In this deeply personal and unflinching piece, Eastern Cape activist Sikhander Coopoo reflects on trauma, burnout, healing and what democracy truly means for LGBTQIA+ people living on the margins of South African society.
There are things you do not have words for until someone gives them to you.
For years, I moved through the world carrying what I now understand as depression, anxiety, burnout, severe hypertension, a heart condition, and lumbago so relentless that I learned to sleep around the pain rather than through it. I blew the whistle on fraud and corruption in a R63 million USAID‑funded social cohesion project, and the retaliation was swift and deliberate.
I was retrenched. In the same building where I raised the alarm, colleagues casually dropped words like stabane and moffie into conversation, told me to stop being so emotional, and made very sure I understood that my race, my age, and my faith made me less. Not a person raising a legitimate concern. Just a problem to be managed away.
I did not have the vocabulary for what was happening to my body and my mind. I only knew I was disappearing.
It’s been over three years since I last had a stable income. I am still unemployed. I am still healing. The journey has no neat arc. It doesn’t resolve and then conclude. Think of an onion with rock-hard layers. As you chip away at one, another waits beneath it, just as dense, just as raw. That is what trauma recovery actually feels like, especially when you are trying to do it in a province that is trying to kill you slowly through poverty, neglect, and organised hate.
Known as the most homophobic province in South Africa, the Eastern Cape carries statistics that should stop the country in its tracks. Gender-based violence and femicide rates are more than double the national average. A province ranking highest in poverty and catastrophic unemployment levels.
It is also the most dangerous place in the country to live as a queer person, with the highest likelihood of verbal, physical, and sexual violence. Year after year, it bears a disproportionate share of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate crimes and murders.
Patriarchy and homophobia are embedded not only in individual acts of cruelty but in institutions. In schools that publicly expose gender-nonconforming learners, in businesses that have tried to ban us outright, in hate crime killings and corrective rape, in the gravitational pull of a patriarchal system that threatens our very existence.
This is the terrain. This is where we live. This is where we organise. This is where we try to heal.
During the worst of it, I sought professional help. SADAG NPOWER, Dr Terblanche, CSVR, Art of Living, Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI) – each one offered something different, each one a thread in what slowly became a fragile rope I could hold onto.
Then, an advert appeared in my Facebook feed for a seven-week online LGBTQIA+ course run by GERI. Something in me reached for it. I enrolled.
What unfolded in that virtual space was subtle and quietly magnificent. A gentle opening like a window in a room that had been sealed for too long. By the final session, I had made a personal commitment. I wanted a more meaningful role in our queer community. I reached out to Tristan Johannes, the GERI LGBTQIA+ Global Lead, to ask whether a workshop might be possible for what was then East London.
Four years later, it happened.
On 13 and 14 May 2026, in KuGompo in the Eastern Cape, Genderworks brought that conversation into one room. Twenty-five of us. All genders. All orientations. It was a collaboration between Sexual Health and Empowerment, Masimanyane Women’s Rights International, Access Chapter 2, the Eastern Cape Department of Health, and GERI. And me, now an intern facilitator after spending a year in GERI’s facilitator training programme. I entered that space as part of the team holding it.
I do not think I can fully describe what it meant to be on the other side of that door.
Day one asked something enormous of all of us. It asked us to arrive fully, honestly, without performance. The group carried pain that was not historical, not wounds from fifty years ago, but pain from yesterday, from that very morning. The container of care we built together, slowly and collectively over those first hours, was able to hold all of it.
Heart stories, long suppressed, began to move through the room. People who spend their lives absorbing the suffering of others were permitted to bring their own. By the time we closed the first day, something in the room shifted quietly.
I shared with the group, in an exercise that asks you to map gendered moments of your journey – the rivers, the floods, the dry spells, the unexpected tributaries. I had done it before, with strangers. With strangers, I opened completely and cried.
Standing in front of people I knew felt different. I stood there, shaking inside. The tears didn’t come, but something else did. The certainty that if I fell, twenty-four people in the room would catch me. Without judgment. Without conditions. That certainty steadied me more than I ever expected.
At 3:20 the next morning, I lay awake in the dark, sifting what moved through me, and that’s when the tears quietly came. The slightest sound of distress from me and Iman, my dog, howls. He is attuned to my emotional state, an honest mirror.
Day two opened with song: Love Can Build a Bridge. I Am Light. Participants said it was the first time in a very long time they slept through the night. And it was on that second day, as the work deepened, that a word arrived.
Resilience.
Not resilience as a performance or a survival tactic or something to be celebrated from a distance. Resilience as it actually lives. In the body, in the chest cavity, in the place where grief and determination share the same address.
What does resilience feel like in the heart space of LGBTQIA+ activists and allies living in the Eastern Cape … When you are navigating hate crimes and femicide, and funding cuts are gutting the organisations you work for? When you are managing personal loss and anxiety that does not lift, and the slow violence of a system that was never fully designed with you in mind?
The group held all of it and named it honestly. Hope. Courage. Laughter. Joy.
Heart stories threaded through the room on that second day, granting us the grace to be moved by experiences different from our own, and to recognise ourselves in places we had not expected. The work was both tender and celebratory. We ended by blessing one another, and committing ourselves to walk together toward a more equal, compassionate, gender-healed world – words that could easily have been hollow, but were not, because we earned them.
This is what the GERI programme creates. Not a workshop, but a container of care. A space where activists who spend their lives absorbing the pain of others are finally allowed to bring their own. Here, the political, societal, organisational and personal are not separated – because they never were. What is done to our communities is done to our bodies. What happens to our bodies shapes what we can do for our communities.
17 May was IDAHOBIT. Thirty-five years ago, the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders. Not because the world became kind, but because people refused to disappear until the record was corrected. We did not arrive through goodwill. We arrived through persistence.
And yet here we still are. Not quite arrived. This year’s theme, At the Heart of Democracy, sits with me. Whose heart are we talking about?
Because the conversation in KuGompo went somewhere that polished institutions prefer to avoid. The movement itself began to reproduce the very hierarchies it was built to dismantle. Class and wealth have come to dominate. Poor, rural, and working-class transgender and intersex people are made invisible by the same organisations that claim to speak for them.
This is not a new pattern. In the eighties and nineties, the spotlight fell on white gays and lesbians. Global Majority queers and transgender people were pushed to the margins, not by accident, but by the gravitational pull of money and proximity to power.
We should have learned. We didn’t.
The fire that lights one part of a community cannot be called liberation if it leaves others in the dark. A small spark can change everything. But only if it reaches the people the system forgot to light.
Sikhander Coopoo is a black, queer, Muslim intersectional feminist with backgrounds in gender, pedagogy and local governance. He is a social justice and humxn rights activist at heart. Sikhander serves on the Gender and Sexuality Alliance of East London committee and writes in his own capacity.
