Trans and gender diverse women in Uganda walk hours for healthcare, build mutual aid networks when the formal economy excludes them, and show up for each other with a consistency that shames institutions a hundred times better resourced. Every March 8th, I find myself asking: why aren’t they at the centre of this day?
Every March 8th, the world celebrates women. And every March 8th, I find myself asking the same question: which women?
I think about a woman I know, whom I’ll call Amara, who spent three hours traveling to get HIV care after her local clinic turned her away. Not because the drugs weren’t available, but because the nurse looked at her and decided she didn’t deserve a respectful consultation. Amara is a trans woman. She is also one of the most effective community health advocates I have ever met. She has trained dozens of peers, navigated bureaucracies that would defeat most people, and never once stopped showing up for her community, for the movement, for a Uganda that has not yet decided to show up for her.
On International Women’s Day, Amara won’t appear in most photos. Her name won’t trend. The panels held in her honor will mostly exclude her. This is the quiet scandal I want to discuss.
I approached this work with a feminism largely borrowed from texts written in the Global North, from movements that rarely addressed the realities of Ugandan women, and from a framework that saw gender as fixed and simple. The trans and gender diverse women in our communities in Uganda challenged that framework. Not through argument. Through the powerful, undeniable truth of their lives.
They showed me that womanhood is not assigned at birth. It is claimed — sometimes at great personal sacrifice. In Uganda, where the legal system criminalizes same-sex conduct and where trans people face disproportionate violence, eviction, and exclusion from healthcare, that sacrifice is real, not metaphorical. According to UNAIDS data, transgender women in sub-Saharan Africa are among the most underserved in HIV prevention and treatment and among the most likely to face violence in clinical settings. The women suffering through those conditions are the same women our movement rhetoric claims to support.
I want to be cautious with the word resilience. It has become a way of celebrating people’s survival of conditions we should be dismantling, a form of admiration that excuses institutions. Trans women in Uganda are not resilient because suffering is their nature. They are resilient despite what they face, and the appropriate response is not applause. It is structural change.
At TYI-Uganda, I have observed trans women building mutual aid networks when the formal economy excluded them. I have seen them create systems of care when hospitals turned them away. I have watched them show up in advocacy spaces and healing circles for each other with a consistency that shames institutions a hundred times better resourced. That is not resilience as a character trait. That is leadership in the absence of support. The distinction matters because one invites celebration and the other demands accountability.
A women’s or feminist movement that excludes trans women isn’t truly a movement for liberation. It’s gatekeeping disguised as feminism. I don’t say this to provoke, but because the exclusion is real and persists in funding decisions, program development, and which groups are recognized on stages today.
Amara has never needed my organization’s validation to know who she is. She has never needed March 8th. What she has needed, and what trans women across Uganda have needed, is for the institutions that claim to champion gender justice to genuinely mean it completely. Without any qualifiers.
Today, when you celebrate women, I ask you to pause and reflect on an uncomfortable question: who is not in the room you are celebrating? Who organized it? Who was not invited to speak? Whose name is missing from the tribute? In most rooms, the answer is the same. And we already know what to do about it.
By Nana Millers | Executive Director, Trans Youth Initiative-Uganda
