My rights abused, says double-sex prisoner

A hermaphrodite who is seeking to be released from Kamiti maximum security prison wants a report about his medical and physical condition tabled in court.

Richard Mwanzia Muasya says the report will help the court understand the continuous human and constitutional rights violations he is going through at the prison, where he is being held after he was convicted for robbery with violence.

A detailed report by medical experts will also help the court to fully understand his gender, says Muasya.

Muasya was born with both male and female sex organs, but goes about life as a man.

Through his lawyer John Chigiti, Muasya says he is suffering inhuman and degrading treatment by exposure to male convicts, prison warders and the public.

Muasya is seeking to be set free because he says he is neither man nor woman and there is no special prison to hold people like him.

The law is discriminatory against him, he says, because it only recognises the two sexes. He wants the law changed.

Muasya was arrested alongside three other suspects in February 2005 after a robbery in their village in which a victim was gang-raped.

Doctors at the Kitui General Hospital confirmed that the suspect was a hermaphrodite, and he was held in seclusion in police custody throughout the two-year trial.

He was kept in an isolated cell at the Kitui police station.

Police also dropped the rape charge against the suspect after medical examination determined that none of his sex organs was fully developed and that it was unlikely for him to commit rape.

Muasya’s case will be heard this morning before High Court Judge Benjamin Kubo.