Joya Sikder

Joya Sikder is a trans woman human rights defender from Bangladesh. She is the founder and chief executive of Sompurna, an organisation in Bangladesh that defends the rights of the transgender and gender-diverse communities through advocacy, mobilisation, sensitisation workshops, and policy dialogues.Joya Sikder was born in the city of Potuakhali in Bangladesh in 1973. She was the third born in a group of four siblings. When she was 10 years old, she started to feel and express herself a girl.Joya Sikder is a trans rights activist who has been working in Bangladesh for over 22 years. She founded Sompurna, formerly known as SNS, in 2010. In her early career, from 1998 to 2003, she worked at Care Bangladesh where she collected data on violence against the Hijra community. Hijra is a culturally rooted gender identity from South Asia, representing a diverse community of transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people, and is recognised as a third gender in Bangladesh. At Care Bangladesh, she raised awareness about HIV/AIDS and condom usage through one-on-one distribution and group discussions. In 2003, she became one of the founding members of Badhon Hijra Shanghai. Until 2009, in her role as Secretary General she built and strengthened the organisation’s capacity, raised awareness on community rights, engaged in negotiation dialogues with donors, and implemented different projects. From 2005 until 2016, she conducted research at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research Bangladesh (ICDDRB) on the health of transgender community members.

As an activist, she participates in different international and local conferences and policy dialogues. She represented Sompurna at the ILGA Asia (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association) conference in 2014 in Taipei, where she spoke about the situation of the transgender community at that time. The conference took place shortly after the government recognised Hijra as the third gender in Bangladesh. She has participated in international workshops such as the regional workshop on including voices of marginalised women and people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity in the UN Universal Periodic Review process, organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Here, she collaborated with members from the National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh (NHRCB) and sex worker organisations to design a strategy and action plan to work on issues concerning discrimination, violence, and health of marginalised groups. In 2014, she participated in a UNAIDS workshop to develop a work and strategy plan to address HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific until 2030. She attended the International AIDS conferences in Durban, South Africa and in Melbourne, Australia, where she spoke about sex workers' rights. In 2017, she also participated at ILGA conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.