Being trans and a person of colour can mean feeling like an outsider in two communities at once, belonging fully to neither. Chidi knew that feeling exactly. What he found, eventually, was that belonging does not have to be something you discover. It can be something you make.
Chidi grew up in a tight-knit Nigerian community in a European city, the youngest of four children in a family where the church was everything and reputation travelled fast. The people he grew up with were warm, funny, generous, and deeply certain about who was who. Boys played football in the car park after Sunday service. Girls helped stack the chairs. Everyone knew which category you were in and no one thought to question it.
Chidi questioned it from about the age of seven, though he did not have the words for a long time.
What he had was a feeling. A persistent, quiet sense that something in him did not match. He could not have told you what it was in the way he can now. He just knew that the category he had been handed did not fit, and he wore it the way you wear a borrowed coat in the wrong weather: technically covering you, not actually keeping you warm.
When I hear stories like his, I notice how often people describe that coat. Not obvious anguish, not a crisis you can point to. Just that constant, low-level wrong-fit feeling that is easy to dismiss because nothing specific is breaking down.
Chidi got through his teens by being excellent at everything else. He was clever at school. He was good company. He had the kind of easy laugh that made people want to be near him. And he kept the coat on, because taking it off would have meant explaining what was underneath, and he did not yet have the vocabulary for that, let alone the certainty that anyone would listen.
He was twenty-two when he first encountered the word transgender applied to someone he recognised. It was in an online forum, at two in the morning, the way so many things begin. He read for three hours without moving. He told me once that reading those words felt like someone had turned a light on in a room where he had been managing in the dark for years. Not a dramatic flood of revelation. Just: oh. There it is. The thing I already knew.
He came out to himself quietly, and then he looked around for his people.
Here is where it gets more complicated, and where I think Chidi's story is important enough to tell.
The trans community he found online was welcoming in many ways. People were generous with their time, their experience, their hard-won knowledge about hormones and names and navigating a world that often does not want to make room. But Chidi noticed, fairly quickly, that most of the voices he encountered were white. The cultural references were white. The concerns that got the most airtime were shaped by the experience of whiteness. When conversations turned to family rejection, they described it in ways that felt different to the rejection he feared. His family's faith was not a backdrop; it was the whole theatre. His community's investment in his body and his gender and what he represented was not a personal thing between him and his parents. It was communal, ancestral, bigger than one household.
He did not feel dismissed, exactly. He just felt slightly outside the frame.
So he turned back to his own community, thinking there might be more room than he had assumed. And sometimes there was. He found elders who spoke quietly about gender variance in Igbo history, about traditions that had been buried by colonialism and missionary theology, about identities that existed long before European categories arrived and started naming things. That mattered to him enormously. It gave him a thread back through history that did not require him to choose between being Nigerian and being trans.
But the community as he lived it, day to day, in the church hall and at family gatherings and in his parents' kitchen, was not there yet. The faith his mother held and the community his father had built their lives around: they were not ready for this version of Chidi. Not yet. Possibly not ever, though he has not stopped hoping.
What he described to me was the particular loneliness of being between. Not belonging fully to the trans spaces that did not see the whole of him, and not belonging fully to the community that had shaped him and still loved him in the form it knew. Two communities he genuinely valued, and a version of himself that fitted neither perfectly.
I think about this a lot. The assumption, when we talk about coming out and finding your community, is that the community is out there waiting. You just have to find it. And for many people, that is genuinely true. The trans community is large and warm and has absorbed enormous amounts of pain with extraordinary grace. But it is not monolithic, and it has inherited the same patterns that run through every human group: the tendency to centre the most visible, to speak most loudly from the middle, to let the experiences of some become the default experience of all.
Trans people of colour describe this frequently. The double visibility: visible as trans in spaces that are majority white, visible as a person of colour in spaces that are majority cisgender. The double erasure: invisible as a person of colour in trans spaces, invisible as trans in community spaces. It is exhausting in a very specific way, and the exhaustion is not nothing.
Chidi did not catastrophise it. That is one of the things I find most striking about his story. He was not bitter. He was pragmatic in the way that people are when they have spent years problem-solving something and got quite good at it.
He started, almost by accident, building something. He connected online with other trans people of colour, firstly through a small group that began as a WhatsApp thread between six people who had found each other through various forums, and then through a more organised network that one of those six eventually set up properly with a name and a website and occasional in-person gatherings. He went to the first in-person meeting on a Tuesday evening in a community centre, half-expecting it to feel forced, and stayed for four hours.
What he described about that room is what I try to convey whenever this conversation comes up. Everyone there knew the full picture. They understood what it meant to navigate faith communities that were not ready for them. They understood what it meant to be the only person of colour in a trans support group and the only visibly trans person at a family function. They understood the specific calculus of coming out in a community where your identity is not only yours, where your gender is bound up with other people's sense of family and faith and the expectations carried across generations. They got it without it needing to be explained, and for Chidi, who had spent years explaining, that silence was enormous.
He did not leave his family. He did not leave his faith, though his relationship with it is complicated and evolving. He did not stop belonging to the community he grew up in. What he found was a third space, one that he and people like him had made rather than found, and that space held the parts of him that neither of the other communities could hold alone.
If Chidi were with me now, this is what I would want him to know, and what I would want anyone in a similar situation to hear. The loneliness of being between is real, and it is not a sign that you have got something wrong. It is a sign that the communities around you have not yet caught up with you. That is their limitation, not yours. The fact that no ready-made space fits perfectly does not mean no space is possible. It means the space you need might be one you have to build, and the people who will build it with you are almost certainly already out there, asking the same question you are.
Belonging can be made. It is harder than finding something that already exists. It takes longer. But what gets made tends to hold better than what you were handed, because it was made for the full shape of who you actually are.
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