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Remembering Arnest Thiaya, father of Kenya’s trans community [1]

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Date: 2023-06

On Fathers’ Day, Kenya’s trans community was in mourning for the loss of our father, Arnest Thiaya. We lost him on 14 June, not long after the passing of Nakshy Saeed, the director of Pwani Trans, a Mombasa-based initiative that advocates human rights, social recognition and inclusion for the country’s transgender community.

Thiaya would have turned 52 this year, a feat for a Kenyan trans person. Our life expectancy is 50; multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities contribute to our short lives.

He started living his authentic self as a trans man in 1986, way before there was any trans community in Kenya to speak of. Way before he even had the language to say what he was going through. He remembered walking into Kenyatta National Hospital and telling a doctor that he felt like his body was not his, that there was something terribly wrong. Fortunately for Thiaya he found medics who were open to making the journey with him, to venture into what was then seen as uncharted waters for medical practice.

Thiaya is of the generation of activists that never ever saw themselves as such. In his mind – and way of life – he was just a small business owner. Every day, he religiously opened his grocery retail shop in Nairobi's low-income Kasarani area. Even when he had important meetings to attend – government consultations or overseas trips such as his recent visit to New York – Thiaya made sure that someone opened his shop which sold dailies like bread, milk and oil. He also had a section on the outside that sold bags and jackets.

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That his small business was important to Thiaya is obvious. He lost his first shop in Kibra, Kenya's largest low-income neighbourhood, amid the electoral violence of 2007, something he always spoke of with pain. Forced to restart from scratch, Thiaya found he was unable to access microfinance credit as he needed identity documents that matched his gender.

Thiaya, along with two friends, took the government to court, wanting to compel Kenya's Registrar of Persons to identify them by their correct names and gender markers on their national ID documents. They won the suit to change their names in 2017 with the ruling on gender markers still pending. In Kenya, the national ID document gives a person access to banking and government services, and is the reference document for all other government-issued documents, such as a passport or driver's licence.

The other two plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Audrey Mbugua and Maureen Munyaka, who co-founded Transgender Education and Advocacy (TEA), which works to defend and promote trans human rights. Like Thiaya, Munyaka is a small business owner and runs a hair and nail salon. Mbugua is best known for winning several legal fights that expanded trans rights in Kenya, not least forcing the national examinations body to change her name on her school certificates and compelling the NGO Board, which regulates non-governmental organisations in Kenya, to register the TEA.

As for Thiaya, he was on the board of three important transgender organisations in East Africa, but most local people will probably remember him best as the strict judge of the Nairobi ballroom on community days.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/remembering-kenya-trans-arnest-thiaya-father-obituary/

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