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you

speaker-1 (00:04.213)
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Hey y'all, you're tuned into Assigned Sex, Unarchived. I'm your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson, and this is a safe space where we're honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer. Today I'm sitting down with Tom Kola. He's a transgender activist, community organizer, and the founder of Trans Nigerian Support. We're gonna unpack what it was like growing up in Nigeria, building a community where there was once a void,and how he learned to keep going and find joy. Let's get into it.

speaker-1 (00:49.934)
I'm Tom Kola. I'm him. I'm a Nigerian man.

intersex and trans experience. And I love people. I love to grow. I love to chat.

speaker-0 (01:07.758)
Can you paint a picture for me, like growing up, what messages did you get early on about gender and who you were supposed to be? I'm curious what that looks like from a Nigerian standpoint.

speaker-1 (01:21.198)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I always like to say what people imagine when they think about it, it's not that far off, I'm not gonna lie. It are bits and pieces, you know, personal encounters that might be a little better than what the average experience is, but growing up, it's a very religious household, very cultural household.

very structured, know, a certain way, a certain two-way street. It's binary in everything, you know, at all times. And so, ironically, you know, it's a thing, it's a similar thing I find where you're good to be yourself, right? You're okay to be yourself when you're a kid until a certain point. It's like, you can only be so free. You can only be so much of yourself. So growing up, it was...

Well, not even a lot that I remember because I realized as I got older that I figured out early on that I needed to just kind of dissociate, disappear a little bit to be able to keep going. It's just recently I started kind of piecing or pulling pieces from my childhood back piece by piece, it was very, know, boy do this, girls do that.

I have a younger brother too, so was like, you know, they had their expectations. That's just like, generally. Personally, I figured out that I was not who they said I was as early as four. I have a very, very vivid memory of when that thought came to mind. I didn't do anything, I mean, I was a kid, I was just living.

But I think until around 12, organic time had resurfaced and then we started just battling. We went down the rabbit hole of like denying, avoiding, suppressing, and it just kept coming back, right? It just kept coming back. And at some point I had to just sit with it, face it. And yeah, here we are. Here we are right now.

speaker-0 (03:44.44)
Do you feel like, are you saying that religion was like the biggest part of it?

I can.

speaker-1 (03:52.684)
It is, yeah, it isn't such an understated way because when I think about it, it wasn't, I didn't get the Bible verses and the, you know, Christian love, you know, the way that is described. There's no hate like this love. I didn't get any of those messages. Really? It was more so, so what, what, what you would, what you would come up, come up again first is culture.

That's what it's usually positioned as, you know, African culture, Nigerian culture is the certain ways that boys and girls behave in a culture. But, um, when you think about it, when you start to analyze it, you would see that, okay, yeah, there are, that culture is very much founded on, on Christian tradition, on like, you know, the mainstream popular Christian tradition.

So yeah, yeah, I would say it was, but it wasn't so hot.

speaker-0 (04:56.46)
Yeah, like gender, these gender norms, they be beating people's ass. I grew up in, my mom, like that religious when I got older. Not like much older, but I was like, I was like in high school when she went to heavy. But I do remember just because like my grandparents and everybody used to always be like, girls do this and boys do this. And I always questioned, because my mom would say stupid stuff like.

speaker-1 (05:00.622)
That

speaker-0 (05:25.62)
Girls don't sleep in. And I'm like, what do mean girls don't sleep in? Like, why do I have to get I gotta get up early because I'm a girl. That's crazy.

Yeah.

Girls can do whatever they want. Boys can do whatever they want.

speaker-1 (05:45.474)
Yeah. And it's funny, even though she lives in a world like, sometimes I think about it like maybe back then, you know, back then they were surrounded by a lot of the, a lot of this stuff was upheld. But it's like even now, when you live in a global world and you see girls doing all the things they told you girls didn't do, you would still, you're gonna need to put those boundaries and those labels and those limitations on people.

speaker-0 (06:15.41)
You founded the Trans Nigerian Support. Was that, like, did you found that? Were you responding to something? Was it like, like one of your friends was going through something that made you want to say, like, hey, I'm a something doesn't exist and I need to create it? Like what brought on Trans Nigerian Support?

speaker-1 (06:35.978)
Or sure, like you nailed it, you hit the nail on the head like 100%. So a lot of everything that I, a lot of everything was like starting to like accept myself, right? And just, yeah, once I started to accept myself and look at myself, right? A lot of everything that came, that became was from addressing a void, a lack. So Trans Nigerian support was no different. Like I grew up, you know.

Not knowing what trans people didn't exist. Not knowing they existed. Not knowing what a trans person was. Not knowing what a binder was. Not knowing, you know, trans men, trans women, just the fluidity of gender. The ownership that we have over ourselves. I've always been, like, my family, would describe me. I've always been independent. I've always been self-sufficient. Always been...

A free stinker? It's like if I like it I'm gonna do it. Doesn't matter what they said for the most part. They hated that about me. But they will see it. They will lie. So at some point right, I'm... Okay, so this is who I am. I'm a guy. I'm not fighting anymore. I didn't even have all the facts then. It's not like I knew was interested way back then. I just knew something didn't feel right. Something didn't make sense. A lot of things would like...

A lot of conversations would just happen spontaneously, right? But at that time, I just knew, okay, this is the guy, right? And people see me and don't see that. They misunderstand that. misjudged, mislabeled, whatever. And so I started looking for the first word I had to say to feel like it looks like we don't exist. So let's fix that. I started talking, I started finding friends, making and building a community of other...

trans men, trans mass people, trans people, period, queer people as well. And so as I kept doing that, I started to just find out there's a lot of stuff that we don't have. A lot of stuff that we need, especially like back home, I was in Nigeria, there's a lot of stuff we don't really need that we do not have. And so it started with just, know, crowdfunding to get certain materials, but yeah, people, certain things.

speaker-1 (08:58.574)
for our friends to get binders, get prosthetics, to get... Even for like trans-seminary people, I was just always, like I said at the beginning, I love to go. It's like, that is where the driving force of a lot of stuff that I am comes from. So it's like, once the people needed, we started to work towards getting that. Literally, I would take a trip home once every year, because the mark stuff is at the carry, and so it can get the...

people that need it. So at some point in 2022, I figured, so that's when the idea was like, okay, if we can do this for social transitions, why can't we do it for more? Because then I started to learn from people that there's actually a way to transition back on. So it's like, I'm this grown-ass person, probably in my 20s, and I never thought...

I felt like I just didn't even believe that it was possible to get hormones safely in Nigeria. I had no clue. So the first time I heard that I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. You mean that this stuff is in the country? We don't have to ship it in? why, why are we not, why is this not like more general knowledge? Why don't more people know this? Why don't more people have access to this? So yeah, you started this conversation sharing there.

helping friends here and there. And then we figured, yeah, why not? It's an opportunity for a grant. Like, yeah, physical, a financial grant came through. And so it was like, okay, yeah, let's do this. Let's pitch this idea to them, get their support and make it happen. And that's exactly what it was. It was like, we can do this for more people in a safer way too, because I'm sure like, know,

We're very good at being stealth in the trans mass community, but also in the trans community in general, because we're so good at surviving against all odds. lot of people, you know, will figure out transdiscrimination on their own with a lot of, people, whatever they can, you know, we're not, we're not worrying about tests, know, lab tests. We're not worrying about being safe. We're more focused on like surviving.

speaker-1 (11:25.566)
like getting to that point where this is who I am this is what it is the instinct is more survival in that statement so that's that's what I wanted to just bring into the picture people were already transitioning right it's just a matter of we can do this we can do this in a way that feels right for us that feels safer for us that feels more consistent as well for us so yeah like I said you hit it right on the head but that's just a bit of the backstory it really did just come from a place of

Seeing the whole world doing it and just having the people in support that made something that wasn't, to bring something to be, to bring something to be that wasn't.

speaker-0 (12:09.824)
Yeah, you like built your own support.

speaker-1 (12:13.312)
Exactly. they wouldn't support us, we'd figure it out.

speaker-0 (12:16.162)
Thank you.

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you

speaker-0 (12:28.654)
Okay, so it's time for a little Black trans and genderqueer history. Today we're centering the story of Georgia Black. Georgia was born on a farm near Galeyville, South Carolina in 1906, the thick of Jim Crow. As a teenager, she got tired of breaking her back in the fields. She ran away to Charleston and found work as a house servant. That's where things shifted. There she got involved.

with an older man in the household, and he coaxed her on how to move through the world as a woman. After a while, that was just her life. Eventually, the relationship soured. Georgia left Charleston and made her way to Florida. In Winter Garden, she met Alonzo Sabie, a seriously ill man she nursed back to health, and when he recovered, they got married. While they're married, a cousin drops off a three-week-old baby and disappears.

Georgia takes that boy, Willie, and raises him as her own son. After Alonzo died, Georgia moved to Sanford, Florida and eventually married again, this time to a World War I veteran named Mustard Black. That second marriage, plus the son she was raising, anchored the life she built there. She did domestic work, joined St. James Methodist Church, became active in the Women's Missionary Society,

and turned into the church lady everybody knew they could call when they needed a peppermint. In the early 1950s, Georgia got seriously ill and was hospitalized. During an exam, the county physician discovered she had male genitalia and reported it. Then, Ebony Magazine swooped in with a sensational transphobic story that called her life a masquerade and treated her body like a spectacle. But Sanford? Sanford is on something else.

Her pastor was in the pulpit asking folks to pray for our worth, that sister Black. A white couple she cleaned for said, Georgia is a perfectly wonderful person. Another wealthy employer said, Georgia Black was first members of our family. She is in our town.

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I don't care what she's doing. She knows that through birth, sickness, illness, she's one of the best citizens.

speaker-0 (14:56.29)
When Georgia died, the town showed their true colors. Black and white folks lined the streets of Sanford's black neighborhood as her funeral procession passed. Heads bowed, crying real tears. Then papers came out to make her a freak show. The people who actually knew her chose something else. Protection, gratitude, and love. Georgia herself had already told them how she understood her life. She said that fate intended her to be a woman and remembered her marriages as peaceful and lovely.

So when we talk about Georgia Black, we're not just talking about a headline from the 1950s. We're talking about a Black trans woman who built a life, a family, and a respected place in our community long before there was legal language. A church sister, a caretaker, a quiet rebel woven right into the middle of Black Southern life. We remember Georgia Black. We honor her legacy because she proves, once again,

that we have always been here.

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You

speaker-0 (16:04.958)
One thing I often see with trans mass folks is like a lot of people are like posting like transition photos, which I feel like can be can be motivating, but it can also be like a little bit brutal. Have you ever found yourself like comparing your body to like other people's body on your timeline? And like, how how do you pull yourself back from that? Because I think a lot of people get stuck on like, want to look like that. And it's we're all different.

speaker-1 (16:34.84)
Yeah, yeah, that's real. That's really nice. It's real.

speaker-0 (16:38.432)
Edix is like...

speaker-1 (16:41.134)
You can do all you want, but some things you cannot change. You are gonna be bald, you're gonna be bald.

speaker-0 (16:45.965)
Yeah.

Exactly.

speaker-1 (16:52.366)
Um, yeah, that's a real question. I... and the funny thing is, most of my life, and... what just came into my head, might need to unpack it there, but just thinking about how a lot of things that I've found myself observing and learning, it's more so from other people's experiences. Like, for the most part of my life, I've been just kind of...

away from my life. Right? Because for the most part, even though it really did look like I was present and I was having a great time, because I mean, if we look back at it, I have done a lot of things that I'm proud of, but it's over time I started to realize like I wasn't really even there, you know, a lot of things that I would talk about would be pulling from my friends and people that I know and people that I met online. I wasn't doing much even though it looked like I was.

But anyway, so like to that point of like comparison, I will say as well, though, I've been fortunate enough to not get stuck in like that cycle. There are, there has been, there still are a lot of like people online, the men online that I see, like, yeah, that I want that for myself. And for the most part, I think if I think about it.

I think a good example would be like the gym, the gym bros.

speaker-0 (18:25.494)
Everybody's a Jimbrough. I'm trying to be a Jimbrough.

speaker-1 (18:29.689)
I mean, now we're to be healthy, you know? We're getting old. know? That's that. But like, I mean, I'm thinking, honestly, I'm thinking like younger, more impressionable. For the most part, if I see somebody who is somebody I admire, I think that's even what got me in the gym. I saw this, you know, black trans man who was kind of, was everything I wanted to be. And then I'm like, okay, so he's doing the gym thing. I'm as opposed to just sitting there and like,

feeling away about myself because I've I really I'm trying to think back and make sure I'm not being I'm not just you know seeing it because time has passed but you know like body dysphoria dysmorphia that's not something that I feel like you know I ever really experienced I got it I got it I did mostly because but my dysphoria was from other types of things it was like probably

my voice, it was from more internal things, More societal things. So I got the concept, but like the personal body thing, wasn't anything that I really did have to struggle with for the more first, like I see it, I like it. And then it just kinda, I was able to turn that into motivation to do, to get it, right? So that's what it was mostly for me, but I did notice that there were people who didn't smile.

that you know they needed they needed a bit more to feel better about themselves they needed a bit more support to get out of those types of things and so it's usually it was always just like you know more so

reminders like like you said we're all different we're all gonna do our best and it's just a reminder that every body is different it's not even just like everybody not just you know physical each and every one of us in so many different ways so that's just what i used to do and it's what i used to share but i never really had that experience of like struggling with getting myself out of yeah out of a comparison

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If you could speak directly to another young trans man who's where you were like say five years ago, what would you want him to know about like love, his body, and like the possibility of a future?

speaker-1 (21:02.71)
The first thing I can remind is if you keep going...

speaker-1 (21:09.894)
It always makes sense. you're the type of guy that will keep going and keep trying and keep sight of what you want for yourself, it's gonna get hard a lot. Some days you feel like you're blind. Forget keeping sight. You feel like you can't see shit. Everything is dark. But if you're the type of guy that will keep going...

Keep trusting, keep believing in yourself, keep going. Just, you know, you're not giving up, you're not stopping. You might sit down a little bit, take a drink of water sometimes. But if you will keep going, you will love what you get to do. You will love what you see. You will love what comes to you. You will love the things that find you. That's honestly it. like because if you keep going, then you keep seeing.

ways that you can do more. If you keep going, you keep finding people who can love you more. You keep going, you keep finding support in the places you never thought were possible. You keep going, you will find a version of yourself, right, that is so comfortable and confident in itself. That all the things that life is built upon right now, if you were to lose it all tomorrow,

you will get to a point in your self-rate. It wouldn't, it wouldn't phase you. But you have to keep going to get there. You have to keep going to get to whatever is better because it's always better in front of you. That's just, that's something that we believe in. Sometimes it's not even because those things are actually better, but I feel like it's more so that your mind gets to a place where you're able to identify.

You're able to identify things a little differently. You're able to put value into things a little differently. And so that mind shift is what really then gives you the life you want, regardless of what the physical you look like. And so I've rambled to a 21 year old, he probably stopped listening me after like 30 seconds.

speaker-0 (23:27.95)
I don't think what you said was cliche at all because I find that like most like the trans men that I talk to that are like further along in their transition they say something similar but I mean it seems like also it just seems so lonely. They're like you have to keep going but it's like how do you keep going?

Like how do you find joy? Like maybe that's the question I want to ask. Like where do you find your trans joy at?

speaker-1 (23:59.534)
So for me, right, I would say it has to be self. I mean, this is me, right? This is me. And again, I preface this by saying I am somebody, was somebody, am somebody who loved people. I'm having fun if I'm with somebody, just one person I like, we're good, right? But it has to be self in the sense of like so for me, for the longest time.

You know, all I had and like, all I, everything I did was from a place of, even though all I've got right now is my social censorship, all I got right now is these things that are not everything I want. You know, I want a family, want friends, want supportive biological family, you know, all these things I wanted, but I didn't have. But.

Keeping inside of myself, keeping inside of who I wanted to become, keeping inside of, so it's like in the hangout, in the queer gatherings, in even hosting your own events, like hosting your own hangout, hosting your own parties, just finding things that when you think about them, so for instance, if I think about top surgery, that makes my heart smile, right? And so it's like I'm keeping...

I'm keeping a vision of that for me, working towards that. So it's like, how we keep going, while we all agree that we gotta keep going and it's hard, it's those things that you want, those things that are possible, even though they feel impossible. Because like I said, I'm here now, but I was a kid that thought it was impossible to transition in Nigeria. Like I literally thought it was, that's not something we could ever do. We have to leave the country to do this.

So it's like, it will seem impossible a lot of the time. But for the simple fact that you have a mind as powerful and as beautiful as what we have as human, and that is something you have envisioned.

speaker-1 (26:12.852)
Even if you don't do it, you can rest assured that somebody else out there is going to it and you can tap into that. You can work with that. You can grow into that with them. But yeah, it's self. It always has to emanate from self, right? Even if you're going, even if it's in parties, even if it's with your friends, even if it's your first binder or you see yourself in a packer and it's like, this is what it looks like. Those things, yeah, but it has to just come from the

from a strong sense of self-respect. Whatever it is that I see and it brings me joy, I gotta keep up with it, hold on to it. Thank you God.

speaker-0 (27:06.702)
Alright y'all, that's all I got for today. You can learn more about Tom Kola's work with Trans Nigerian support at transnigerians.com and on Instagram @transnigerians. If you want to connect with him directly, you can find him on Instagram at @stilltomtommy. If this episode dragged you a little bit, or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your non-binary cousin, Sean Dawson.

on all platforms at I Am S Dawson. Y'all be safe out there.