*This article was produced for a class and not initially intended for publication. The names of subjects have been modified throughout the piece. Anonymity protects their safety.
In “LGBT-phobic” Morocco, transgender teens begin to seek community abroad
By Celia Heudebourg
RABAT, Morocco - Omar Hassan, 19, studies his figure in his bedroom mirror. His eyes slowly work their way up his body, lingering on his hips and chest. He fusses with his hair and pulls down on his grey crewneck sweatshirt, adjusting it over his khakis in various ways until he’s satisfied with his outfit.
On any given day, Hassan can take up to 45 minutes to get ready to leave his house on the outskirts of Rabat. After carefully selecting his clothes with the help of his girlfriend Btissane, he gives himself a whispered pep talk to prepare himself mentally to go out in public.
“Me getting ready, that’s my nightmare for now. I have to make sure I look good. I have to make sure no one notices anything on my body,” Hassan said, waving his hands over his chest.
Hassan, who was born female and named Leila, is one of the many transgender Moroccans whose gender identity is legally forbidden. Morocco has a history of pioneering in the field of gender reassignment surgery and counts a transgender woman as one of its most celebrated belly dancers. However, common understanding and acceptance of transgender people remains scarce, even though the LGBT activism scene is currently expanding with the December launch of a new NGO for sexual minorities.
According to the World Bank’s legal and judicial sector assessment, Morocco’s legal system operates on a semi-secular legal system, a lingering trace of France’s protectorate of the country for 40 years. However, laws regulating personal and family issues, such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, sexuality and child custody are governed by religious law.
Article 489 of the country’s penal code states that “any person who commits a ‘lewd or unnatural act’ with an individual of the same sex may be sentenced to imprisonment for six months to three years.”
Though this article is not as penalizing as many laws found in other African and Middle Eastern countries, which call for lashing, torture, or death sentences, there is a strong culture of discrimination against gender non-conforming individuals in Morocco.
In 2011, a young hermaphrodite woman was attacked by 20 individuals in Nador because they deemed her physique to be “against nature.” Her attackers told L’Observateur du Maroc, that “they believed she was a homosexual dressed up as a woman.” Last year, a feminine gender non-conforming individual was publicly beaten in Fez by a group of six men who thought the victim was a transgender woman. The altercation, which was witnessed by tens of people, was filmed and shared widely on social media.
The Moroccan Association for Individual Freedoms, or MALI, has tried over time to raise awareness and tolerance of LGBT individuals through ad campaigns and art exhibits. However, Soufyane Fares, 25, an activist who works with MALI admits that efforts are primarily focused on gay and lesbian Moroccans instead of trans Moroccans because their material and financial needs are too much to take on.
But, in December, an association named Akaliyat will hold its first general assembly, becoming the first LGBT rights association in Morocco.
“I hope that the government won’t get in the way, the LGBT community really needs a safe space,” Hassan said, hopeful about this new initiative.
Hassan grew up in a subdivision home with his parents, sister and twin brother. “I was kind of genderless,” he said of his upbringing. “People didn’t actually know if I was a cute little baby guy or cute baby girl and it was like that for a long time.”
Omar Hassan* shows off childhood school photos, November 2016. Photo by Deborah Honore.
Hassan came to understand his gender identity after watching a YouTube video about trans people he could identify with. It was the first time he’d heard the term ‘transgender.’ Over time, he began cutting his dark hair shorter and shorter and wearing more masculine clothes, slowly towing the line of gender norms. His careful daily clothing selection became a safety compromise for him being able to wear what he wants and walk the streets feeling comfortable.
Other major aspects of Hassan’s life also had to involve added precautions. Hasan’s four-year relationship with his girlfriend Btissane Halami, 21, was largely forced to develop in private, within the confines of their gated community. The pair met as kids, when they were neighbors and grew up together. “She said ‘I’ll walk you home’,” Hassan remembers fondly, “And then she asked me to kiss her. So I did.”
Still to this day, they don’t hold hands down crowded streets. They don’t hug for more than a few seconds when Halami drops Hassan off at the train station. And up until a week ago, Hassan was only Halami’s “best friend” as far as her family was concerned.
“I wish that I could have a picture with Omar and share it on Facebook. Just you know a picture... but I can’t,” said Halami. “Everybody says this relationship is wrong. They [her friends] still don’t understand. I lost one of them, one of them doesn’t talk to me anymore, and the other one, we are still friend but whenever we talk about Omar he’s like, ‘no it’s wrong.’”
“It’s so weird that words on a paper stop a person from being a person,” Hassan said, speaking about the Constitution. “But, it’s not just the article, it’s the whole society.”
Dr. Abdessamad Dialmy, a sociologist and expert consultant on sexual and reproductive health explained that in Moroccan society, a person’s body commands their social destiny. A male is to become a heterosexual man and a female is to become a heterosexual woman. “When you refuse this social status, you are refused,” Dialmy said.
“In Morocco, we don’t yet make the distinction between sex as a biologically given data and gender identity, how the person, him or herself defines him or herself,” Dialmy said. “The notion of transgender is not well understood. When you talk about [the] transgender identity people think that you use this notion to hide your homosexuality.”
Though Morocco still grapples with this issue, the country has long been considered a historical pioneer in the field of gender reassignment. In the 1960s and 70s Dr. Georges Burou, a French plastic surgeon, innovated the modern sex reassignment surgery for trans women in Casablanca. However, the operations were clandestine and most famously performed on foreign clientele.
More recently, a transgender belly dancer, Noor Talbi, has become a mainstream celebrity and was even cast as a woman in a Moroccan feature film. However, in this case, Moroccans largely see gender nonconformity as “entertaining and confusing as long as it's safely confined to a stage or TV screen, not something you meet on the street,” said international human rights activist Scott Long in an interview with the Associated Press.
Hassan recognizes that there are no role models for him here, nor is there a strong transgender community he can seek out. He is part of several Facebook groups but local ones aren’t very active and members hide their identities with stock images of celebrities. “I’m mostly on American FTM [female-to-male] groups,” Hassan said. “They’re more supportive. The Arab ones are not really well managed.”
Access to foreign online communities and research into other states’ LGBT laws, have prompted Hassan to make the trip of his lifetime, one highly coveted by many transgender Moroccans seeking to transition medically: move to Canada.
In March, Hassan will enroll in a trade school in Montreal and work as a bartender until he can gain citizenship or asylum on the basis of sexually-based persecution.
“If I had a single idea of how to live here,” Hassan said. “I wouldn’t think about going. But, there’s like no way. My biggest priority is going to Canada.”
“I can already picture my life there: me finally being myself,” said Hassan, slowly and with a smile. “I want to go there because I know I will be free and I know that I have the right to be free. I will get my freedom and be respected.”
As far as he’s concerned, the only reason Hassan would come back to Morocco permanently would be to start an NGO or association in order to create a safe space for LGBT in Morocco. “I don’t know how I will do this, but I am very determined.”
As for Halami, she’ll be joining him in Canada too. “We can’t wait to only have mini-problems like paying the electricity and paying the rent.”