Trans Day of Visibility: The risk of being seen

By Adrian Kibe, Program Lead on Sexual & Gender Minorities at the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

Across the world, transgender people are being pushed into a dangerous paradox. We are told that visibility is progress. That being seen is a sign of inclusion. Yet in practice, increased visibility is being met with increasingly coordinated efforts to regulate, target, restrict, and erase us.

This dynamic is unfolding across jurisdictions, across legal systems, and across political contexts in Africa with a striking degree of similarity.

The growing climate of repression in Africa

In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 did not simply criminalize same-sex relations. It expanded liability to those who associate with, advocate for, or fail to report. For transgender and gender non-conforming people, whose existence is often read through the lens of queerness, this creates a constant risk of criminal exposure.

In Ghana, the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, introduced in 2021 and still shaping political discourse, seeks to criminalize identity, expression, and allyship. It moves beyond behavior into policing existence itself.

Kenya has seen repeated attempts to introduce legislation targeting LGBTQI+ communities, alongside court battles over registration of NGOs and recognition. Even where legal protections exist in fragments, access remains uneven, contested, and fragile.

Across the Sahel region, in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, recent years have seen the introduction or strengthening of laws that criminalize same-sex relations, often framed as moral correction or cultural preservation. In Senegal and Nigeria, enforcement has intensified, with public arrests and prosecutions reinforcing a climate of fear.

These laws are often presented as expressions of ‘African sovereignty’. As defenses of ‘culture’. As protections of ‘family’.

But that framing does not hold up under scrutiny.

The Draft African Charter: External influence under the guise of cultural authenticity

A growing body of research has shown that many of these legislative pushes are not purely local in origin. They are shaped, funded, and strategically supported by actors and organizations based in the West. Advocacy networks, religious lobbies, and political groups export legal language, campaign strategies, and moral narratives that are then localized and repackaged as indigenous resistance.

What emerges is a cycle where external influence is rebranded as cultural authenticity.

The Draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values, a proposed treaty within the African human rights system, sits squarely within this pattern. It claims to articulate shared African values, yet it does so by flattening a continent of diverse histories, cultures, and kinship systems into a single, rigid moral framework.

Africa is not a monolith. It never has been.

Pre-colonial African societies held varied and complex understandings of gender, community, and belonging. The idea that there has ever been one fixed ‘African family structure’ is historically inaccurate. What the Draft Charter advances instead is a narrow, highly individualized model of family that mirrors Western conservative frameworks more than it reflects African communal traditions.

Concepts such as ubuntuor utu, which center interdependence, dignity, and collective humanity, are notably absent in both spirit and application. In their place is a model that prioritizes control, hierarchy, and exclusion.

The language of the Ddraft Charter reinforces this. It frames non-conforming identities as threats to social order. It elevates protection of “the family” without interrogating whose family is being protected, and at whose expense. It invokes sovereignty, yet remains silent on the economic and political dependencies that shape state decision-making across the continent.

Because sovereignty, in this context, is uneven.

African states are told to assert independence in matters of culture and morality, while remaining structurally dependent through debt, aid conditionalities, and geopolitical pressure. What is presented as autonomous decision-making is often deeply entangled in external influence.

In practice, these tensions are often worked out through the regulation of people’s lives. Transgender and queer people have become easy targets: visible enough to be polticized, but not deserving of protection.

The global erosion of trans rights

This pattern is not unique to Africa. In the United States, recent years have seen a wave of state-level legislation restricting access to healthcare, education, and public life for transgender people. Across parts of Europe, policy shifts and political rhetoric have narrowed protections under the guise of safeguarding tradition or public interest.

Different contexts. Shared trajectory.

Visibility, in this environment, becomes complicated.

It can open doors to recognition and community. But it also increases exposure to systems that are actively being redesigned to exclude. To be visible without protection is to be legible to power without being shielded from it.

This is what many trans people navigate daily. Not just prejudice, but systems. Not just hostility, but policy. A reality where being known can carry consequences, where recognition does not guarantee safety, and where survival often depends on constant negotiation with institutions that were not built to accommodate you.

Global responses have not kept pace with this reality. Support is inconsistent. Solidarity is often symbolic. Attention spikes in moments of crisis and fades just as quickly, leaving those most affected to navigate the long-term consequences alone.

If visibility is to have meaning beyond symbolism, it must be accompanied by protection that is real, sustained, and enforceable.

That requires more than statements. It requires governments to resist importing and enacting frameworks that endanger their own people. It requires institutions to move beyond performative inclusion and address structural barriers. It requires global actors to confront the role they play in shaping the very conditions they later condemn.

Transgender people are already visible.

The question now is whether that visibility will continue to be used as a tool for control, or whether it will finally be matched with the conditions necessary for dignity and safety.

Until then, being seen will continue to come at a cost.

(Photo by Pradnyal Gandhi on Unsplash)