Camminga, B. Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 301 pages

South Africa’s post-Apartheid Constitution extends rights not just to its citizens, but to all people within its borders. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of ‘sexual orientation,’ which has been interpreted not just to mean sexuality but could also apply to any number of possible non-normative gender expressions. The controversy surrounding the inclusion of ‘sexual orientation’ in the Constitution served to spread LGBT human rights discourse around the continent. This development was amplified by news media outlets across Africa and fostered a pan-African association between South Africa and LGBT rights. Camminga illustrates how this facilitated the migration and adoption of language surrounding ‘LGBT,’ and in particular, helped to spread the identity categories of ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ bisexual,’ and ‘transgender’ across Africa. The establishment of the South African Refugees Act in 1998 made asylum a possibility for those who were being persecuted on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation. For these reasons, South Africa has become established in the minds of gender non-conforming Africans as a place of possibility and freedom. While the book provides an overview of theoretical conceptions of gender and sexuality, including feminist theory, queer theory, and trans theory, the author emphasizes that this work is generally “routed/routed in the Global North” (7). While acknowledging that “subaltern transgender experiences” (8) may be framed through Northern discourses, the author incorporates a genealogy of the term ‘transgender’ (Stryker 2006) that is specific to South Africa. They explore how these concepts are introduced through interactions with the Global North, are experienced subjectively by locals, and are imbued with new, localized meaning. For Camminga, this raises questions about the political economy of discourses based in the Global North and the identity movements that evolve from them. Throughout the book, Camminga illustrates the hegemony of systems of power and control experienced by gender refugees, employing Prosser’s (1998) notion of literal and embodied migration to demonstrate how gender refugees move across both geopolitical and gender borders. These socially constructed boundaries are both politically reinforced and socially reproduced. Through interview excerpts, Camminga demonstrates how gender refugees are marginalized in their countries of origin. Highly visible to others in their transgression of gender norms, they struggle to survive amidst ostracization and threats of violence—what Arendt (1962) calls a state of ‘rightlessness.’ In reaction to this violence, gender refugees flee their countries of origin and make their way to South Africa. These refugees migrate with the expectation that they are headed to a place of acceptance and recognition, where they might be able to reinstate their status as human beings. This is what Camminga calls ‘the imagined South Africa.’ The book’s most valuable contribution is how it masterfully employs ethnographic evidence to illustrate the gap between legislated rights and the bureaucratic and social mechanisms that perpetuate the marginalization of gender refugees. Camminga notes that the South African asylum system is problematic for all asylum seekers, but gender refugees in particular experience exacerbated challenges. The very mechanics of the asylum system perpetuate the inflexible gender binary that gender refugees seek to escape. Furthermore, the lack of support for new gender refugees means that they are almost always unable to evade the communities of their countries of origin, even in South Africa. The asylum system requires refugees to renew their paperwork four to twelve times a year, for as long as they remain in the system. Refugees are required to visit the office at the same time as others from their country of origin, and once there must queue according to gender. This is inherently problematic for gender refugees. Exposing themselves as transgender to others from their …