Gender Identity: Your baby isn't quite a girl or a boy

Ryan now identifies as a male (Photo: Anthony Gitonga/Standard)

It was a quiet, slow realisation for Ryan’s mother. “The midwife made a passing comment to her that they could not tell if I was a boy or a girl,” Ryan Muiruri says of his birth some 30 years ago in Lari, Kiambu County. He now, out of choice, identifies as a male, and will be referred to as male in the story.  

Beat and still on her delivery bed, his mother’s would-be celebrations of safely delivering her first born child quickly faded into confusion. All she had wanted was a healthy baby.