Ntsiki Mazwai, a poet and musician, has revealed that she has erased an offensive tweet regarding transgender women.
This after a group of trans and gender-diverse organizations published a statement demanding her to remove the tweet and apologize.
Guys I have deleted the offensive tweet because it is the proper thing to do when someone claims that anything you have posted has harmed their feelings.
— MissNtsikiMazwai (@ntsikimazwai) January 18, 2023
The statement states, “On January 16, 2023, Ntsiki Mazwai published a problematic and hurtful tweet asserting the harmful and unfounded view that trans rights threaten women’s rights.”
The statement added that the post expressed pervasive and unacceptable ideas regarding transgender women.
“Despite societal perceptions and attitudes that marginalize transgender women, transgender women are women and have always been a part of African cultures and history; thus, our existence will never be eradicated.”
Leigh Ann van der Merwe, director of Social Health and Empowerment, stated that trans persons are born into the world without access to the kind of vocabulary that they can use to identify and better comprehend themselves.
“Despite claiming to be a feminist, Mazwai polices how other women interpret their bodies and life experiences. In this regard, her tweets are not just anti-feminist but also transphobic and aggressive, as stated by Van der Merwe.
Nelly Mahloko, a young trans woman from rural Free State, stated, “It’s quite disheartening to hear important people use such nasty language, which might easily increase the number of trans women being murdered.
“We need laws to prevent hate speech that can lead to our deaths.” In addition to imposing violence on the LGBT community, Ntsiki’s post generated a wave of transphobic violence in the comments area.
Gender Dynamix is aware of the 16 January 2023 tweets by Ntsiki Mazwai in which she invalidates and delegitimizes transgender women. We thus ask Ntsiki Mazwai to issue a statement apologizing to the transgender and gender-variant community for fostering prejudice. pic.twitter.com/bzlbL60Wjb
— Gender Dynamix (@GenderDynamix) January 18, 2023
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