On the eve of Transgender Day of Visibility late last month the United Nations launched what it is calling the “Unbox Me” campaign “to raise awareness among parents, teachers, and the wider community about gender identity during childhood.”
“Many of us take our gender identity for granted, but for many children it is not so easy. It’s a matter of daily survival, a daily struggle,” Mahesh Mahalingam, UNAIDS Director of Communications and Global Advocacy at the U.N. said.
“Children all around the world must be supported in expressing their identity freely,” Mahalingam said.
Transgender boy Damian of New York takes part in the NYC Pride March as part of World Pride commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising on June 30, 2019 in New York City. (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
An announcement about the campaign described it this way:
Unbox Me is centered around a common experience for children, many of whom have boxes or hiding places where they store prized possessions and trinkets. These hidden objects can reveal a lot about the child, such as who they really are, their likes, and their dreams for the future.
For some transgender children, hiding treasures in a box can become a way of hiding their identity from disapproving eyes, UNAIDS said. Unbox Me helps to give them visibility.
Stigma, discrimination and criminalization tend to make transgender and gender-diverse people invisible, the agency added, with extreme forms of discrimination leading to even the denial of the existence of gender-diverse people.
In this file photo dated June. 14, 2021, an unidentified drag queen waves a rainbow flag during an LGBT rights demonstration in front of the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)
The announcement said that transgender people are 35 times more at risk of acquiring HIV than other adults.
A boy dances as he and others participate during the Delhi Queer Pride March in New Delhi, India. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
The “Unbox Me” campaign is a collaboration between UNAIDS and the advertising agency FCB India, which produced a film last year “about a young boy looking in the mirror and dressing up as a woman. “
“In India, children usually have a box which they use to store their most precious possessions, but in the case of transgender children they need to hide their box of treasures, since some of their most precious possessions don’t fit the gender norm that society expects them to conform to,” Swati Bhattacharya, FCB India’s Creative Chairperson, who came up with the campaign.
The Unbox Me website said UNAIDS “is now extending the campaign to the global level.”
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