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LIFELONG REJECTION, BULLYING: TRANSGENDER WOMAN’S STRUGGLE
Can I be free to be me? DESIRÉE RORKE @dezzierorke
F
aced with a “life sentence” in the wrong body, a transgender woman from Brackenfell has turned to crowdfunding to raise the R200 000 desperately needed for her gender reassignment surgery. Not only does Robyn Alaina Botha (22) want to use this campaign as a unique awareness platform, but she invites the public to join her in making history by being part of the first crowd-funded gender reassignment surgery on a South African crowdfunding platform. Robyn (22), born Dewald Botha, is a makeup artist at Cipria Milano and has been struggling with her gender identity her entire life. At birth Robyn was assigned “male” as her gender, a label she would spend most of her life trying to live up to. By definition a transgender person is someone whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex. Sex is assigned based on biology – chromosomes, anatomy and hormones. But a person’s gender identity (the inner sense of being male, female, or both) doesn’t always match their biology. “I always felt as if there was something wrong with me. As a boy, the reflection in the mirror staring back at me was someone I couldn’t relate to. It always seemed that the person I was seeing was someone else,” she says. From an early age Robyn much preferred make-up and Barbie dolls to toy cars and playing in the dirt. Her parents noticed this and took her to countless specialists from the
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age of five, to diagnose the “problem.” “I was diagnosed as transgender, shattering my parents’ dream of a model son. I was trapped in a body that didn’t belong to me. It was frightening,” she says. She was relentlessly bullied throughout her school career, which started at Fanie Theron Primary School in Kraaifontein and continued at Labori High in Paarl and later Monument Park High in Kraaifontein. “It started with name calling and then progressed to me being physically assaulted by my male classmates on a daily basis. Teachers turned a blind eye and nothing was ever done about it,” she says. After her mom passed away when Robyn was only 16, she dropped out of school and went to college. “My mom was the only person who truly supported me and loved me unconditionally. Without her I couldn’t cope with the playground name-calling. I wasn’t strong enough.” At 17, Robyn started dressing as a woman. “I learned to embrace myself and started living as the woman I was born to be.” She legally changed the gender in her ID book and Dewald became Robyn. In college, during the start of her transition, she experienced bullying of the worst kind. “A girl who I used to be friends with outed me and soon everyone found out that I was transgender. It was a complete nightmare. My college peers treated me terribly; they would throw rocks at me and call me the most disgusting names. Even the lecturers made fun of me in class. I felt suicidal every day; I would come home from class and cry my eyes out,” she says. V To page 2.
Robyn Botha (22)
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