‘Please help me do surgery from man to woman’

Thapelo Matshameko, a transgender woman who was recently attacked at Trekkers night club in Gaborone is pleading for help from members of the public to assist with sponsoring her sex reassignment surgery from male to female. A free-spirit, Matshameko says that she is tired of being disrespected because of her sexual orientation. She is pleading to both government and the private sector to help her perform the surgery. She says that she has been advised that it can be done in South Africa. “It’s not by choice that I’m a transgender woman. I’m tired of the bullying and insults hurled at me every now and then. People call me words like 'brazen', skhokho, laitiyaka and auti. I ‘m a woman and I want to live my life in peace,” she says. She works at Payless, BBS mall in Gaborone. “Next to where I work, there are some boys that always shout at me and call me names. They’d say to me ‘Hey wena o p**o, mosimane ke wena o itirang ngwanyana. O batla thupa, o batla go bolawa,” she says however adding that she has chosen to ignore them. She says that employees from other stores would come to her supermarket to harass her and shout at her in front of customers saying she is a man and should stop behaving like a woman. Last month, a 43 second- long video of Matshameko lying on the floor, behind a car with a group of people calling out her private parts and saying she needs to be exposed on Facebook, circulated on social media. In the video one of the men slaps her bare buttocks, saying that she is not a woman. They also removed her wig. The video ends with her crying. In a previous interview with The Midweek Sun, she said that she had gone to the nightclub and decided to go out and use the toilets. “When I got there, I just fell and blacked-out. Bouncers from the club then decided to take advantage of me upon seeing me as it is shown on the video. They did so with their friends that don’t work there,” she said then. A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth. For Matshameko, she discovered that she was transgender when she was growing up. She says that even her family has long been aware of it. “When I discovered that I’m a woman, I felt good about it. It’s who I am,” she says.