Miss Trans Africa's Long Wait for Freedom

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2023/06/01/ [login to see] /transgender-lgbt-rights-south-africa
One of Chedino Martin's first memories is of a woman in red standing in the doorway of her grandmother's house in Heideveld, a suburb in the Athlone part of Cape Town, South Africa. It was 1986. Chedino, 39, was only 3 years old at the time but still remembers the moment clearly.

"It was raining. There was this red cloak. Then it fell away, and I saw a gorgeous, elegant woman standing in a silver foil dress with these long black curls and this broad smile," she recalls.

The woman in red was Chedino's aunt, Sharon. Sharon had just won that year's local chapter of the Spring Queen beauty pageant, a competition organized by textile workers. "I knew one day, someday, that was going to be me," Chedino continues.

Chedino might have grown up surrounded by the glamor of pageantry — her mother and her aunt were both successful beauty queens — but her early childhood was filled with turbulence and pain.