Transgender communities are one of the most vulnerable and socially excluded communities in the context of Bangladesh. Some of their experiences of inequalities- stigmatized by the mainstream community, deprived of their share of lands by the family, rejected by the family at an early age, absence of trans-inclusive health care facilities in the hospitals, experience of violence from police, etc. In such a situation, the emergence of COVID-19 has added extra vulnerabilities into their experiences and they are now the most excluded of the excluded. They already belong to a marginalized group and this pandemic has undermined their condition financially, physically, psychologically and so on.
SAVE Youth: TransInclusion is an ongoing project in association with SAVE youth initiated by one of the resilient youths Atia Sanjida Shushoma. It is initiated for the urban transgender communities of Bogura. The aim of this project is to raise awareness against bullying the transgender community through online platforms, improve mental health, present their creative skills and increase employability and opportunity for the targeted transgender audience.
The project is initiated in the urban areas of Bogura district for 13 transgender. Shushoma one of the resilient youths had chosen the transgender community because during the COVID’19 the transgender community became more vulnerable both mentally and financially. The aim of her project is to take effective measures for improving their livelihoods. She took mental health sessions with the transgender community with an expert who had joined and conducted the session online. Atia Sanjida Shushoma has initiated her program in the urban areas of the Bogura district for various reasons. First of all, the urban transgender communities are comparatively more vulnerable than the rural transgender communities in the Bogura district, and secondly, since she resides in this area, it was be easier for me to initiate this project. The aim of this project is to improve their living condition through awareness-raising campaigns in the online platform, increase their employability and opportunities, and improve their mental health. However, mental health is specifically focused in this project because the targeted audience admitted that they have gone through several pieces of training about their physical health through different local organizations but none of those has arranged training and counseling sessions regarding their mental health. Shushoma has collected 20,000 BDT funds with her personal networks and the SAVE Youth chapters. She gave two sewing machines to two particular transgender named Harun and Lima who have expertise in stitching clothes. Harun was a professional tailor during the pre-pandemic time and made a living with it. But during the pandemic in 2020, her whole tailoring shop got burnt down and had a loss of about 2 lakh Takas. Having no other option, she had to give a tea stall but could not make a profit due to her traditional behaviors. As a result, she had to participate in money collection. In such a situation, this machine worked well for her. During handing over this machine, Harun replied that she would be able to make about 10000 Takas per month. After taking the assessment, it was found that she is now earning about 8000 Takas per month and now she no longer goes for money collection.
Another transgender, named Kona has also got a sewing machine from Shushoma’s fund. Whereas Lima comparatively made a better profit than Harun since Lima was engaged in diverse forms of tailoring activities such as sewing bags, sewing dresses, and doing Karchupi on dresses. As a result, she made about 10000-12000 Takas per month by using this knitting machine.
Another transgender was given a young goat to rear up and made business with it. That goat now entered into the adult phase and she is now conducting goat reproduction. Side by side, she is now selling goat milk in her neighborhood and in the market and making quite a good profit than the previous time. According to her, she is now earning about 3000-4000 takas per month by selling goat milk and after reproducing goats in the future, she will be able to sell each young goat at 4000-5000 takas.
The rest of the audiences named Shuvo, Kiron, Hasan, Rupa, Lipi, Sathi, Ashique, Monica were given 30 chickens each and another one named Pakhi got 30 young ducks as per her preference. Now, most of their chickens and ducks are on sale. In total, they are now earning an estimated profit of about 15000-16000 Takas by selling all the chickens and ducks. According to their plans, they will use some portion of this money in their future business and will use the rest for livelihoods, and in this way, they are hopeful that they will no longer have to go back to their money collection profession and all of them are self-sufficient. Shushoma is continuously observing these thirteen transgender for their work updates. Besides increasing the employment opportunities of the targeted transgender communities in the urban sectors of the Bogura district, one of the objectives of this project is to present the creative skills of the transgender communities. Some are henna artists and makeup artists, some are skilled at designing flower bouquets, some are very skilled at preparing and designing dresses, and so on. This helped to change the mindset of mainstream communities about them i.e. they are not good at anything, they only can do the weird poses and so on.