our (un)gendering now

on truncating presents

On Kenyan social media, some of the most popular figures are (presumably) straight men who ventriloquize women.¹ Often, they don headscarves, pitch their voices higher, rural their accents, and imitate a range of women, mostly mothers, girlfriends, and grandmothers. At other times, they use TikTok’s “use this sound” feature—it allows you to overlay your video on someone else’s sound—and lip sync to women’s speech. Perhaps most strikingly, many of the (presumably) straight men who ventriloquize women do so in Kiswahili or Kikuyu, and from what I can tell, some of these men are from or live in rural areas. It is not simply urban men using the safety of distance to create content.

Is this simply comedy? And if it is comedy, what makes it funny?² I might return to these questions.

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I have used “presumably” twice because recently one of these very popular figures, whose character was named Mama Maiko, posted what can only be described as a thirst trap while singing. The lyrics sound like “chali yangu ni different” (my guy is different), though someone commented they are “journey yangu ni different” (my journey is different). He wore a short, sleeveless top, exposing toned arms, and more than a hint of (skinny) chest. In other pictures, he wore a t-shirt almost short enough to be a crop top–when he lifted his arms, it rode up to expose skin. Gone was the character he had created, the safety it had provided. He had come out. As himself.

It had been acceptable for him to portray a woman’s desires and intrigues while dressed as a woman—to be fair, in the videos I’ve seen, he only donned a headscarf and terrible wigs; never a full dress or makeup. But he broke a wall.

In the comments—always read the Kenyan comment section—audiences speculated about his sexuality. Some said they had always known he was gay. Funny how people always know. Others said they hoped it was not true. While yet others insisted that they had to part ways with him—they could not watch a gay person. Capitalizing on TikTok’s attention economy, others posted videos that mostly repeated what was said in the comments.

To watch a gay person in drag creates what Sara Ahmed describes as a problematic proximity, an intimacy that implicates the viewer. It might indicate that the viewer is interested in watching drag, which might mean the viewer is interested in the people who perform drag, and if the people who perform drag are gay, then the viewer is interested in gay people, and interest is a hop away from attraction. Slippery slopes are nothing if not affectively saturated with incoherence.

I am uninterested in whether or not this particular person who outed himself as himself by posting a thirst trap is queer or trans or nonbinary.³ Instead, I want to speculate on the peculiar—though not unique—histories that permit Kenyan men to ventriloquize women.

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I won “Best Female” twice for acting in high school. I would have won it three times, but I was cheated the first time.⁴

In Kenya’s single-sex boarding schools, cross-gendering roles were common in drama and music festivals.⁵ Teenage boys—it is significant that that these were teenagers—would dress as girls and women to portray wives, daughters, grandmothers, girlfriends, domestic workers, and sex workers. From what I recall, it was rare for professional women to be portrayed. In girls’ schools, teenage girls would act as husbands, sons, politicians, fathers, doctors, and a whole host of other intimate and professional roles dominated by men in Kenyan society. In music festivals, teenage boys would dress as girls and women to play gendering roles in traditional dances.⁶ At the elite Kianda School, I watched a production of My Fair Lady, where all the roles were played by teenage girls. It was common for girls’ boarding schools to hold dance evenings where girls danced with each other.

The single-sex boarding school—please permit this naming, though trans and nonbinary thinking offers many other possibilities to name these schools; in fact, some of these places did not have gendered names: Alliance School, Nairobi School, Kenya High School, Kianda School, Lenana School, Mang’u High School—allowed for a range of gendered and gendering experiences often marked by age, class, and regional differences, especially in what used to be called national schools, which drew students from across the country.

Younger students, especially first-year students, were often gendered as domestic workers. You might be asked to run errands by senior students, to buy bread at the tuck shop or fetch a book from a different school house. You might be asked to polish shoes or to wash a senior’s room. You might be asked to wash a senior’s clothes. You might be asked to fetch a bucket of water for a senior. In my school, the tasks were marked by legacy, ability, and region. If you came from a famous rugby family and you were interested in playing rugby, you had immediate immunity. No one would risk messing with a future star. If you had an older sibling at the school, you were relatively safe. If you came from a family that had traditionally attended the school, your name would protect you from bullying. If you were from Nairobi and, in particular, from a particular subset of Nairobi schools that sent many people to a particular national school, you might be spared the indignities suffered by those from more rural areas. If you were from a major town—Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Kiambu, Kakamega—you often had an easier time than people from smaller, rural places. In general, those from smaller, rural places who had no aptitude for sports and no outstanding talents as musicians, dancers, or actors were gendered as domestic workers.⁷

During practices for drama and music, one might be gendered in particular ways. Younger students were often assigned to play roles as girls and women, especially because most of them had no facial hair. If you were pleasantly plump, as I was, the comments might be that you have a womanly shape. Or, at least, a shape suitable to act as a woman.⁸ It might be that these comments led to sexual propositions, but I am not very interested in claiming that “gayism and lesbianism” were common in Kenyan high schools.⁹

I’m interested in marking the range of gendered and gendering positions available in high schools, mostly boarding schools, but generally across single-sex schools. Gender play was a feature, not a bug.

Perhaps those of us who were queer and trans and nonbinary found forms of refuge in these spaces and practices (drama, music) that allowed and even encouraged gender play.¹⁰ Though I would not describe them as necessarily safe spaces. If you were too convincing, you might be asked for advice on how to get girls, since, clearly, you understood them very well. There were definitely some forms of gay panic. But since none of us were announcing ourselves as queer or trans or nonbinary in those days, safety protocols were in place.¹¹

And it is this gender play that translates into—is facilitates a better word?—Kenyan social media practices of (presumably) straight men acting as and ventriloquizing women.

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But. The. Law.

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In the version of Kenya’s Family Protection Act that I have, “cross-dressing to portray that a person is of a sex different from the sex assigned at birth” is defined as a “grossly indecent act,” and carries a potential prison sentence of ten years (11.1, 11.2.c).¹² Given that Kenya’s current president has a history of making homophobic remarks and endorses the view that there are only two biological genders, we are living in interesting times.

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What has changed? What turned a common practice in Kenyan schools into a target of transphobic legislation? More accurately, one of the targets. Trans people and practices are the focus of the legislation. What might turn a (usually misogynist) gender ventriloquizing practice into a crime?

We have ways to discuss the internationalisation of transphobia—Africa’s most famous author supports TERFS, after all. And Kenya is certainly part of this international stream, especially given the central role social media plays in social, cultural, economic, and political life. What we often lack is a certain granularity. Or, to be more simple: I don’t think transphobia in Kenya simply replicates transphobia elsewhere.

It must be said: there is no necessary relation between cross-gender play and lesbianism. There is no necessary relation between gender play and what Kenyans call gayism. There is no necessary relation between gender play and gender. There is no necessary relation between gender play and transsexuality. There is no necessary relation between gender play and trans politics and aesthetics.

Heteronormative, homophobic, and transphobic (il)logics insist on creating these relations, often through legal strategies like the one I describe above.

Gender play may provide spaces for a range of experiments where queer, trans, and nonbinary Kenyans can breathe differently. Even, perhaps, find companionship and pleasure.

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In our unsettled times, I have no eloquent way to conclude. We are navigating truncating (il)logics, both in the sense that they want to shorten queer and trans lives and practices, and in the sense that our sentences can only end without concluding. I do not know how any of this will play out. I can only map the present and work toward freedom.

1. For instance, Dada Sarah, who mostly posts in Kikuyu, has over 600,000 followers. Wa Kairu, who similarly posts in Kikuyu, has over 400,000 followers. Kenya’s most popular tiktok creators, who mostly post in English or Kiswahili, have 2-4 million followers. I emphasize the two who post in Kikuyu as the use of a local language would suggest a mostly rural audience, or at least one interested in ethno-national formations, which tend to be mostly conservative and heteronormative.

2. Misogyny makes it funny. That’s one answer. And one I am putting in the footnotes to create some space to think otherwise.

3. I am directly translating “outed himself as himself” from Kiswahili and Kikuyu here, languages which allow this grammatical form.

4. More honestly, the script—written by students, back when that happened—was shit. The women characters were badly written. To wear headscarves and serve men. I won when I shaped the scripts. I provided input in one and wrote the other.

5. I want to stay with “cross-gendering” as opposed to “cross-gendered,” because something moved outside a particular performance.

6. I have no interest in tracking these cross-gendering performances to Kenya’s colonial education and, from there, to the cross-gendering performances common in Early Modern England that persist in particular English single-sex schools.

7. I want to avoid the term “feminized,” thought it certainly applies. What might it mean to think of “domestic worker” as a gendering category? I’m working through this in other work.

8. I spent most of high school wandering around in a haze of grief and religion, so I probably missed much of the sexual innuendo, and definitely missed all the queer sex that was happening, though there were always rumours about people from particular regions. Older students who liked younger students who looked femme—young, plumpish, pretty, light skinned.

9. A 1995 presidential commission on devil worship in Kenya claimed that homosexuality was common in high schools, and was evidence of devil worship.

10. Terms like trans and nonbinary were not available in the 1990s, certainly not as vernaculars with which to imagine oneself. That does not mean trans and nonbinary people did not exist. Here, I abbreviate a longer discussion of the relation between existing vernaculars and practices of legibility. We can only name ourselves and make ourselves legible to ourselves and others when certain vernaculars exist. The absence of those vernaculars does not absent a kind of specificity. It might mean naming oneself as gay or bisexual or queer or some other inexact word until a certain word is available that feels right. And, even this feeling right is still subject to the rules of language, especially the gap between the signified and the signifier that we call signification.

11. Perhaps a few people were? I am reliably informed that lesbians flourished in single sex high schools. I don’t know of anything similar for gay teenage boys. At least not in the boarding schools I knew.

12. I think a little about the bill here: