The untold horror story of being transgender in Kenya

One day in 2001, Maureen Muia Munyaka a hairdresser in Nairobi's South B estate was stripped naked in front of onlookers by police officers at the Industrial Area police station.

Yet, the offense for which she had ended up at the station as a suspect, had nothing to do with her gender. Rather, she and a number of hairdressers had ended up at the police station after they, "unknowingly" bought stolen hair products.

At the time of the arrest, police officers had assumed Maureen was a female. At the station, police discovered that her national identity card indicated she was Maurice Munyaka and a male. On that hot afternoon, she ended up being punished in a most unconventional manner. In a fit of rage, a police officer assaulted and stripped her in the full glare of the public.

"I was stripped and left there for what felt like hours as police officers alerted their colleagues to come over to the front desk and see a woman that had male sexual organs," Maureen recalls. "For the stretch of time I remained there disrobed, any member of the public that visited the station was treated to the humiliating scene."

Maureen, born 43 years ago in Machakos as Maurice Munyaka Muia, is a transgender woman.

Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their sex assigned at birth.

As far as she is concerned she has always been Maureen—a female in a male body.

She says she became aware of her "otherness" at the age of six, the age at which she adopted unisex dressing. The age at which her mother begun to seriously get concerned and probe "the way she was behaving".

Later, growing up in Nairobi's Mukuru slum; she never wanted people knowing she was a boy. So the second born in a family of five children, started dressing like a girl and mates at school noticed something was off about her, and nicknamed her "Keletu-kabici".

"My mum would beat me up severally for wearing makeup. She did not understand why a boy was so obsessed with makeup," recalls Maureen.

"Of course with time she realised she could do little to change what was unraveling and slowly started to accept the person I'd become. It is my extended family back in the village that fails to understand my gender identity. My uncles from the village still ask when I'm going to bring a wife home. Sometimes I don't know if they're mocking me or they really still have hope that I'll take them a wife because they know now that I'm not a man."

Discrimination

Another transgender (Female-to-Male), Arnest Kaku Thiaya, echoes similar concerns about the welfare of transgender Kenyans. "There are high levels of discrimination facing transgender people in Kenya. The government continues to reject the change of name applications despite the High Court of Kenya ruling on the matter. Access to surgical reassignment of gender is non-existent and this is very serious. Our police force continues to ignore harassment cases reported to them by transgender persons, which endangers their lives in their villages and estates."

Maureen and Thiaya endured the long legal battle of changing their names on their national identity cards, finally succeeding in 2017. It brought some relief in their lives. But their documents still indicate they are male and female respectively. This raises eyebrows when they present their documents and have on numerous occasions been refused services because their national identity cards were deemed fake.

While she has been taking feminising hormones since 2008, the thing Maureen really wants is a full sex-change surgery.

"That is what I'm working towards. It'll cost me about Sh1.5million to do and I've started saving for it," reveals Maureen who until four years ago was dating a man, and shudders wistfully every time she has to go back to her love story, "We dated for eight years. The first four years were bliss and then things started going south, and I discovered he was living a double life. Not only was he seeing someone else on the side he was also using me financially. Dating as a transgender woman is very difficult because for a large majority of our lovers they want to treat us like rubbish because they think we ought to be grateful they accepted to date us. Exploitation, emotional abuse, and cheating are common."

Maureen says she now cannot muster the nerve to get into another romantic relationship. Not even with the frequent advances, she gets from men who see just the veneer of a beautiful woman. "I often receive the attention of men...some of whom aren't bad looking at all. But after my previous experience, I'd rather not."

Relationship issues

Maureen adds, "Because of our transgender status most people only want to be in secret relationships with us. They don't want the world to know they're actually dating transgender women or men. We are their dirty little secrets. Maureen who says many people associate transgenderism with "sexual immorality even mistaking it for homosexuality" adds that others see them as fit only for fleeting romantic flings that often involve fetishes and experimental sex.

"It is common knowledge among transgender women that there are a lot of heterosexual (straight) and decent men who are attracted to transgender women but the world is hostile to them. They are mislabeled as gay - and they aren't so. The society is yet to understand there's a difference between homosexuality and transgenderism."

"Most think of us as immoral, amorous people who decided to change our genders for sexual adventure...on the contrary, most of us are living very wounded lives. Most of the stories we hear from our counterparts are sad tales of rejection at home, bullying, and humiliation in public, arbitrary arrests, and exploitation by lovers," she adds.

It is experiences like Maureen's that have kept businessman Thiaya, a 49-year-old female-to-male transgender man, from getting entangled in romance. He says he has never experienced romantic love.

Sex change

"For me, it is awkward having to explain to people about my situation. I'd rather not. I've not even tried getting into a relationship. And now at my age, I'm trying to live each day at a time. I won't go out deliberately looking for a partner. You see, for me unlike you even if I'm attracted to someone I'll have too much explaining to do. And as a transgender person, I could start all that explaining and then someone still decides it's too much for them."

Thiaya who started the sex change process only to realise just how difficult it would be had been born Annette Jennifer Muthoni and assigned the female sex.

In 2005, he had part of his female reproductive system removed following a series of visits to a gynaecologist here in Nairobi. He had walked into the gynae's clinic in 2002 with a rather bizarre but specific request to the doctor; "Can I have a body change? Can I get a male body?" he had inquired. Obviously stunned, the doctor after hearing him out, prescribed monthly visits for Thiaya.

"During my consecutive visits at the doctor's we discussed how I felt about my body...my thoughts and gender identity. It was also during this time doctors identified a growth in my uterus. My wish was to get a complete body change to be male. What I didn't know in my naivety then, was that I couldn't have a full sexual organ change at one go. But I made it clear that I wanted a body that corresponded with the way my mind worked. I was lucky since it turned out I needed a complete removal of my uterus," recounts Thiaya.

Sanitary towels

"I don't have a uterus, fallopian tubes, and the ovaries. Everything's gone," says Thiaya, "Because of my age, I'm not keen on having the sexual organ change. All I wanted was a body that I didn't have to struggle with. A body that did not have the monthly menstrual cycle...I'm not wired to manage it. I wouldn't remember it happens at a certain time of the month, I didn't remember when to buy sanitary towels, can you imagine being out and about you're essentially a man, and then it happens....it's running and then you realise, Oh!"

"I was really glad when I didn't have to deal with those cumbersome days of the month anymore. It brought me a lot of mental anguish," admits Thiaya with a full out bass, "ask any man how he'd feel if he were to receive periods."

But even with the distress of having to deal with periods behind him, he says life is still replete with unpleasant surprises including discrimination by immediate family. For example, he says he has often been "forgotten" during important family gatherings. I love my family but they 'forget' me constantly and I have come to accept that."

A recent study conducted by the Transgender Education and Advocacy (TEA) explored levels of public acceptance of transgender persons among Kenyans. The study revealed high levels of stigma towards transgender persons with 83.3 percent of Kenyans interviewed having stigma towards transgender persons. Transphobia (anti-transgender prejudice and hatred) was also prevalent among these respondents with 86.7 percent of respondents harbouring transphobia.

According to Audrey Mbugua, the principal investigator of the study, the study gives transgender human rights advocates a better understanding of how to approach Kenyans on the subject. "Kenyans have great discomfort having a transgender family member compared to having a transgender citizen (80 percent versus 46.7 percent). It tells us that a huge section of our society perceives transgenderism as something immoral, sinful and shameful – in their eyes it's ungodly. In fact, 80 percent of our respondents thought it was wrong to change sex while 60 percent told us they would not want a transgender tenant in their property."

Gender reassignment surgery

"This stigma is to blame for failure by many transgender persons to access gender reassignment-related services. A lot of transgender people are struggling with living in a gender they don't belong because they are scared of hostilities."

The study brought out a rather controversial observation. Clustering of the data showed that individuals who had great hatred for transgender persons were likely to have college or university education compared to those who had not gone very far with their education. Anti-transgender stigma and hatred were more common among persons of the male gender and those aged over 35 years than members of the female gender and the youth.

Audrey further laments, "Transgender people need to be public educators on the subject of transgenderism. They can utilise the power of social media to reach millions of Kenyans and empower them on gender diversities and social acceptance. But sadly, instead, they're hiding and calling themselves feminists, trans, queer, gender non-binary, human rights activists, and other funny names. They don't want to use the term transgender on themselves because they don't want people to know they are transgender. It is counterproductive and frustrating especially when 60 percent of our respondents thought transgenderism is the same as homosexuality and that it is illegal to be transgender."

"People should be free to define their sex or gender. Whatever we have between our legs is private and should not be used to identify us," Audrey infers.

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What does it mean to be transgender?

Only a decade ago transgenderism was considered in health circles as a psychiatric disease and was classified as "gender identity disorder".

That term has since been replaced by "gender dysphoria" or (a state of unease or generalised dissatisfaction with one's natal gender)" and no longer appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a mental illness.

The World Health Organisation has since moved the diagnostic codes from the chapter on mental disorders to one on sexual health. But decades later many people do not understand what transgenderism is all about. Most actually mistake it for intersexuality (having both male and female sexual organs). Yet, more confuse it with homosexuality. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, transgenderism refers to the broad spectrum of people who transiently or persistently identify with a gender different from their birth sex.

A team of family doctors at Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan, says gender identity is your inner sense of being a woman, man, or both in between or neither. For transgender people, their gender identity does not match the sex that they were assigned at birth.

"For transgender people, their gender identity does not match the sex that they were assigned at birth. Sometimes gender identity is outside the two most common categories of male or female," says a publication authored by a team at the university led by Adam Husney MD - Family Medicine specialist.

The feeling that something is different may begin early in life. Many transgender adults remember noticing as children a difference between how their bodies looked and how they felt on the inside. Other transgender people make this discovery as adults.