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by Feki, Shereen El

  It’s not just nonconforming men who are raising the temperature in the Gulf. Boyat is the Arabic term that’s been coined to describe women who look and behave like young men. Boyat are also causing something of a panic in some Gulf societies: in the UAE, for example, police squads scan malls and other public places in organized campaigns targeting suspicious-looking girls: those arrested for the first time are released into parental custody, but repeat offenders can find themselves in court for “violating public moral norms.”60 Boyat have been variously accused of mental illness, defying God’s creation, and sowing moral corruption through predatory homosexuality and same-sex marriage, not to mention Satan worship and jinn possession.61

  Although boyat are today characterized as a dangerous foreign import, there is, in fact, nothing new about women cross-dressing in the Arab region. In ninth-century Baghdad, the hottest girls on the streets looked like boys. These were the ghulamiyyat—a feminine derivative of the Arabic word for a young man. These women were a curious combination of male and female. The ghulamiyyat dressed like men, yet wore makeup. While they plucked their eyebrows and painted their lips, they also drew on mustaches in musk. In an age of strict segregation, they hung out with men at dogfights, hunts, horse races, and chess matches, all the while eschewing such feminine niceties as wearing jewelry and braiding their hair. They even took male names. Yet they made no attempt to bind their breasts and were decidedly heterosexual, often painting their male lovers’ names on their cheeks.62

  The ghulamiyyat fashion reached its height during the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. According to some accounts, there were up to four thousand of them in the court of its most famous sultan, Harun al-Rashid. The fashion gained momentum during the reign of his son, al-Amin, thanks to Zubayda, al-Rashid’s wife. Same-sex relations flourished in the Abbasid court and al-Amin was famous for his taste in boys. Zubayda was so concerned about her son’s dwindling prospects of producing an heir that she hatched a plan: she dressed slave girls as boys and cut their hair, in the hope that they would attract her son. It seems to have worked, at least in part. Al-Amin took to the ghulamiyyat, and some rose to considerable prominence: his favorite, ‘Arib, was famous not only for her beauty but for her talent as a singer, poet, chess player, and daredevil horsewoman as well.

  Today’s attitudes toward cross-dressing women are rather less tolerant, ranging from outright condemnation to attempted conversion. Qatar has one of the most public and organized efforts on the latter front; in 2007 the government set up a special “social rehabilitation” center to treat youth problems including addiction, aggression, and “sexual deviance,” into which the boyat are bundled. When I visited the facility, on the sandy outskirts of Doha, no one was quite sure just how common the phenomenon was, what was really driving it, and whether girls would outgrow it.

  Many people I met in Doha spoke of seeing boyat in shopping malls in the same astonished tones usually reserved for UFO sightings. But according to one psychologist dealing with boyat, such public displays are rare: girls tend to keep their cross-dressing quiet and under their abayas, unwrapping as boys only at school or among friends in private. Discretion is the rule, so I was told, since family ties are strong in Qatar and news travels fast. “The percentage of Qatari people are maybe 16 percent or 18 percent only [of the total population]. And they are families; it’s a lot of families with the same name, maybe fifty families with the same name. So doing something wrong, that’s it—stigma for the whole family,” the psychologist said.

  Most of the teenage girls brought in for consultation don’t consider themselves troubled: “Women do not feel it’s a problem. They feel it’s their freedom; they don’t feel it’s wrong.” From observation, the psychologist divided the boyat into at least three groups: those whose gender identity is male; those who think of themselves as women but are actually attracted to their own sex; and those who behave like boys to be cool, fashionable, and popular with the beautiful people at school. The practitioner described one patient, a sixteen-year-old who felt uncomfortable as a girl and was disguising her blossoming body through dress, dieting, and battening down her breasts. “She was treated as a boy at home, playing with other boys with a ball,” the psychologist told me, ascribing the girl’s gender confusion to her upbringing. “[Her parents] did not try to make her play with dolls and in the kitchen. That family has no friends with young female kids, but they did not try to think or find other female friends for her.”

  After psychotherapy, the young woman started to change outwardly. “She began to decrease the hours of seeing football, knowing everything about the issue. She began to accept wearing makeup and trying to have different dress. She began to think about her future … ‘At the end, I have to be married in this society, so I have to accept to think about this issue.’ ” But are such alterations merely skin-deep? If a boya were content with her situation, would the psychologist try to change her? “No,” was the reply, but this particular expert was doubtful of a happy ending in such cases. “If you are something in between men and women, you will not find your freedom. The same pressures are still there; it is not a solution.”

  For some transgendered people, that solution lies in changing sex altogether. It’s an expensive process: USD 30,000 to 40,000, says Randa, for the full course of hormones, hours of plastic and reconstructive surgery, and years of psychotherapy. Those who take the plunge often travel outside the Arab region—Thailand and Singapore are popular destinations for those who can afford it. It is possible to surgically change your sex in the Arab region, but the procedure is laden with restrictions.63 Hard-liners who oppose all sex change operations lean on a phrase in the Qur’an: “There is no altering God’s creation.”64 However, a fatwa issued by a former Grand Mufti of Egypt, the late Shaykh Sayed al-Tantawi, opened up a little space for those who have clinically defined gender identity disorder.65 Some Shi‘i religious scholars take a more flexible stance, most prominently Ayatollah Khomeini, who, in the 1980s, issued a fatwa permitting sex change operations (including for transgendered people) on the grounds that these procedures are not explicitly forbidden in the Qur’an and that such operations reconcile the disharmony between the soul and the body and prevent the transgendered person from falling into sinful acts—that is, same-sex relations.66

  In the Arab region, though, changing your sex can be as hard on paper as it is in the flesh. In the Gulf states, for example, getting government permission to have sex reassignment surgery and altering your sex on identity documents—a procedure with profound implications for matters like inheritance that vary according sex—can involve years of legal challenges. In Lebanon, things are a little less formal, says Randa. “For Lebanese, it’s very complicated, but it’s possible. It costs money, time, but it can be done.” Not for her, though. Randa was a foreign national in Lebanon, so changing her papers there was not an option, and given her history in Algeria, the prospects are equally slim back home. In the end, Randa headed to Europe for a new life, one she could lead as a full-fledged woman.

  On the personal front, Randa was lucky and rarely lacked for male companionship. Professionally, though, times were a lot tougher. She was denied employment at a private Beirut hospital, even though her experience as a health administrator in Algeria more than qualified her for the post; no matter how convincing she is as a woman, without the sex to match her official ID, which prospective employers ask to see, bias against transgenders and transsexuals can put regular employment out of reach. Those who do get work can find themselves exploited by employers, facing longer hours, lower wages, and fewer benefits than other employees, with the possibility of sexual abuse thrown into the bargain.67

  Trans people in the Arab region have been largely overlooked by organizations supporting other sexually diverse groups, although there are a few initiatives now springing up to better understand and to address their needs. But it’s not easy to bring many of them into the fold. “The transsexuals are so despairing of society, tired
of everything, they don’t want any more,” Randa told me. “ ‘What are you saying? You want to bring us here, you want to give us rights?’ They don’t believe that.” But she also appreciates why society is reluctant to engage with them. “That is partially the responsibility of some transsexuals themselves. When you go overboard into extreme vulgarity, extravagance, and all that, what are you expecting in the way of respect? It is the question of the chicken and the egg. If you treat me as a slut, okay, I will be a slut, a slut to the extreme. You only have to dig a little to see the suffering that has engendered this extravagance.”

  FUTURE TENSE

  Experiences like these underscore calls by LGBT activists in the region to fight their fight in a broader context. This strategy is prompted in part by fears of a conservative backlash if the focus is on the bogeyman of “gay rights” but more so by an understanding that nonconformism and diversity in general—ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual—make people uneasy, and not just in Beirut, a city built, broken, and reborn along sectarian lines. Moumneh is very much in the broader-is-better camp. “I think the best-case scenario for LGBT individuals in our region is [to] stop thinking in terms of LGBT. I think it just limits so much. I think it would be better if people looked at the underlying causes of the problems that we’re facing, and looked at connections between these problems and the wider problems in society. Because if not, we are going to end up with a situation that any progress that we do achieve will be progress for a privileged few.”

  She continued in this vein: “I find it very difficult to see how far an LGBT rights discourse would go in a culture that places so much emphasis on the family, for example. I don’t see how far that could go without work on women’s bodily autonomy and women’s bodily integrity. And LGBT organizations have historically never worked on these issues because they are primarily headed by gay men. I generally don’t think this is an appropriate model for the region. No one is going to decriminalize homosexuality while women are still being punished for adultery. It’s absurd; it’s not going to happen. Without tackling the issue of sexual autonomy as a whole, nothing is going to move forward.”

  Shahira echoed these sentiments. “As a starting point to rally communities, we have to find something other than ‘We’re all gay,’ and that’s partly my issue with identity politics. Just looking at the realities of the region, LGBT individuals are not as visible as we think they are. But everyone in the region is suffering from the repression of morality—whether it comes from the state, from religion, from society—everybody. So why would I work on liberating a subgroup, for just a very small subset, when I can invest in doing the real work which needs to get done, which is a very long-term strategy?” she asked me, with quiet determination. “When I was younger, I didn’t identify with L or B or G or T.… I was just someone who was repressed because I was a woman. Injustice was on me not because I’m queer, but because I’m a woman—an Arab woman, a single woman.” For Shahira, the grand plan of social justice, at the end of the day, comes down to the personal. “I want to go and be able to rent an apartment without being called a whore. I want to be able to walk down the street without my ass being touched. It doesn’t matter what I do in my bed—because I can close my door.”

  In many ways, Lebanon is an outlier in the Arab region. I asked Moumneh what lessons might be drawn, if any, from the experience of Meem and Helem in carving out space for sexual diversity. Without skipping a beat, she gave me her prescription. “I think the key issue to look at here is freedom of association. In countries where you have a more relaxed freedom of association law, you will have more space for people to organize over whatever issue, including sexuality or LGBT issues. So that was why Lebanon was in the vanguard, because, however flawed it is, it has the institutions of a democratic state. So you have multiple political parties, you have an active civil society, and you have a very, very liberal law of association that basically does not require the consent of the state—it just requires that you inform the state. Without those factors, you would not have what you have today in Lebanon in terms of work on sexuality and sexual rights. And I think that’s the key factor to look at in other countries.” Her advice to Nasim, Munir, and their peers is to go slow. “Now is not the time to say in Egypt, ‘I want to establish an LGBT organization.’ There are foundational things that need to be laid first. You’re talking about a society in a huge sway of transition, and the building blocks of a more open and democratic society need to be laid down first.”

  Just as the uprisings, and their aftermaths, are playing out differently from country to country, the strategies of the region’s LGBT groups are also diverging—some advocating full-throttle legal reform to seize a moment of change, and others taking a slower approach. None of this strategizing is occurring in isolation, however; compared with the fragmentation of, and competition among, civil society groups that I’ve seen in other domains—old school women’s rights organizations, for example—the region’s LGBT activists are remarkably well organized and well connected, both online and off. A steady stream of workshops and conferences on HIV across the Arab region, like the one described earlier, are bringing them together on a regular basis to swap stories and compare strategies. Turkey, in particular, has proved a handy incubator for budding sexual rights activists across the Arab region, hosting workshops and networks to help them hone their skills and learn from its particular model of social and sexual change in an Islamic context.68 The most prominent activists in the region are booked months in advance with invitations to international meetings on sexuality, and the rising tide of conferences on the “Arab Spring,” in which the status of homosexual men and women in the new order increasingly features, means the air miles are adding up.

  These men and women, mostly under forty, are impressive—educated, thoughtful, and articulate. They’re not into hierarchies, and their networks and organizations are run on refreshingly meritocratic grounds. Their numbers are still small—a minority within a minority—but not their ambitions. They know exactly how the world turns and can tell you with devastating precision what they think has worked abroad and what will work back home. “The Global South has numerous examples to learn from, whether it’s from Africa and the religious fundamentalists or from Latin America and the trans [transsexual] movement there, what’s happened in India and the decriminalization of the [sodomy] law. The Global South is extremely rich in examples, successful ones and not successful ones,” said Shahira, giving me a wide-ranging view of international developments in sexual rights. “To say that the West has these perfect solutions, it’s extremely imperialist and extremely condescending, and it’s just another form of colonization, and it’s problematic.” She went on: “If we want help, we have voices, we have computers, we have brains, we know how to ask the questions. If the solutions are not local, they are not going to work. If we need help, we know where and how to ask for it. There are enough of us who have studied, learned, and been in the field for so long.”

  One of the most interesting opportunities for the region’s LGBT activists to network, and a measure of their progress in recent years, is Mantiqitna Qamb (Our Region’s Camp).69 Since 2010, LGBT individuals from across the region have been meeting once a year in a “secret” location for workshops on sexuality, gender, and activism, as well training on life skills and advice on the personal front. As Shahira, a regular at the event, pointed out, the key to Mantiqitna is connecting “not just through our gay identity, but through our Arab identity.”

  It is already yielding results. Hassan, an LGBT activist from Tunisia, was there from the beginning. “It’s an initiative I really appreciate. I got experience and I learned how to coordinate and create a small regional network [called Khomsa]. It was the 2010 camp, on the last day, we had a meeting of LGBT activist groups from Greater Maghreb—Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. We have experience, but we don’t know each other. It was the moment when we saw we have common objectives. We work together, exchange experience, conf
erence-call by Skype.”

  This solidarity is invaluable for Hassan as an activist and as a gay man. “What is really important for us as LGBT? We are not safe. We lived like this for years, being discriminated against, stigmatized, ignored and no one wants to talk to you, refused by the family, isolated, excluded,” he said. “The fact of having a network that supports you, that you are not alone in this world, it’s moral support. Plus technical support, to have experience, to have had activities which achieved their objectives and others that did not work, so we can learn from these failures.”

  Hassan is clear on his goals: for starters, a repeal of Tunisia’s article in the penal code criminalizing same-sex relations (with up to three years in prison) and the creation of a new NGO to advance the rights of minorities and marginalized groups, across the board. Like Meem’s, the strategy of his nascent group is to join other organizations working on women’s rights, children’s welfare—any human rights issue, really—to mainstream its interests and subtly introduce its message into the broader debate on social justice. “We try, wherever there is a chance, to raise the issue of LGBT, so [the other groups] sympathize. If you find a heterosexual woman, married, who speaks openly against the stigmatization, or [putting] men in prison simply because they had [same-sex] relations, or punished, that is less of a risk [of a backlash] than if you came out directly [and said], ‘I’m gay and proud of it.’ We don’t do that—it’s provoking. Our work is to advocate, do meetings, unite with others who can carry the torch to convince others.”

  Like his counterparts in many other parts of the region, Hassan also knows exactly what he doesn’t want. “I know Tunisian society. We will never ask for gay marriage, that’s for sure, because most don’t want the classic frame of relationship, marriage; we don’t think of that. No, not having children, no, no, no. Most [of the men] are young; they want to live their lives normally, correct, without stigmatization or discrimination. That’s our objective for the next five years, and even after.”