Steven’s World

By Steven Keddy

Kiena is a tall, skinny woman. Her legs are stick-thin and are accentuated by her four-inch heels. At five foot eleven (without heels) and 120 pounds, the 30-year-old could have been a supermodel if she had that body ten years ago. Her silky-black skin is aged from years of partying, but she wears her makeup well enough to cover any imperfections. From a distance, her appearance is striking, but if you look closely, you can see she has lived a tough life.
Her personality is so overwhelming it draws you in. She’s the type of person who can grab your attention and hold it for hours. She talks so fast that you can barely keep up and you have to struggle to catch her words through her broken-English and thick Somali accent. But there’s something about her that you just can’t turn your eyes away.

Born in Somalia in 1978 with the name Corey, Kiena was not your average boy.
“I wanted to be the princess,” said Kiena. Growing up as a boy was tough for Kiena. “I wanted to be the girl.” She did not know what to call it as a child because being a transsexual was practically unheard of in East Africa.
Playing dress-up with her two younger sisters was always her favourite game. She would take clothes and necklaces from her mom’s and her sisters’ closets and dress up as the princess. And she would dress her sisters in her boy clothes that she never wanted to wear. “I always wanted to become the woman one. That’s how I knew it,” she said. “Something inside, deep inside. I wanted to become a woman in my life. I knew it.”
Kiena remembers the first time she dressed up as a girl. She was seven years old. She waited for her parents to leave then she put on her sister’s dress and her mother’s necklaces. “I was feeling good,” she said. “When my mom came home, they beat me up.”
Her parents stormed into her room, “No! That’s wrong,” they yelled at her. “Something’s wrong with him,” her parents would say.
“They were scared,” Kiena thought. “They always knew it.”

“Where I come from, they don’t believe in homosexual people,” said Kiena. “Back home, you can’t be who you are.” She never knew anyone like her. “If you be gay, they make your life miserable,” she said. Not only was she confused about her sexuality, but her gender identity was always on her mind. Kiena knew her family would never accept her as a woman. Her parents told her, “Oh, you can change, you can change, you can change.”
And she tried. “That was a pressure for me,” she said. “I tried and I suffered the price. It’s not me. I pushed myself to be a straight guy, but it’s not me,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes. Her friends and family blamed her for being different; they said it was her choice. “It’s not a choice,” she tried to convince them. “Psychologically, it’s not a choice. If I made the choice I’d be married, have children but it’s not my choice.”
“The pressure killed me inside. Cry, cry. Why God made me this way?” Kiena spent years struggling with her identity, she blamed God for making her so different until one day, she had an epiphany. “It’s not God punishing me, who I am. It’s me,” she said, “This is how I feel now. Why don’t I make myself happy?” she asked herself. “I want to be woman. That’s my dignity, my feeling in my body.”

The lines of gender identity are confusing to say the least. It is all a matter of how people identify themselves. There are many names given to classify people who identify with a gender other than their birth gender. Transgender is a broad term for someone who is uncomfortable with or rejects their birth-assigned gender. This could include transsexuals. A transsexual is a person who believes they were born into the wrong body. In their minds they feel like they are a person of the opposite gender they were born with. A lot of transsexuals live happily without undergoing any sort of physical transformation, but most transsexuals decide to make some sort of physical alteration to their bodies, usually in the form of hormone treatments and plastic surgery for things like breast enhancement or reduction and eventually gender reassignment surgery.
Intersexed people are people who are physically born with both male and female organs, or with sex organs that are gender ambiguous. These people used to be referred to with the more politically incorrect term “hermaphrodite”. Sometimes all of these groups of people are incorrectly called transvestites. But a transvestite is just used to refer to a cross-dresser (someone who gets emotional satisfaction by dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex). Transvestites do not necessarily live as the person of the opposite sex; they usually just dress like them from time to time for their psychological well-being. Similarly, the term drag queen or king is often incorrectly used. People who do drag are performers; they perform songs or dances in the likeness of the opposite sex. The term drag was coined in Elizabethan times when only men performed on stage. It was used as an acronym for “dressed as girl”.
Overall, the issue is not the title given to people. Often times a person’s identity can be classified by more than one of the titles or sometimes with none of these titles. Gender identity, similar to sexuality, is not easy to classify. The lines are easily blurred. Gender identity is more a matter of a person feeling either male or female, or both, regardless of the gender they were born with and regardless of the individual’s sexuality.
“I am tranny,” Kiena laughed. “I am transsexual.”

Kiena and her family moved to Canada when she was 14 years old. “It’s different where I come from and here,” she said. “A lot of freedom here. People can be who they are.”
“God, you brought me to the right place,” she praised. “ My wish, my dream came true.”
As a teenager, now living in Canada, Kiena felt as if her eyes had been opened to a whole new world. “When I came here, I see gay freedom,” and that’s when she realized, “I can be a gay, huh?” So she tried to live her young adult years as a gay man, but she knew this wasn’t the life she wanted. She was not being true to herself.
She saw a lot of transsexuals living happy lives and she thought, “Why can’t I live the life they have?” She always dressed as a woman when she was home alone, but she never dressed as a woman in public until she started to perform. She began doing drag shows at gay bars in Kitchener and Hamilton. “For me to be able to perform, it was fun. I was Kiena.” After only a few years as a drag performer, she became very well known in Hamilton. She has a natural talent for dancing and performing. She spent most of her week at gay nightclubs in Hamilton. From Thursday to Sunday, she was out dancing and hosting drag shows.
As the years went on she found that she was actually able support herself on the money she was making by doing these shows. Eventually she was performing all over the greater Toronto area. From London to Toronto, she was becoming somewhat of a celebrity in the gay community.
By the time she reached her late twenties, Kiena was getting tired of performing and doing drag shows. The years of late nights and parties took their toll on her, physically and mentally. Her life was upside-down. She was living her nights as a woman, but her days she was still trying to pose as a man. She was still feeling the pressures of society. “Every society, everywhere you go, some people, they accept you, some people, they think something’s wrong with me.” But again she came to a point in her life where she needed to forget about what everyone else wanted and focus on what she needed. “It’s not something wrong with me. It’s something wrong with you if you don’t accept me,” said Kiena. “It’s tough. I was upset. I cried, but you can do nothing.” She was ready to take the next step. She was ready to become a woman.

Kiena met with a psychologist, who told her, “You’re ready to do it.” She was put on a regiment or hormones to begin her transformation. When a transsexual makes the transition, the majority of the physical changes are made through hormone treatments. Male-to-female transsexuals, take estrogen and testosterone blockers. The hormones help to redistribute body fat to more feminine areas, like the hips and chest. It creates breast development, softens the skin and softens facial features to a more female look. “You mentally become woman,” Kiena explained. “You act like woman. Your mentality changes.” As well as her two years of hormone treatments, Kiena has also undergone laser hair removal on her face and she started wearing weaves to make her feel more naturally female.
She lives everyday, day and night as a woman, “I live happy now.”
The next step for Kiena is to get breast implants. She wants to do it on her birthday this March. “I always dream, the day I’m born, I want to become woman.” She also plans to legally change her name on the same day to Kiena Shakley. “You don’t have to explain to people anymore, ‘I’m transsexual.’ They see you as a woman, which I want to be.”

Kiena has put herself on the waiting list for gender reassignment surgery. “In five years, I want to be full woman.” She hopes that by making the full transformation, her family will finally accept her. “Maybe in the future when they see I have everything done, when they see my ID say Kiena, they’ll respect me maybe, and I hope so.”