Myths About Transgender People in Kenya

Audrey Mbugua wrote a powerful article on Pambazuka about the struggles of transgender people in Kenya and beyond. In the first part of the article she describes the violent abuse of transgender female "Storm" in police custody in Kenya. She then goes on to challenge the gay community for misgendering and gayjacking transpeople's identities for their own agenda.

This case presents one of the many incidences of gender oppression transgender people in Kenya face. Gender oppression against transgender people takes the form of violence, sexual assault, verbal abuse, intimidation, victimisation and psychological torture.

The dynamics of these cases of gender oppression are not too hard to understand. First, people look at you and make the assumption that you are a man or a woman. Storm never mentioned that she was a female but the officers assumed she was. This is predicated by the assumption that there are only two sexes/genders: Male and female. Anything else has to be pigeon-holed in these narrow categories. Storm is a transgender woman and the best option would have been to have placed her in a 'transgender prison facility'.

Secondly, it illuminates the invalid excuse called ignorance. Ignorance is used by many to justify the oppression of transgender people in Kenya. One police officer admitted that if the officers had known about the transgender identity, things would not have gotten out of control. What sort of moral and intellectual cowardice is this? Some of us transgender people don't know much about pregnancy, but we don't go around beating up pregnant women because they impersonate fat people. And why do people have to react so violently towards a transgender person? How is violence going to resolve the issue? Transgenderism is not an issue to us but it becomes an issue because people want it to be one.

Mbugua goes on to challenge the gay community for misgendering and gayjacking:

This reminds me of a confrontation I had with part of the gay community related to HIV programming for transgender people. Some experts coined the term 'Men who have Sex with other Men' (MSM), which initially was used as a behavioural term rather than as a noun. What these experts were ignorant about was that, whether the term is a behavioural term or a noun, it is disrespectful to refer to transgender women as men who have sex with other men. We are not men but transgender women. But then someone mentioned that most transgender women do have receptive anal sex with men, so the term serves them right. I don't know where people got this rubbish from but I sincerely hope it will die out sooner than later. There are cisgender women (women born women) who have anal sex with men. Does that make them men who have sex with other men? In a nutshell: Their argument shoots itself in the foot.

This also takes us to the land of 'misgendering' transgender women by the gay hungry media and some sexual minorities organisations. A case in point is the just ended Tiwonge and Steven charade in Malawi. Tiwonge maintained she wasn't male, but I guess a gay hungry media and some gay rights activists couldn't hear of that. They reasoned: Tiwonge has a penis (and is therefore male), and Steven has a penis (and is therefore a male), so their union was a gay wedding. There is nothing wrong with gay weddings, but it is offensive to label a transgender person gay. You deny her the fundamental right to self-identity; you are simply calling her a man. She is not a man and it is also wrong to assume that a man dating a transgender woman is gay. Yes, explaining this to my 100 year-old grandmother might be a hair splitting exercise but it shouldn't be quantum physics for the current crop of human rights activists. The valiant Monica Roberts wrote a moving publication about these shenanigans of turning transgender issues into gay issues:

'We are getting beyond sick and tired of gay organizations misgendering and gayjacking transpeople's identities to fit their agenda ... Hot on the heels of the misgendering and mischaracterization of the Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza relationship in Malawi as a 'same-sex' one... now comes the story out of Pakistan that an attempted marriage to a transwoman was broken up by Pakistani police.