers may distinguish between forms of Black queer/trans language and other forms of contemporary gender terminology. One recent linguistic study found participants associating Black trans language with expressions such as “sis” and “queen”, while contrasting this with highly specialised gender terminology more commonly encountered in other queer contexts (Crowley, 2025).
This comparison should not be used to claim that South African queer language is simply an African version of ballroom language from the US; it is not.
Rather, ballroom demonstrates a broader principle: marginalised communities create languages that do social work.
They create ways to identify one another, build kinship, celebrate expression, establish status, communicate criticism, celebrate femininity, and survive exclusion. The language is therefore knowledge.
From “correct terminology” to situated knowledge.
This raises an uncomfortable question about class: What happens when one person’s vocabulary is treated as more legitimate than another person’s?
A university environment may privilege words such as intersectionality, cisnormativity, gender performativity, and transmisogyny. Social media may privilege another vocabulary. Family environments may use completely different expressions. Township queer communities may develop their own registers. Religious communities may frame gender and sexuality through spiritual language.
These languages are not interchangeable, but they should not be automatically ranked.
The Black trans woman who says, “They do not respect me as a woman,” may be describing a phenomenon an academic would describe as gender invalidation. The woman who says, “They only respect me because I make money,” may be describing the relationship between economic power and gender recognition. The woman who says, “My family accepted me once I could stand on my own,” may be articulating a complicated relationship between financial independence, kinship, and gender. The terminology changes, but the knowledge remains recognisable.
Indeed, South African research has documented precisely these relationships. One participant in Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s study described how becoming educated and economically resourceful changed her position within the family and altered the intensity of some forms of violence she experienced. The study’s broader conclusion is that Black trans women’s experiences of violence are shaped by intersecting structures of gendered, racial, and socioeconomic marginalisation (Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape, 2023).
This suggests that class does not simply produce different trans experiences. It produces different conditions for negotiating trans experiences.
Family as a site of translation
Family is perhaps where these different languages become most visible. For many Black South Africans, identity is not experienced exclusively as an individual project. It is negotiated through kinship. Consequently, coming out or transitioning may require translation.
“I am transgender” may not be the language through which a grandmother understands the situation. I mean, my late grandmother still appreciated my gender expression and identity. However, it took her a while to reconcile singular they/them pronouns with Setswana/Sepedi, and to grasp what “non-binary” means.
My siblings understand; my mother understands the change through femininity. Some relatives I do not fraternise with in any capacity think of it as sin. My friends, particularly Gomolemo, understand it through Ballroom language. A television audience understands it through representation. I encounter these different interpretive systems as I navigate my gender identity.
Research on transfeminine women in the Western Cape has found that social support networks can function as alternative forms of family, particularly where conventional family structures do not provide adequate support. The study explicitly conceptualises these networks as important resources for navigating intersectional stigma (de Villiers et al., 2024).
This resonates strongly with the concept of chosen family in Black queer and ballroom histories, even though South African kinship forms must be understood on their own terms.
The central point is that belonging is itself a form of knowledge. People learn where they are safe. They learn who understands them. They learn when to explain themselves, when explanation is necessary.
Beyond the idea of one Black trans experience
The danger of discussing “Black transfemmes” is that the category may become too broad.
A Black trans woman in Sandton, a Black trans woman in Tembisa, a Black trans woman in Ganyesa, a Black trans woman living in Kimberley, and a person living in Mthatha may inhabit radically different socioeconomic and linguistic environments.
Their access to healthcare, employment, education, technology, queer communities, and family support may differ entirely.
South African research has repeatedly shown the importance of these differences. Studies have documented how socioeconomic status, geography, race, and gender interact to shape healthcare access and exposure to stigma (Shabalala, 2023), yet these differences should not lead to fragmentation. After all, recurring patterns still matter.
Across socioeconomic positions, Black transfemmes may encounter questions about the legitimacy of their femininity, the acceptability of their bodies, their being recognised by their families or institutions, or the space communities have for them.
What changes is the answer available to each woman. Money can provide upward socioeconomic mobility, but cannot completely or automatically eliminate transmisogynoir. Education can provide vocabulary, but cannot guarantee belonging. Urbanity can provide community, but cannot guarantee safety. Visibility provides representation, but does not protect you from scrutiny.
This is why a class-sensitive account of Black transfeminine life should resist both extremes: the idea that all Black trans women experience exactly the same thing, and the idea that socioeconomic difference makes their experiences incomparable. They are neither identical nor stratified; they are differently situated.
Conclusion: Toward a South African transfeminist epistemology
Ultimately, the question of language leads to a larger question: Who is allowed to produce knowledge about Black transfeminine life?
If only academics can produce legitimate knowledge, then the everyday language of transfemmes becomes merely anecdotal. If only activists can produce knowledge, then people outside organised queer politics become invisible. If only media representations count, then television becomes an inadequate substitute for lived experience.
A transfeminist approach offers another possibility: lived experience itself can be a source of knowledge.
South African transfeminist scholarship explicitly argues for centring trans people’s stories and histories in producing trans epistemologies. Shabalala, Boonzaier and Chirape’s research is particularly important here because it treats Black trans women’s narratives not simply as evidence of victimisation, but as sites through which gender, race, class, and power can be understood (Shabalala, Boonzaier, Chirape, 2023).
This means listening carefully to the different vocabularies through which Black transfemmes express themselves.
The epistemic vocabulary matters. The activist vocabulary matters. The township vocabulary matters. The family vocabulary matters. The spiritual vocabulary matters. The language of television matters. The language of ballroom matters. And the silences matter too.
Because sometimes the most significant evidence of knowledge is not whether someone knows the word transmisogyny. It is whether she knows what it feels like to be treated differently because she is perceived as a feminine person who is not supposed to exist in that way.
Different women may name that experience differently. They may interpret it differently. They may survive it differently. They may have entirely different socioeconomic resources to respond with. But across these differences, they can still recognise something in one another. That recognition itself is a form of knowledge.
Perhaps, then, the project is not to discover a single “Black trans experience” in South Africa. It is to understand how Black transfemmes produce, inherit, translate and circulate knowledge across different social worlds.
Different languages do not necessarily mean different realities. Sometimes they are different routes towards articulating the same underlying social knowledge.
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