Freddie's Thots

A “Dicko.” The role of the gender binary in shaping conventional societal attitudes towards intersex and Gender non-conforming individuals.

Sometime during lockdown, a voice note circulated around mainly twitter. On it, a guy recounted a sexual encounter he had with a girl who happened to have what he called a “dicko”, along with a vagina.

I can’t even begin to imagine what she went through, seeing the story trending, being used as the punch line to below-par jokes for likes and retweets. The whole debacle got me thinking about the gender binary and how it has harmed intersex and gender non-conforming individuals.

My research in preparation for this piece uncovered information I was totally blown out of my mind to discover. In some parts of this essay, I am just as surprised as you are.

It is important that you approach it with an open mind, because we are going to be tackling things that until now we may have never questioned. Just because you’re hearing something for the first time doesn’t mean it’s not real. I too have only recently understood these things and there’s so much I have left to learn.

 So. The Gender Binary. This is the cultural belief that there are only two genders; boy or girl; man or woman, and that every person belongs to either one or the other. You’re probably nodding your head. ‘Of course, what else is there?’

Stick around, or don’t, maybe it’s just not yet your time to encounter this information and that’s okay. Is it? No, it’s not, but I can’t force you.  

Gender and Sex are two different things. This may be news to you, because they are commonly used interchangeably.

Sex is biological, usually it’s reduced to “what do you have in your pants? A penis or a vagina?” but it’s actually much more complex than that.

Sex as a categorization encompasses a combination of factors that include chromosomes, gene expression, gonads, hormone levels and function, and reproductive/sexual anatomy.

Sex isn’t as simple as a penis or vagina. External genitalia, albeit the most prominent, is only one consideration in the determination of the sex of a child. And some people are born with both a penis and a vagina, like the girl in the voice note, who, from the boy’s narration I assume is intersex.

An intersex person is someone whose anatomical, hormonal or genetic sex is neither completely female nor male. Hermaphrodite is the word that you may be familiar with. It comes from the Latin word Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite in Greek mythology, who apparently was a very handsome man.

Some of you are fans of mythology, maybe you know this story;  when the nymph of the fountain of Salmacis saw him, she decided she liked the view and tried to seduce him, but he wasn’t feeling the vibe, and said he wasn’t interested. Apparently, she didn’t understand consent and decided to secretly watch him bathe in a pool, and even jumped into it to be close to him. She begged the gods that she might be forever united with him. As a result, they were fused together into one individual possessing both male and female traits. After his transformation, he prayed to his parents asking them that anyone who bathed in the pool would have the same fate as him, his wish was granted.

Now, I won’t lie, it’s a cool story; she’s a bit of a creep and he’s vindictive, that ‘I can’t suffer alone’ mentality is the cause of many problems in this world. But that’s as far as it goes. A story.

I won’t be using that word because not only is there no such thing as a hermaphrodite; a person who is fully male and fully female is a physiological impossibility. The term is also considered offensive.

The more recent medical term is a Disorder of Sex Development (DSD). This term is also problematic, medicine is not immune to human prejudice. Intersex people do not take kindly to being termed as disordered, especially when in most cases intersex people can lead perfectly healthy lives as they are. Defining it as a disorder suggests that there is something that needs to be fixed.

This paradigm has been the basis on which countless invasive, irreversible surgeries have been carried out on intersex babies to make them “normal”.

It’s not a disorder, some people are just like that, we don’t all have to be the same. There are multiple variations in the intersex condition. One intersex person may not be the same as another.  I won’t attempt to cover them all, nor do I pretend to understand what it’s like. And if I make any mistakes I am very open to correction.

A person may be born with a vagina but internal testes and produce high levels of testosterone when puberty begins. Or they may be born with a womb and ovaries, but with a penis. There are those who are born with genitals that are not easily categorized as male or female, no clear penis or vaginal entrance. Some people are born with just the one X chromosome. Others are born with gonads consisting of one testis and one ovary or combined ovatestes. And in some cases, where typically people are born with either XY or XX chromosomes, they are born with XXY, XYY.

Some intersex conditions are not obvious at birth because they only affect the internal organs and can go undiagnosed for years. Often, people discover during puberty when say, a girl does not menstruate, while others may live their whole lives and die not knowing.  So you may have a vagina but instead of XX chromosomes have XY or vice versa.

Have you ever had a chromosome test? I haven’t, and as of 2015, there was no such laboratory equipped to perform chromosomal tests in Uganda. Based on the trajectory this country is on, it’s unlikely we have one now. According to accord alliance, 1 in 1500 births are intersex or about 1.7% of the human population. That doesn’t look like a lot but if you do the math its adds up to whole fucking lot of human beings whose lives are just as valuable as yours.

Am I saying there is no such thing as a male or a female body? No. I’m saying that’s not all there is, like you have been led to believe. This cultural investment in a neat and clear binary incentivises the erasure of intersex individuals. The cosmetic, “corrective” surgeries that intersex children with visible genital differences are subjected to often serve no medical purpose, other than to preserve this idea of normality. These individuals are not given the chance to decide whether or not they even want those surgeries at all.

It is common practice for a child’s intersex condition to be hidden from them because it is viewed as a shameful thing. Until puberty hits and they start developing secondary sex characteristics different from what they expect. The surgery is often irreversible, and may result in life long pain and dramatic loss of sexual sensation from sexual organs.  It’s important that we gain a better understanding of intersex people, because locally, some people consider it a curse, or the result of witchcraft.

Intersex children are often hidden away and isolated from their peers out of shame, or fear that they will be ostracised if word of their condition is known. This is with good reason, children can be cruel when they encounter those who are different from them. However, that wouldn’t have to be the case if there was not such a deliberate erasure and denial of the existence of intersex people. Perhaps then, we could gain a better understanding of intersex individuals, but to do so would mean to let go of your precious gender binary, and you don’t want to do that, do you?

This lack of understanding of intersex individuals also means that they regularly get mistaken for homosexuals or transgender people. When say, they grow up having been known to be a certain gender, only for them to develop otherwise. Cue the homophobic or transphobic violence that the rest of us suffer. But that’s how hate is, it’s blind and irrational. 

Whew, I’m so glad the science is out of the way, that was a lot of work on my part. Y’all should send me money for my intellectual labour. Haha, sike. Unless…

Anyway, fr, I’m not a science person, it makes my stomach hurt just passing by labs, best believe I experienced about a fortnight’s worth of abdominal discomfort in the making of this piece so the decent thing to do would be to share it widely.  I’m a liberal arts hoe, but I went and did hella research because I respect you and I respect myself. Because a lot of people hold their prejudices closely to their hearts so much so that for some, it’s a core part of who they are. I couldn’t risk pulling up to the gunfight with a lemon. What does this mean, I come bearing not- so- straight (hehe) facts and receipts, in fact my sources will be cited at the bottom of this post, because it’s deep like that.

 As I already said, gender and sex are commonly used interchangeably, this is because the world operates in such a way that your sex is used to determine your gender. If you have a penis, you are considered a man, and if you have a vagina, you are considered a woman. From the first part of this post, you can see that it’s not always that simple and clear cut. No matter how much we want it to be.

Gender, on the other hand, is socially constructed. It is not biological. It’s a set of arbitrary rules about what roles as an individual you take up based on the gender you are assigned at birth. How you are expected to behave; dress and express yourself, down to how you groom your hair and nails; basically almost all the things that make you an individual. And it influences how you relate with the world and how it relates with you in turn. Gender goes as far as determining how power and resources are distributed in society. These vary from place to place, and are in constant flux. It may be surprising to hear, but things have not always been this way, and they won’t always be. I won’t get into that now, but we will be addressing gender roles and inevitably, submission in the next post.

Now, every individual human being has a gender identity, this is basically how a person sees themselves in terms of gender. Most people’s gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, and when that’s the case, you are referred to as cisgender. For transgender and non-binary people, their gender identity does not really match the sex they were assigned at birth. Are Cis people the majority? Yes. Are they everyone? No.

You may be familiar with trans men and trans women, people who were assigned female at birth but their gender identity is man/boy, or assigned male at birth, but their gender identity is girl/woman, famously, Caitlyn Jenner and Bobrisky. These are binary trans people, for others, their gender identity does not fit neatly into either one of those choices because it is not confined to a binary, such a person is Non-Binary (NB, or enby), or gender non-conforming. Some non-binary people consider themselves to fall under the transgender Umbrella, but not all of them do. Not to be confused with intersex. In fact, most intersex people identify as either male or female. These are just umbrella terms in the same way that intersex is.

Which means that one non-binary person may not be the same as another. Because gender identity is a deeply personal experience. Non-binary identities exist on the spectrum between what it is to be female and what it is to be male. So some people’s gender identity may not be static; it could exist along a continuum and may change over time.  Some people feel both male and female, others may feel like a girl in the morning and a guy in the evening, others feel like neither gender. Again, I won’t try to list them all, or pretend that I understand them all. I can only give you my personal experience of being non-binary. I already talked about this on Queer Talk Africa’s episode on Being Non-Binary but I will repeat it, for those who may not have access to podcasts or just simply can’t sit through them.

I only recently started to identify as non-binary. This is because I didn’t have the language to put a name to the way that I felt.  Some days I’d look in the mirror and feel very uncomfortable with the way my body looked. Why I am using past tense? I still feel that way. Even though objectively I know I am a s n a c c,

somehow the message doesn’t get transmitted to my brain.  It’s easier to deal with when you know what it is; dysphoria. Now, I knew about transgender people and that that was something that they experienced, but I really could not see myself transitioning into a man, yet at the same time I didn’t feel comfortable being perceived as woman. Even more confusing was that fact that this feeling isn’t constant. Some days the dysphoria isn’t as bad as on others. I sometimes wake up feeling masculine and other times, feminine. I could wake up wanting facial hair

and to get a double mastectomy on Tuesday and by Saturday I can’t stop thinking how pretty my tiddies are and how I should go get nipple piercings. Sometimes the interval is a few weeks, and other times it’s as short as half a day. Who knows? One day I may wake up feeling masculine and the feeling will never go away. Up to now I don’t fully understand what is happening, I probably never will, and I’m okay with that. Just knowing that I’m not the only person who experiences this and that I’m not going crazy really does so much for me.

So what does this mean? I’ve changed my name to Freddie. Not officially, because that’s a bitch, but socially.  Someone wanted to know how I came up with the name and they asked if it was because of Queen’s Freddie Mercury. And honestly it wasn’t. It just came to me, but that’s what I’m going to tell everyone who asks from now on. After all, I was obsessed with Bohemian Rhapsody (the song) for a hot minute, and then I found out he was queer, something I didn’t know until I watched Bohemian Rhapsody (the biopic). It’s fitting and it makes for a cooler story.

I’ve also changed my pronouns to they/them. Not every non-binary person is like me. not everyone will change their name or want to be refered to with they/them pronouns. If you don’t want to misgender someone but you can’t tell ‘what’ they are, all you have to do is ask. Because you cannot tell someone’s gender just by looking at them. Which brings us to the next topic; Gender expression.

“External manifestations of gender, expressed through one’s name, pronouns, clothing, haircut, behavior, voice, or body characteristics. Society identifies these cues as masculine and feminine, although what is considered masculine and feminine changes over time and varies by culture.”

GLAAD

Gender identity and gender expression are not the same thing. There are people who identify as men, but may dress or act ‘feminine.’ This does not mean they are homosexual. Not every feminine man is gay and not every gay man is feminine.  Read that again if you need to. The same goes for women. It’s important, because sometimes we have expectations about how trans and non-binary people are supposed to look.

I found an interview online of Keem Love Black, a Ugandan trans woman. Aside from the overall incompetence of the interviewer, the comments were a mess. They suggested that if she wanted to be a woman she would have to shave her beard and legs. So she could look more like one, completely ignoring the fact that there are women who have facial hair and hairy legs, or that she could simply like her body hair and want to keep it.

Similarly, there may be expectations of non-binary people to look androgynous. We haven’t even started having discussions around non-binary identities for those expectations to arise in Uganda. For most of you, this may be the first time you’re even encountering the notion, so lemme preempt those expectations. Non-binary people do not owe you androgyny, transgender men do not owe you masculinity and trans women don’t owe you hyper femininity.  No one owes you anything with regard to their personal appearance or how they choose to adorn their bodies.

Why? Because a lot of us don’t have access to gender affirming health care. We may not want to, or be able to medically transition so as to “pass.” Passing is when you look like the gender identity with which you identify as a Trans person, such that no one can clock that you are in fact trans.  And since many of us live in transphobic societies, many trans and gender non-conforming people may not be able to express themselves in the ways that they would like.

This especially holds true to trans women and amab (assigned male at birth) non-binary people. People are a lot harsher to “sissies” than to “tomboys.” And I think that comes from good old misogyny. Because the most insulting thing you can say to a man is to liken him to a woman, so they see these people whom they perceive to be male and think “how dare you reject masculinity and stoop so low as to be like a woman?”

Thusly, for safety, people may not express themselves the way they really want to. And if you’re that person, and you are scared to buy ‘feminine clothes’ it helps if you find an ally, a girl preferably the same size as you with whom to go shopping. That way, she can try them on for size on your behalf and you can get to buy the clothes you would enjoy wearing. Even if you can’t go out in them, wear that shit in your room, so you can feel good about yourself, even if for a little while. 

Now, the fact that I’m less likely to get a violent reaction for leaving my home looking masculine doesn’t make it easy. Especially when I think about shopping. Recently I entered a Woolworth’s to window-shop. I like how it makes me feel, walking through the aisles with confidence pretending that I can afford their clothes. The shop attendants probably can see right through me but who cares? Anyway they were having a sale (not that it mattered, even the discounted prices were not within my range), but I rifled through the jeans they had, to try and get an idea of what my size is in men’s jeans.

An attendant approached, I held my breath, waiting for them to tell me that I needed to stop touching the clothes and exit the shop in an orderly manner. But they didn’t say that, they helpfully informed me that the jeans I was looking at were men’s jeans and that the women’s jeans were across the store near the tall skinny female mannequin.  I’m very proud to say that I did not have the panic attack I thought I was going to have when I visualized this very scenario. I just sweetly smiled and told them that I was well aware.

I know they thought they were just being helpful, but I would have had to have been actually stupid to not know that. I know that I’m looking at ‘men’s jeans.’ With good reason. Even aside from achieving my ultimate goal of a more androgynous closet, unlike women’s jeans they actually have pockets. Not those pseudo pockets women’s jeans downtown be having. Not only are there real pockets but the pockets are deep. I don’t know why clothing manufactures think women don’t want working pockets please. I’m tired of having to tuck my phone in the waistband of my pants at events. I hate carrying bags, I’m likely to abandon them somewhere like a four year old who has just started school. So, I knew what jeans I was looking at. But she felt the need to remind me.

Why? Binary thinking, the same thought process that gives you that hate-lumonde in your throat when someone talks about transgender individuals, it’s the reason that girl felt the need to apologize for her genitalia, as if she handpicked it herself. It’s why I’d always thought when a trans woman was arrested for personation that it was a man wearing a dress to go into incognito mode to steal some stuff. When I found out that it was usually just a trans woman going about her day in town, being clocked and arrested, I was shocked. It’s also why you are hearing about enby’s for the first time, and ultimately, why transgender and gender non-conforming individuals cannot access gender affirming health care and surgery in Uganda.

I remember one time in my S4 my neighbour in class looked at me for a minute and then asked me if I was a boy or a girl, I can’t even remember what strange thing I had just done, I was always doing something weird at any given time. I knew this was a test of sorts, would I reject femininity? I didn’t. She was surprised by my answer. That was when I was just beginning to encounter feminist theory and fully starting to notice how ingrained it was for femininity to be something you strived to distance yourself from.

You know? Wanting to be the ‘cool girl’ by not being a girly girl and that “I’m not like other girls” phase which stemmed from a tangled mess of gender non-conformity and internalized misogyny on my part. As a baby feminist I was anxious not to perpetuate that, because I felt guilty for essentially rejecting femininity. It took a while for me to separate the internalized misogyny and what was just me simply not liking those things that ‘as a woman’ I was supposed to enjoy and look forward to. Look, I fucking love women, I love being friends with them – to think I used to say that I didn’t like having women as friends because they were ‘too much drama.’ Lol, a scam.

  For the girls reading who are still in this phase, do yourself a favour and make some female friends, your overall quality of life will improve –  I just love when they get excited about things they care about, I love being around them and watching them just exist, but I’m not really one, not most of the time. I’ve never really typically fit that description and I’ve always felt like an outsider looking in, just observing this beautiful thing that I can’t truly be a part of. Like some sort of impostor just waiting for someone to be like, “Heyyyy, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”  

What does that mean?  Femininity does not come easy to me and I have been mistaken for a man multiple times because, you know, I’m tall, dark, broad ass shoulders and big ass feet too. So much so that in my F.1, the form fours called me, out of all the other students in Sherborne, to their room with the utmost urgency. I rushed, scared out of my wits, wondering what I had now done to offend them -PS. I was terrified of those girls, okay, girls in general. I don’t know why but abawala bantiisa-  only for them to ask me to help them kill a rat. I guess I had the “look.” Never mind the fact that I am too scared to actually kill one, the sounds they make when they’re being hit make me want to cry. I’m honestly soft af, I just don’t look it, but you could practically rob me with a cockroach.

 I used to hate it but now I quite like it, the being mistaken for a man, I mean. And it doesn’t help that most days I’m quite tomboyish and a lot of the things I enjoy are typically masculine, even the fragrances I wear.  I love spending time at garages or climbing trees, yes I still do that at my big age, come and beat me. So you ask, ‘if gender is just a construct why does it matter what pronouns you are called?’  Because society has decided that gender is important and I live in society, and as much as I’d like to, I cannot extricate myself and carry on like I don’t. I personally don’t think there should be such a thing as a male hobby or a female hobby, or male talents and female talents, or male clothes and female clothes, or male fragrances and female fragrances, or- I don’t need to continue, you get the idea.  If it were up to me, there would just be things human beings did that they were good at and enjoyed.

A common misconception is that all these things are western creations and that sexual minorities are another tendril of neo-colonialism that we have to fight. And I’m here for decolonizing everything, the only problem with that is that we have the history wrong. In Africa there have always existed gender identities that transgressed the heteronormative gender binary that we know today.

Gender was conceptualized in ways that the colonizers could not fully wrap their minds around. For example, in pre-colonial Buganda, gender existed as an intersection of political authority, social class, biological sex, and gender roles. As such, understandings of gender were context sensitive. Buganda, as most of you know, is a monarchy, and the royal space was believed to have been set apart by divine provenance, the palace was considered sacred grounds.

This meant that gender was constructed entirely differently in the palace than it was in public spheres, within the palace, all royals, regardless of their biological sex were gendered as male, and that’s why a Mumbejja (princess) would be referred to as Ssebo (sir) and all bakopi (commoners) were gendered as female. Prof. Sylvia Nnanyonga-Tamusuza narrates an experience where when she visited the palace in Mengo, an elder told her not to kneel down before him, as would ordinarily be expected of a woman. He explained that within the palace enclosure they were all women, and that they should only kneel before the king, the Ssabasajja, the man among men. Within the palace, there existed the male-man and the female-man (royals) and the male-woman and female-woman (commoners).

 Outside the palace, gender was primarily ascribed by biological sex, but there existed people who transgressed expected gender roles. If a male behaved in ways associated with femininity they were referred to as Ekikazikazi (feminine man). And females who refused to take up traditionally female roles were known as Nakawanga (she- cock) or Kyakulassajja (mannish-woman) directly translated to mean “it grew like a man”

Similar identities persisted across the continent. Around Ndongo, present day Angola and Namibia, third gender natives known as “zvibanda,” “chibados,” “quimbanda,” gangas” and “kibambaa”—were believed to carry powerful female spirits that they would pass on to fellow males through sexual activity. In Ethiopia, among the Amhara there were the wandarwarad (male-female) and the wandawande (mannish-woman) who lived among the tribespeople. Among the Hausa, the ‘yan dauda’ roughly translated to mean homosexual or transvestite and in Ghana, the word kojobesia (man-woman) is used to refer to transgender indviduals. The Fanti in Mankessim believed in the ‘sunsum’, loosely described as the essence of the person; A light ‘sunsum’ was typically characteristic of a woman. As such if a woman had a heavy ‘sunsum’ they would be referred to as ‘obaa banyin’ (female-man) such a woman could add ‘banyin’ (male) to her everyday name to reflect this identity. Eg. Ama banyin.

The reason your brain wants to short circuit is because it is saturated with those Mugabe quotes, you know the ones, and your leaders constantly repeat this lie, over and over again until you also believe it’s true. There’s nothing unafrican about queerness, it’s just a convenient thing for leaders to say when they want your votes but they want you to forget about their incompetencies. So then they rebrand themselves as the brave revolutionary leaders who are protecting you from western dominance by rejecting sexual minorities. In that rush of righteous homophobia, you forget that these are thieves who rob you blind every chance they get, and have consistently and dedicatedly cheated you out of the quality of life that you deserve as a human being living in the 21st century. It works everytime unfortunately.

Non-binary and gender “non-conforming” identities have existed across the world for as long as human beings have existed. I use quotes because before colonialism they weren’t failing to conform to anything. They simply were. The colonial endeavor was global, and the many of the same tactics were used across the world to root out and eventually erase these identities. In the Americas, many native tribes recognised gender identities beyond the binary we know today, these individuals were known as two-spirited or Berdache. Among certain tribes such as the Navajo the emergence of a berdache youth was considered a great fortune.

A family with a naddleeh (Navajo berdache) among its members
“was considered by themselves and everyone else as very fortunate …
[s]pecial care was taken in the raising of such children and they were
afforded favoritism not shown other children of the family. As they grew
older … [t]his respect verge[d] almost on reverence in many cases.

WALTER WILLIAMS, THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH 63 (2d ed. 1992).

However, the Spanish believed that homosexuality was one of the most deplorable sins against God, and they pointed to the widespread existence and acceptance of the Berdache to justify their violent takeover of the Americas. Under that cover they raped and pillaged Native American villages and led to the near erasure of these identities.

The same thing almost happened in India to the Hijra under British rule. They were placed under the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 and labelled a “criminal tribe.” This categorisation had the effect of stripping them of their inheritance rights, subjecting them to compulsory registration, strict monitoring and stigma. The British essentially launched a campaign to erase them from the public consciousness. Luckily, the Hijras had a recorded history since antiquity, as suggested by the kamasutra. They were officially recognized as a third gender by the Indian Supreme Court in 2014.  Nepal, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh have all legally accepted the existence of a third gender, being considered neither completely male nor female. India, Pakistan and Nepal have included an option for them on passports and certain official documents. This does not make their lives that much easier, because although they were denotified in 1952, the centuries-old stigma continues. Distinct from transgender and intersex identities in other countries, hijras occupy a unique and contradictory place in Indian society. Hindu mythology deifies them, and British colonists demonized them.

So you may not understand it honey, but the world involves possibilities that stretch beyond the boundaries of your limited mind, that’s not even a drag, it applies to me as well. Just because I stopped understanding math once we started long division doesn’t mean I have the right to disrespect mathematicians.

Now so far all I’ve spoken about is the Alphabet mafia, and some of you by now are thinking, what’s it got to do with me? Those sound like their problems, but you have to understand, I put my gang first, the rest of you come after. The heteronormative gender binary does negatively impact cisgender heterosexual people as well, just in case you were wondering but that’s for my next post. It’s a shame that it’s hard for some people to bring themselves to care about someone else unless they too are negatively impacted. I guess empathy is not a strong suit for everyone. And I hate asking for things from people, I hate how small that makes me feel, but I guess it has come to this.

I am a human being, as I child I used to get scared when I had to pee at night. I’d lay in bed for what felt like hours, creating monsters out of the shadows, merely postponing the inevitable as my bladder got fuller and fuller, until eventually I’d make a mad-dash for the bathroom, just waiting for a cold hand to grab me.

During the day, I sang ‘Bye bye Museveni’ every time I saw a helicopter.  I shout when UMEME has mercy and brings back the power, and I worry that my hair is growing too slowly. So this is my appeal to your humanity to understand that we are ordinary people, just slightly different. We are not demons hiding in the shadows waiting to “recruit” the children into our “lifestyle” whatever that means. Alok Vaid-Menon said that the best way to eliminate a group is to demonize them so that their disappearance is seen as an act of justice not discrimination. Gender diversity is an integral part of our existence, it always has been and it always will be.

As promised, my sources. But don’t be on my dick over the referencing styles please, I’ve done my best.

Freddie's Thots Avatar

Published by

Freddie’s Thots
Queer in every sense of the word. My permanent state of being is longing. I will do great things, just you watch.😊
Categories:

Leave a comment