Litnet

Christina Engela is a trans-woman who lives in the sunny South African city of Port Elizabeth (known as the Windy City) – a tourist haven with an unhealthy preoccupation with apples and whose mascot symbol is a Jackass Penguin – which should give you some idea of what she has to deal with on a daily basis. She attributes her weird sense of humour to her unusual family and friends and perhaps having too much time to herself as a child. At school she was known for her quirky poetry and weird sense of humour, which came in handy while directing a school play (which, incidentally, involved three toilet rolls, a walkie-talkie and a hammer marked "Exhibit A").

After completing high school in 1991 at the tender age of 18 she enlisted in the Army and spent the next few years wondering what the hell it was all about anyway and "Why is that fat man with the red badges shouting at me?" She qualified as a computer technician (A+) in 1999 and moved into the network support environment, where she gathered a lot of experience in conflict resolution and self-control. Travelling 5 km just to push a power cable back into a monitor and give users Dirty Looks became a genuinely fulfilling experience.

At the age of 26 she came out as transgender and began a difficult process of transitioning from male to female, undergoing her final surgeries in January 2006. She has, in the course of the past ten years, written eleven books, eight of them being sci-fi comedy novels using GLBT or I characters, and the rest being books on human rights matters affecting the pink community. Her articles on gay and transgender rights are reproduced on several places on the web.

As an agnostic she has little time for people who claim to know any gods personally and who campaign for the removal of the equality and civil rights of others based simply on their ignorance, intolerance and what they think they know. When she encounters people who claim "God hates ..." and "God says ..." she loves to check their pockets for any hidden communication devices (white for the Big Guy, red for the Other Place).

She doesn’t take kindly to being treated like a second-class woman or human being, and her passion is working for the unity, dignity and equality of the pink community against oppression and prejudice. For this reason she became an activist for the pink community, and is closely involved with two South African GLBTI rights groups, SA GLAAD and ECGLA.

Opgedateer/Updated: 2009-10-01
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