Stop imposing your imperialist Western transphobia on my people

There is something that people in the UK spreading fear of trans people like me need to understand. I think they don’t really get what they’re doing, or the grim colonial history they are choosing to be part of.

I am what Kenyans call a mixed-tribe person. One side of my family is Meru, the other is Kalenjin, specifically Kipsigis. My great-grandmother on the Meru side was Maasai.

Usually, this would be seen as a rich heritage. But I do not speak any of the associated languages and only now am I exploring what the cultures of ‘my people’ were, and what elements remain today.

This research has led to many interesting discoveries. It turns out that the very concept of tribes was created through the lens of colonialism, based on how the coloniser saw us, and perpetuated by how colonial schools taught my ancestors to view themselves.

This codified organisation of different tribes made it easier for the colonial masters to rule us – and in 2021, they allow Kenya’s politicians to mobilise votes, by making people with a totally different heritage feel like they are part of the same group.

This is true for almost everyone who has grown up in a former colony of the British empire. None of us remembers who we were pre-Christianity and pre-colonisation. We are all pulling at little pieces of the past that we call African culture, and trying to sew together a heritage.

For me, this search is more than an anthropological interest. It’s because I am a transgender person. And in my country, transgender people are referred to as a foreign concept, as “unAfrican”. Some claim that we are a bad omen. Others say that we have no place in the Christian ‘Kingdom of God’.

I am not angry at the British empire for robbing me of my tribal past, or for inventing those ‘tribes’ in the first place. I could deal with that by inventing a new future, imagining Kenya as my Wakanda.

I am not angry that Christianity has completely erased whatever divine beings my people believed in.

But I am livid.

I’m livid that, almost 60 years after Kenya’s so-called ‘independence’, my trans siblings and I across Africa and Asia have to justify our existence without being able to refer to our cultural past before colonialism. Our history has been erased.

I am livid that my coloniser disciplined the people around me into believing that Victorian patriarchy was their own culture, when all my research has taught me how much that is a lie.

I am livid because I now know that my Meru ancestors had religious leaders called the mûgwe, who were assigned male at birth, wore their hair like the women in the community and gave blessings with their left hand (a symbol of the feminine). My school taught me that the mûgwe were ‘Medicine Men’. Now I understand that they were not ‘men’. My traditional community accepted gender diversity.

I am livid because Kenyan Christians quote the coloniser’s Bible as evidence that my existence is “not African”.

And I am livid that transphobes in the West continue to erase my people’s history and culture.

Erasing trans people from history

It is tempting to claim that I am just an angry 40-year-old – trying to blame my own underachievement on a coloniser. I was the first to self-accuse. So I went on a quest to talk to other transgender people from other places that share Kenya’s colonial past.

Nayyab Ali and Saro Imran told me how they strain to explain to their fellow Pakistanis that their gender-diverse community, the Khawaja Sira, has existed for thousands of years, but was blacklisted by Britain’s Criminal Tribes Act in 1871. It’s not trans people who came from the West, but transphobia.

Yahyia Al-Zindani fled his home in Yemen because Houthi militia believe our kind are a foreign concept, and they want to kill him. But the transphobia doesn’t come from Islam: the Koran accepts gender diversity, calling my people ‘the Mukhanat’.

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Erasing trans people from history

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