Khameer Kidia
speaker
465 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Khameer Kidia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But it was in that moment when I realized that I was gatekeeping for her, something that she needed to survive and thrive, that I realized that psychiatry didn't have the same kind of power back in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is an extremely homophobic place with uh colonial era anti-sodomy laws that give society permission for state-sanctioned violence that
um end up really affecting the mental health of queer Zimbabweans.
Yet a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in Zimbabwe is definitely not helpful to a a queer person.
In fact, it may actually cause more violence, more likely to expose them to prejudice within the medical system, which is already extremely biased against queer people in Zimbabwe.
Well,
Um, and I realized that these diagnoses that you know sometimes have social and political power, gender dysphoria, PTSD, um, you know, diagnoses that can help people access benefits and care.
Psychiatry didn't have that kind of power.
And in fact, diagnosis in general wouldn't be that helpful because most people in Zimbabwe don't express their mental distress in terms
Like that.
They don't say di, they don't say depression, they don't say anxiety.
They say things like, kufungi sisa, I am thinking too much.
Or moyo unorwaza, my heart feels burdened.
Cultural idioms of distress that are more local and pertinent to the way that they um express their distress.
And then if you think about the causes of mental distress in so
Much of Zimbabwe.
You know, poverty and violence are such big drivers of mental distress in Zimbabwe, especially in parts of rural Zimbabwe.
And if those are the drivers of mental distress, diagnosing people with depression and anxiety when they're living in poverty and giving them medications is a type of gaslighting, right?
It's a type of non-recognition of their true structural problems.
You know, I spent the next
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