This Black History Month, we are honouring the historical and contemporary fight for Black queer liberation. This includes sharing the stories of Black-led LGBTQI+ organizations that are on the frontlines of freedom. Today, we are featuring TransWave Jamaica, an organization working to advance the health, welfare, and well-being of the transgender community in Jamaica and the Caribbean.
For TransWave Jamaica (TWJ), the fight for trans and gender-nonconforming rights is inextricably connected to the global struggle for Black liberation. In Jamaica, where the impacts of colonization are still felt, trans communities face intersecting forms of marginalization that demand collective, community-led responses.
“Our work at TWJ is deeply rooted in the global struggle for Black liberation,” says Yakeem Reid, Media and Communications Specialist at TransWave Jamaica. “The realities faced by trans and gender-nonconforming Jamaicans are inseparable from those lives impacted by the residuals of slavery, racism, and anti-Black violence.”
Black liberation movements across the Caribbean and the wider African diaspora have long emphasized dignity, safety, self-determination, and collective care. These values guide TransWave’s approach to advocacy and service delivery, grounding their work in local leadership and lived experience rather than externally imposed models of change.
Reimaging Systems: Decolonial Perspectives on Liberation
Colonization in Jamaica left behind rigid gender norms, punitive laws, and moral frameworks that continue to criminalize and stigmatize LGBTQI+ people. TransWave confronts this legacy head-on by challenging colonial laws and attitudes while centering Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous ways of understanding gender, community, and care.
“Our advocacy prioritizes local leadership, lived experience, and culturally grounded approaches,” Reid explains, “resisting the idea that liberation must look like models imported from the Global North.”
This decolonial perspective also shapes how TransWave engages with humanitarian systems that were never designed with Black, queer, and trans people in mind. Rather than positioning communities as passive recipients of aid, TransWave insists on dignity, consent, accountability, and long-term investment.
“Reimagining humanitarian systems from a decolonial perspective means dismantling systems that treat Black, queer, and trans people as anything less than experts of their own lives,” says Reid. “It’s about shifting power to community-based organizations and valuing local knowledge.”
Solidarity Beyond Symbolism
In July 2025, TransWave Jamaica received support from Rainbow Railroad’s Crisis Response Fund for a six-month project that provided direct assistance and support to 60 trans and gender-nonconforming individuals facing urgent risks.This partnership helped support access to housing, care packages to meet basic needs, and psychological empowerment workshops.
Across borders, solidarity means more than symbolic gestures. “True solidarity moves beyond performative allyship to sustained, accountable partnerships,” Reid says. “It looks like global allies listening to Jamaican trans voices, supporting locally led work, and challenging harmful narratives about the Caribbean as inherently violent or backward.”
TransWave’s work is informed by a long lineage of Black queer and trans resistance. Reid points to figures such as Audre Lorde, whose writing on difference and survival resonates deeply within the Caribbean context, as well as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, whose grassroots organizing reminds us that trans liberation has always been led by individuals who experience multiple levels of marginalization. Caribbean activists, many of whom organized without recognition or protection, also continue to shape TransWave’s understanding of courage, care, and resistance.
Centring Joy and Celebration for Trans Jamaicans
For many queer and trans Jamaicans today, the global fight for asylum, safety, and dignity echoes historic Black liberation movements rooted in survival. “Seeking asylum is not about opportunity but about survival,” Reid notes. “The same systems that once justified enslavement and colonial control now determine whose lives are worthy of protection.”
Despite immense challenges, TransWave finds hope in the present. Youth-led organizing, mutual aid networks, trans creatives, and regional collaborations are expanding conversations around bodily autonomy, economic justice, and political participation. Care and joy, which are often overlooked in crisis-driven responses, remain central to this resistance.
“In a society that often denies trans people safety and celebration, moments of laughter, affirmation, and collective care are radical,” Reid says. “Joy allows our community to breathe, to imagine beyond crisis, and to reclaim wholeness.”
Sustained by the resilience and pride of trans Jamaicans who continue to show up for one another, TransWave Jamaica embodies a truth long held by Black liberation movements worldwide: resistance is ongoing, community is essential, and freedom is collective.