Monika: Do you like fashion? What kind of outfits do you usually wear? Any special fashion designs, colors, or trends?
Arya: Clothing and my being transgender have always been related. I used to tell my ex how much I didn't like menswear and I would complain so much. She used to laugh about it and say I hated men. I would criticize their clothes, behavior, really everything. Finally, she was like "I thought you had self-made clothes why don't you make some more."
I had always worn tailored pants from about 2007, this conversation happened in 2012/2013 and we were still trying to keep my secret and fit into society and church and some female pieces of clothing I had weren't helping this cause. So, I went into earnest about making my own clothing. The initial goal was of course to create something that was mine but that didn't scream women's clothes - so very androgynous pieces.
After our break up in 2015, my clothes were more themed around my prevailing values and feelings. The last set of clothing I made was in 2019, a series about freedom, at this time I was really living my authentic self - I had three wrap pants that would catch the wind. I had tops for these that I called the renegade shirts. They had pointed collars, tight-fitting hands, and cuffs that went all the way to the fingers. Then I had a set of colorful tops I had named butterfly tops that had transparent chiffon on the body and wide arms - four colors luminous green, fuchsia, bright yellow, and white.
I had a conference in Prague in 2019. I remember my host calling me an "African Princess”'. It was such a panic for me as I still didn't have the confidence I have now. I was wearing the wrap pants, the renegade tops and head wraps from Afro Fanatic. I am still figuring what I want to create next - this past year I have had pieces of clothing gifted to me by my cisgender and cis-gay women friends - many short skirts and dresses and I have also bought a few thrift dresses.
Monika: By the way, do you like being complimented on your looks?
Arya: It depends on where the compliment comes from.
For example, there was one of us who I was consistently angry at for misrepresenting our transgender identity on Kenyan media and on social media and they always used to compliment my looks and I never felt that their compliments were genuine. It was more of them trying to get me to cut them slack.
With cisgender women, I have always had to get used to the compliments cis-women give each other on appearance and clothing items and I love those but I have also had to pick up cues where someone especially those who knew me were implying I was passing, as passing compliments do not count as compliments to me.
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| "Cishet men's compliments are almost always of a sexual nature and to any lesbian, they are a constant irritation." |
Cishet men's compliments are almost always of a sexual nature and to any lesbian, they are a constant irritation. But sometimes I have entertained them with a civil "thank you" to get services or to avoid drama.
I get a lot of compliments on social media - but that is also because I use my pictures to drive traffic with the weird algorithms of Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes though this is counterproductive as people will see the picture and not read anything. Part of me is actually feeling that maybe I need to do more videos than writing.
Monika: Social media are not always reliable in this respect.
Arya: The weirdest time was when I was desperately trying to find any medic or researcher who was working on Aromatase promotion, which I felt may have held an answer for my enby child's condition and also some benefit for me as a transgender woman. My friends liked that post without knowing what it was about and every time I saw alike I would quickly open Instagram hoping to find a medic who had liked it and I would find it was a friend.
So social media does tend to be fickle but still, it is always nice when someone random just says nice things about you to you.
My child's compliments - any day. That is all I need to set myself up for a whole day.
Genuine friends who will also tell me when I have let myself go - yes I appreciate their compliments too.
Over the years though I have really learned to disconnect my choices of appearance and compliments. So, my appearance and what I wear are really the highway - compliments and criticism are accepted and respected but they are not taken into advisement or to heart.
Monika: Are you satisfied with the effects of the hormone treatment?
Arya: Me and hormones is also a funny story. My usual way of solving life problems is to research and research. After my discovery in 2011 that my being was transgender and not a perversion of a man and accepting that this who I was, I did a ton of research on my options. I downloaded resources from transgendercare.com and a YouTube video animation of vaginoplasty. Then for three years as I went through my relationship all these resources were shelved and I was trying to be the best partner to my ex.
After we broke up I just went looking for them where I had stored them. However, in my isolation, I didn't know that I could start on hormones without surgery. So, my future felt a bit bleak as I tried to figure out where $16,000 would come from. When I met the community in 2019 that is when I realized I could get hormones over the counter and I didn't need to have undergone surgery to start on hormones.
This is partially one of my regrets - had I started when I was in employment in 2014 -2016 this would have been awesome. But I still appreciate not so much the changes on my body - those are still minimal but the overall feeling that I am doing something for my alignment. Even the minimal changes though do give such elation - the first time I noticed my shadow was rounded and there were tiny little protrusions where my flat chest should have been was most exciting. Even my Doctor this year taught me how to examine my breasts for cancer - I never felt so affirmed by a medic than I did at that particular moment.
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| "Clothing and my being transgender have always been related." |
Monika: Could you tell me about the importance of love in your life?
Arya: Love is everything. I tried to hide and fix my gender for three years because I loved my ex. I haven't seen my Mum since 2019 because I care for her and my existence will hurt her. It has taken me so long to love myself and realize that this kind of love for everyone else was imperfect because it involved mutilating myself - killing my being, hiding the most beautiful parts of my existence. No one can love wholesomely unless they are whole.
Now I have my lesbian, enby child, who is 20 and I love them more than life. Being a mother to another human being is not like anything I have experienced before. There is such pure and beautiful love between us probably also because there is not much love for us from our society and our love is radical, typically breaking all boundaries between a mother and their child.
Societal norms where I live tend to turn mothers into providers and molders of their daughters into what society needs, ours tends to be the opposite, both of us pushing society bounds to give each other happiness. There is nothing I wouldn't do to see them live a beautiful life.
Monika: Many transgender ladies write their memoirs. Have you ever thought about writing such a book yourself?
Arya: I used to blog a lot about tech and other topics. In 2019 which would be the time I came into being I thought I would blog about myself and I even started a new publication on Medium titled "Becoming a Butterfly" but the publication is still blank. I have not been able to write about this interesting journey that life has been for the past few years.
On Facebook I used to tag my posts #ThisTransitLife - after a friend of mine read them she asked me the same thing if I ever thought of doing a memoir. Well, to be honest, I didn't think my life was that interesting.
Monika: What is your next step in the present time and where do you see yourself within the next 5-7 years?
Arya: I am aging. I really want to save up and get my vaginoplasty before I hit our life expectancy in Kenya (50). Hopefully, in a couple of months, I can save up and do an orchiectomy, which will help me cut costs on how much I am spending on blockers.
My child and I want to see what more there is to life and what's out there in the world so I will actively try and pursue a higher education qualification outside of Kenya - I don't know maybe in Europe.
I still want to continue contributing to decolonizing. I truly believe it is central to African queer lives freeing themselves, so anthropology and study of cultures are where I might wind up.
If I carry out all these plans that will be approximately five years. I will be 45 and my child will be 25. I want to do things to make their life secure too. Allow them to travel, taste art and culture, and do all the things a lesbian girl in Kenya is told they can never hope to experience and to break all the systemic challenges they have faced.
Before this year, I really wanted things to change for our government to decriminalize same-gender loving relationships, for transgender people to get official recognition but now I feel like this is a long drawn-out fight, and the effort I put in during the last few years has been draining for me. I need to pace myself.
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| "Love is everything." Painting credits: Kisped KENYA |
Monika: What would you recommend to all transgender women that are afraid of transition?
Arya: I think transitioning is really a personal decision. I would tell them fear is the price we pay for adventure and that they are missing out on the hardest, trying and most beautiful times and parts of their life.
Monika: My pen friend Gina Grahame wrote to me once that we should not limit our potential because of how we were born or by what we see other transgender people doing. Our dreams should not end on an operating table; that’s where they begin. Do you agree with this?
Arya: We were born transgender. The whole premise of this statement is that we were born as cisgender men who spend their whole lives changing into cisgender women.
Whether we do anything about it or not - we are all born with a BsTC (the stria terminalis of the Central Subdivision of the Bed Nucleus), which is the same in structure as that of our cis-counterparts i.e. transgender women and Cisgender women share the same structure in BsTC while transgender men and cisgender men share the same structure in the BsTC.
We spend our lives trying to reconcile this part of us with our bodies and trying to live life in a world of binary, cisgender, heteronormative societal structures. And having such a brain structure isn't an anomaly to fix - it is just the diversity of nature. Humanity sees nature being diverse in its entire species but for some reason, humanity assumes nature will do orderly structured boxes when it comes to human beings.
The operating table is a huge part of what I want to have done before I die... maybe because of how expensive it is to people in our kind of economies... where $16,000 is savings that take ages to achieve. I want to do a ton of things for myself including my PhD etc., I want to do a ton of things for my daughter/my human so that they may have a beautiful life. I want to see queer lives in Africa set free. But I also want to someday find myself on the operating table because I want to house my being and my spirit in this body that my mind has preconceived, this body that my brain has been searching for since the first trimester of pregnancy.
Monika: Arya, it was a pleasure to interview you. Thanks a lot!
END OF PART 3
All the photos: courtesy of Arya Jeipea Karijo.
© 2021 - Monika Kowalska
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