Sidney: I was raised a girl, but I’m a man

By Standard reporter

Sidney remembers that night in 2001 when neighbours in Western Kenya viciously attacked him.

Sidney was born with both sex organs but his parents chose to name and socialise him as a girl. Sidney has striking female facial features, but that is where it ends. Everything else about him says he is a man.

The girlish face masks the thread of pain and torment he has endured.

He has had a stormy relationship with his parents and family, has attempted suicide and is now trying to live a normal life as a young man. It has not been easy.

Sidney was born August 1990 in Mumias. He knew he was different because of the way he interacted with other children.

“I was raised a girl, and had to wear skirts which I really hated. My mother would scold and beat me every time I refused to wear skirts. I started wearing shorts and never looked back,” he told The Standard on Sunday in an exclusive interview in Nairobi.

His condition was a constant source of conflict in their rural home. Sidney acknowledges he was treated different by his parents. “My father worked in Nairobi so I did not have a close relationship with him. My mother vented her anger on me and I rebelled as I did not want to be raised a girl.”

Sidney recalls he was not allowed to interact with other village children. He would head straight from school to the house, do his homework and house chores and would rarely be allowed to play outside.

But he found his boyhood in school. He loved playing and kicking a football despite being called Beatrice, the name he was given by his parents. He hated the name.

His teachers, he remembers, were very accommodating despite his strange behaviour. Life at home was a different story.

“I knew I was very different when I went through puberty. At thirteen, I started developing this unusual attraction to my Kiswahili teacher. I would tell her how much I loved her and wanted to be with her,” he says. The world around him looked very strange and was evolving in a way he could not understand. Sidney’s biggest problem was that he had no one to share his experience with.

Strange behavior

His feelings for attraction grew worse, but he was also the talk of the village. Boys made humiliating comments about him and his strange behaviour made him a pariah. His relationship with his parents deteriorated. “They were ashamed of me. I think to them I was an embarrassment,” he says.

Boys in the village referred to him as “chali-dame” and whispered cruel things in his ears.

They were suspicious of his gender eventually laid a trap for him. Sidney fell for it hook, line and sinker.

They convinced a young girl to pretend she was attracted to him. “I took her out and went into a room. Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door.”

Sidney was terrified. He made the mistake of answering the door and was engulfed by a marauding crowd of villagers, many of whom he knew, punching him and flooring him.

They carried crude weapons. He remembers being forced onto the ground, the girl running away and being stripped naked.

The villagers were astonished by what they discovered. It had been their sole motive to establish his gender, but seeing him with two sex organs was too much for them. They beat him terribly, leaving him for the dead.

Sidney says an uncle called his father in Nairobi to give him the news of his tribulations.

“I remember my uncle telling me that my father asked him if they had killed me so he could come and bury me,” he recalls.

Having been exposed as an intersex made life unbearable for Sidney in a culturally conservative village. He managed to put some money together and moved to Nairobi in 2004.

His tribulations had been highlighted in a local radio station and a DJ with the assistance of friends was able to facilitate his move to a more tolerant environment where he could afford to be anonymous without the fear of being killed.

Life in Nairobi was not exactly a bed of roses. It took Sidney a while to adjust and find his bearing. He needed time and support to confront his status and accept his identity. In 2010 he attempted suicide and has continued to struggle with his situation without a supporting family structure.

“Sometimes I go through these spells. I remember the first time I had my periods. It was very painful. I had pain in my stomach and could not understand what was happening and why I was bleeding,” he says, almost absent minded. His menstrual cycles come in phases of four months and they are unusually painful.

“When I get my periods, I can’t stand or go to work and I have to stay in bed,” he says.

He has been able to get a driver’s licence using the name Beatrice and currently works in a firm in Industrial Area. It’s a base that gives him a steady income and allows him to be able to stand on his own two feet.

He has very little relationship with his parents who call him, he says,        “only when they want money” from him, not to check on his condition.

When you meet Sidney, he strikes you as polite and humble. He is everything a young man is, yet internally he is tormented everyday. But the idea of an operation to excise the female sex organ is not anywhere in the horizon.

His situation often lands him in awkward situations.

When he visits a secured location and is required to leave his ID, the guards often accuse him of impersonation. The name on the ID is femine—Beatrice.

For now, he is trying to fit in a society that has conservative values about gender identity and the lack of education among the public – his parents included – about intersex.