Hope is the Pedestal of My Transition: The Politics and Paradoxes of Trans‐Subjectivities in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Based on ethnographic research in Abidjan, Côte, this paper examines how a diverse set of gender minority individuals and communities adopt and adapt global assemblages of “trans‐ness” and human rights discourse and, in doing so, fashion themselves as “modern” subjects and position others along similar continuums. Between 2010 and 2015, I conducted fieldwork in Abidjan, using participant observation and life history interviews to document the embodied experiences of sexual and gender minorities. In Abidjan, both the local stigmatization of homosexuality and efforts to curb a concentrated HIV epidemic among the same population heavily influence the lives of gender and sexual minorities. In addition, in the wake of Côte d'Ivoire's 2010–2011 conflict and regime change, gender minorities were particularly vulnerable to state‐sponsored violence from the Forces Républicaines de Côte d'Ivoire. Like gender‐normative sexual minorities, travestis in Côte d'Ivoire are accused of being not just aberrational but foreign, having allegedly imported their identities from elsewhere, namely the global North. However, the stigma and violence travestis encounter is often more extreme than for those sexual minorities whose gender normativity allows them to avoid unwanted attention. Travestis are largely left to cope with these challenges without the support of mainstream Ivorian sexual minority rights groups who have worked to distance themselves from travestis, often framing them as recklessly indiscreet. Gender minorities found NGO spaces, staffed mostly by local, gender‐normative men, to be hostile. Many of these NGO staff members blame gender minorities for bringing unwanted attention to the NGOs and stigmatize them as a more feminine and affected version of themselves. This exclusion partly explains why many Ivoirian travestis engage in sex work, describing the “stroll” – outdoor spaces where travestis congregate to find clients – as the place where they are most free to express their sexual and gender identity. Thus, travestis—a category encompassing a diverse set of individuals who were sexed male at birth—have experienced simultaneous invisibility when HIV/AIDS programs fail to include them and hypervisibility as victims of state‐sponsored violence. Though many travestis have accepted their positions within this continuum of vulnerability as “normal”, others have begun to organize for further inclusion and tolerance in their communities and in Côte d'Ivoire at large. This paper documents these “local” struggles as well as the more “global” struggle to fit within the international movement for sexual minority rights, as their identities and lives do not always align with globalized notions of transgenderism.