-Essay-
BAGHDAD — “Love and resistance…”
I don’t know if such words somehow justify, with their naivety, the ignorance of what is happening to trans women in Iraq among queer circles in the Arab and regional region. The neglect extends to feminist institutions that claim to reject and resist discrimination based on sex and gender and gender-based violence.
✉️ You can receive our LGBTQ+ International roundup every week directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.
We must rely on such regional institutions because we do not have any in Iraq.
Any gender-based behavior that reveals our non-normative identity as trans women is enough to be killed in the street. This happened with Nour, BM, Semsem, and Doski Azad, who were killed because of their gender identity.
It also happened with the trans Iraqi Dusky Azad, whose brother returned from Germany to kill her in 2022. Her body was found later on a remote road in Dohuk governorate in the Kurdistan Region.
In fact, this crime is considered “acceptable” within the boundaries of normal behavior of parents, siblings and children. It is seen in our culture as a way to maintain the value and honor of the patriarchal family.
“Culturally inappropriate”
In the last three years, three trans women were executed in public. Dusky’s body was found in the Kurdistan region in 2022, followed by Nour last year, who was killed near her apartment in a lively street in the al-Mansour neighborhood in the capital, Baghdad; then Semsem. She was stabbed to death after returning from Turkey to visit her family earlier this year.
Socially, the killings were justified on the grounds that these fellow citizens were culturally inappropriate. Such reactions shed some light on the great importance of our fight for trans women’s rights, just as we continue to fight the battle for women’s and human rights in general.
With the increase of the tyranny of religious fundamentalism and its bureaucratic apparatus, we see related reactions spreading towards non-normative women or what used to be called “cross-dressers” in Iraq.
The above explains that society and the state are reinforcing the patriarchal identity. Still, many trans women do not hide their non-normative sexuality, which can be explained as being neutral within society. It is ultimately a type of gender that men are accustomed to seeing and does not affect the collective gender of the system. It can be kept within the assigned social role, which is based on its biological gender in the Arab hierarchy: two-type gender.
Trans women are directly discriminated against because they do not conform themselves to the assumed perceptions of what a woman is and what she looks like in that society.
Legalizing the crackdown
On August 15, 2023, the Iraqi parliament passed a preliminary reading of the draft anti-prostitution law that targets LGBTQ+ people and further persecutes trans women and non-normative men. It has criminalized what it calls “imitation” of the opposite sex, through clothing, wearing cosmetics, or using hormones to change body features.
This led to prosecuting activists and anyone who “promotes homosexuality.” Some also raised the specter of a law for executing LGBTQ+ people. And the government instructed the media not to use the term gender, and use “sexual abnormality” not “homosexuality.”
On Feb. 1, the Iraqi parliament passed a second reading of the bill, after making it more repressive against members of the LGBTQ+ community. It included controlling social media and the activities of civil society organizations that are deemed promoting homosexuality, and punishing anyone who supports, or promotes it.
Lawmakers, who supported the legislation, said Iraq will not yield to foreign pressure, in reference to the United Nations’ officials who attended the parliamentary sessions. Such sessions took place amid waves of incitement to violence and on social media.
Invisible practices
The deeper form of gender bias, and the male centralization are difficult to define because they are part of invisible practices of the patriarchy. They don’t come as intentional acts by individuals or groups — and that is ultimately the main source of problems for women and trans women in particular.
The rights of women, LGBT+ people are often interpreted as explicit symbols of Western culture.
Such invisible practices have coincided with the rise of religious fundamentalism and its control over political decision-making. The fundamentalist political movements have supported the ugliest forms of this bias against women, and gender-based violence. Such violence becomes a means to cover up the political failure and corrupt operations of such groups.
In this context, it is important to note that the fundamentalist groups reject what they view as “Western culture,” with a would-be moral decadence that threatens their patriarchal society with its confirmed moral assumptions.
Meanwhile, the governing authority has attempted to legitimize violence caused by the rejection of the identity of individuals who don’t align with the local community’s perceptions of the gender pattern, and don’t serve the collective type of the patriarchal system.
The rights of women, LGBT+ people are often interpreted as explicit symbols of Western culture. In this context, the state authority has reinforced the denial of individual and human rights, and brushes off gender diversity as nothing more than an “abnormality” and a psychological illness that must be treated.
The Fatwa
Back in 2006, all were at risk because of a fatwa issued by the highest Shiite figure in Iraq, Ali al-Sistani. He called for killing homosexuals, especially the “active ones,” in the most horrific means. Human Rights Watch documented assassinations in the subsequent three years in which the victims’ penises were cut or were given laxatives after closing their anus.
The fundamentalist militias came to power and installed themselves as representatives of the whole society.
What we see now instead is more akin to a personal exploitation of power, not deriving its legitimacy from a “legal or constitutional” base, but rather from the sheer reality of power. People, in other words, have been stripped of their human and civil rights. Once these fundamentalist militias came to power, they installed themselves as representatives of the whole society.
Cultural and religious justifications for violence against trans women continue. The governing bodies adopted legislations based on vague standards that enable them to prosecute trans women.
The anti-prostitution draft law, for example, prohibits wearing clothes of the opposite sex. That means clothes determined by social norms and customs as for women. It also prohibited cosmetic and medical products that change the features of the body, which is what trans women need to achieve their self-fulfillment.
A moral issue
Still, within this context, institutions and organizations that identify themselves as feminist have failed to understand these problems that are unique to diverse gender bias.
Persecuting trans women, and sometimes killing them, is also seen as naturally and culturally appropriate, in a way that confirms the assumptions of governing bodies towards women and gender in general.
Yet trans women are particularly exposed to risk, which normative women’s groups don’t seem to comprehend. For example, the Manahil Foundation, a state-registered feminist organization, circulated news of the killing of Semsom, the trans woman. It described trans women as “negative phenomena” that the state must address. Though it later apologized, the organization insisted on its position against trans women!
So it seems, we have found a single speaker, who is culturally dominant, and who assumes that women are one gender that can’t be changed.
And this assumption has become part of hierarchical binaries within Arab sexuality: male and female, man and woman.
