Justified

One Nairobi lawyer John Chigiti and indeed the Kenyan judiciary as a whole has a unique case in their hands. Richard Mwanzia Muasya is a confirmed hermaphrodite. He is also a convicted criminal incarcerated at Kamiti Maximum Prison for robbery with violence. Muasya, through his lawyer, says that the law is discriminatory against him

he’s undergoing human and constitutional rights violations at the Prison and would like the law changed to accommodate the likes of him who do not fall under either the male of female category. He is also asking to be set free because there are no provisions of his kind in our Kenyan constitution and penal institutions.

One cannot ignore the tribulations Muasya has probably been through. For one the whole intersexual thing must be heavy on his psyche. I imagine he grew up grappling with the psychological effects of his mixed gender – all in an unforgiving culture. Secondly sexual abuse in our penal institutions is no secret. If he has not already been put through some of that, it’s just a question of when and not if and he must be spending all his waking hours fretting about it. But then again if he did not commit the robbery, nobody would have put him in Kamiti in the first place. If it’s a question of human rights, the person he robbed has his own right to his property.

Cases like Muasya’s are rare but not entirely unheard of. In 2004 for example, intersexual Jonothon Featherstone managed to escape a prison sentence in Jamaica because the Jamaican penal code had no provisions for those bearing both male and female genitalia. That was even after he admitted trying to smuggle drugs out of Jamaica. That is what Muasya is hoping to do.

For one, just having medical examinations to determine his must have been humiliating enough. Having been thrown into Kamiti, he says he’s suffering inhuman and degrading exposure to the male convicts, prison warders and the general public.

It’s a rare condition and in developed countries, some incidences are surgically corrected when the child is still young. But this medical intervention on hermaphrodite infants is meeting with resistance as more and more people more and more people with the condition are coming forward with claims that immerses subjects into worse psychological, medical, and sexual damage. They’re encouraging parents to let their children develop into themselves and enjoy the gift of being unique.