OII-Egypt

Official Conact: Jasmine Hasan

Although most of my efforts (and correspondence with local rights groups) thus far have been focused on issues in Egypt due to limited time/resources/volunteers, I try to widen the scope of our mission to also have an emphasis on issues in the greater Middle-East and the Islamic world as a whole, and not only Arabic-speaking countries. So that also includes Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.. I also try to stay in touch with a trans friend in Bosnia, but the information I have from her thus far is very scarce and not enough to be able to do something with it yet.

Two of my current top priorities are to shed more light on some of the most extreme forms of persecution of Transgender people currently taking place in Kuwait, and of LGBT as a whole in Iraq. With the help of a small and stealth transgender group in Kuwait, I've managed to collect tens of news articles (07-08) detailing the active "witch-hunts" and jailing of transgender Kuwaitis who are often subjected to sexual harrassment and rape in such conditions, and I intend to summarize and translate these articles to publish them in an organized and dedicated report. On the other hand, more than 300 LGBT people have been killed—in the most despicable ways—in Iraq over the last 3 years alone, almost exclusively by Iraqi Authorities with the orders of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the single most powerful religious figure in Iraq today—a man the Bush administration played up as a partner in peace and many have promoted for a Nobel Peace Prize. Somethings that were unheard of even under Saddam's rule. About two month ago I have started researching about some of the transgendered victims of this new regime, and documented the ones I could find information on under the "Remembering Our Dead" page on the english version of our site.

You might be thinking that the issues at hand, in Egypt alone, are all overwhelming enough to allow for dealing with any other related countries/regions issues. However, I believe that, given Egypt's rank/role in the Arab and the Islamic world, any positive change here will sure reflect positively—or at least somewhat—on her counterparts..

Of course, I do not intend to do that all by myself, and I believe that the key to progress is to unite anyone and everyone concerned for any common causes—be it middle-eastern or international LGBTIQ or Human Rights or other Non-Governmental organizations, well informed and supportive intersexed/transsexed/transgendered or cis-gendered people.

I currently coordinate with EIPR (Egyptian Intiative for Personal Rights)—who have shown great interest in supporting and following up on our efforts, as well as Meem Group in Lebanon. I have also coordinated and conducted an interview with a local Egyptian newspaper who have written a bit about my letters and petition aimed at the Egyptian Medical Syndicate. I have also recently met up with Dan Williams, a representative from Bloomberg, to talk about some of the issues we are concerned with, including transwoman Sally's long battle with Al-Azhar in court as well as other social and legal issues concerning L/G/B persecution and the related issues such as the so-called "soft-immutability" and "imputed gay identity" that transitioning intersexual/transsexual/transgender people face. His article, which I think is somewhat lacking and quite narrow-focused but nevertheless great, was published on Bloomberg with the title: Transsexual’s Fight for Education Pits Egypt Law Against Islam.