Upon hearing the news of childbirth, the first question many Nigerians ask is, “Is the baby girl or boy?” They rarely consider an in-between or neither, because infants are automatically assigned the gender that matches their sex, expected to identify as this and perform its roles as they grow.
Gender identity is the personal conception of one’s own gender. Although the most common gender identities in the world are boy/man and girl/woman, there are more identities than this binary category covers. Some people grow up to continue identifying as the gender that correlates with their assigned sex, and are called cisgender. Others choose a gender identity different from their assigned sex, and are called transgender. There are people who do not identify as either of the binary, and are referred to as genderqueer or non-binary.
While a doctor can determine and pronounce a baby’s sex, it ought to be up to that child to decide its gender identity as it grows, knows itself intimately, interacts with the world, and discovers different ways it wants to express itself.
In a Nigerian society where gender roles are nearly enforced on individuals right from childhood, there is little to no space for people of a perceived gender to behave contrary to the stereotypes attributed to that gender. Gender expressions are determined by and restricted to sociocultural expectations of what a girl, boy, woman, and man should be; an attempt to step outside of these boxes is attracting an unpleasant attention to oneself.
Despite the laws and hostility hindering the freedom of queer people in Nigeria, some of them are stepping out of the closet regardless and are at their most authentic in safe spaces. Findmymethod.org provides such a safe space for people of all gender identities to interact on their forum from anywhere in the world.
To document experiences of genderqueer Nigerians, I spoke to four of them and asked what it means to identify differently from the conventional gender binary.
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This post was culled from Medium and was written by Emitomo Tobi Nimisire
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