Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

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Six years ago, when she was at university, Shiro met a married man nearly 40 years her senior. At first, she received just groceries. Then it was trips to the salon. Two years into their relationship, the man moved her into a new apartment because he wanted her to be more comfortable. Another two years down the line, he gave Shiro a plot of land in Nyeri county as a show of commitment. In exchange, he gets to sleep with Shiro whenever he feels like it. George Paul Meiu, who studies transactional relationships between men of Kenya's Samburu tribe and older European women, has described how their youth and good looks have become valuable commodities in Kenya's beach resorts. Until recently there was no data to indicate how many young Kenyan women are involved in sugar relationships. But this year the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics conducted a study for BBC Africa in which they questioned 252 female university students between the ages of 18 and 24. They found that approximately 20% of the young women who participated in the research has or has had a "sponsor."

Grace, the aspiring singer struggling to put food on the table, has a slightly different perspective - to her the similarities with sex work are more apparent. Transactional sex was once driven by poverty, says film-maker Nyasha Kadandara. But now, increasingly, it's driven by vanity. We're constantly bombarded with moral ethics, and with what religion does and doesn't allow. But it's all a pretence," he says. "We're just burying our heads in the sand and pretending these things don't happen." Mother and lesbian daughter reunited for Pride This year, for Pride Month, Verizon facilitated phone calls between four members of the LGBTQ community and members of their families with whom coming out created a rift. Among the people in the group was Cyndy Riggs, a 21-year-old lesbian, and her mom, who is also named Cyndy. This is the story of their life-changing phone call. Phamotse eventually fled her abuser, with nothing to show for the relationship. "I had to escape so I didn't find any financial privilege," she says. "I left the house and the car, and had to rebuild my life."For many young Kenyans, the values espoused in families, schools, and churches simply do not align with the economic realities of the country, or cannot compete with the material temptations that, in the age of reality TV and social media, are everywhere visible. Both Grace and Jane have come of age in the last decade, bombarded since childhood with images of female status built on sex appeal. But according to Crystal Simeoni, an expert on gender and economic policy, Kenyan society encourages sugar relationships in other ways too.

I prefer the sponsor thing, rather than standing on the street," she says. "Because you have that one person who is supporting you… you don't need to sleep with so many men." Jane, the student, makes a distinction, arguing that "in these relationships, things are done on your terms", and Dr Kirsten Stoebenau, a social scientist who has researched transactional sex in Kenya, agrees that this is significant. Jane, a 20-year-old Kenyan undergraduate who readily admits to having two sponsors, sees nothing shameful in such relationships - they are just part of the everyday hustle that it takes to survive in Nairobi, she says. What is wrong about sex anyway?" asks Jane. "People just make it sound wrong. But sometimes, it ain't wrong at all."Even within the family, most Kenyan girls have it drummed into them from an early age that they must marry a rich man, not a poor one. It's taken for granted in these conversations that men will provide the money on which women will survive. So for some it's only a small step to visualising the same transaction outside marriage. The artist Michael Soi notes that Kenya remains on the surface a religious society with traditional sexual mores - but only on the surface. Those who deplore sex before marriage and infidelity within marriage rarely practise what they preach, he argues, and the condemnation of sugar relationships is tainted by the same hypocrisy. A look at the Kenyan tabloids also suggests that women are at risk of violence from their sponsors. But as most of those dependent on sugar relationships are female, they have dominated the public debate. There are concerns about the morality of their lifestyle, but also about its consequences for their health. She also insists that her relationships with Tom and Jeff, both married, involve friendship and intimacy as well as financial exchange.

She is poor by the standards of middle-class Kenyans, often living hand-to-mouth, dancing for cash in a nightclub, and struggling to put her daughter through school. But her determination to feed and educate her child coexists with a naked ambition to become rich and famous through modelling and music. Dr Joyce Wamoyi from the National Institute for Medical Research in Tanzania says girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 24 have consistently been at higher risk of HIV infection than any other section of the population in sub-Saharan Africa. Among them are the stars of the reality TV show Nairobi Diaries, Kenya's own blend of Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. The show has launched several socialites out of Nairobi's slums and on to yachts off the coast of Malibu or the Mediterranean.But while some feminists argue that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist - because it was made by a woman - others question how free the choice to enter a sponsor relationship really is. Older men have always used gifts, status, and influence to buy access to young women. The sugar daddy has probably been around, in every society, for as long as the prostitute. So you might ask: "Why even have a conversation about transactional sex in Africa?" Grace, a 25-year-old single mum from northern Nairobi, has a regular sponsor, but is actively seeking a more lucrative relationship with a man who will invest in her career as a singer. Most young women, she says, are not aware of the dangers. "Some of the girls who disappear around our continent were in these transactional relationships… Looking at the police reports, these are cases of girls who were in relationships with older people, and they were rejected at some point and someone decided to kill them." In Kenya, more and more young women are using sugar daddies to fund a lifestyle worth posting on social media.