Aziz

It took me 6 years to become a person who accepts different people, not to help them or be an advocate for their cause, to merely accept them. Working in the legal field in women’s cases and violence against women pushed me to take a step back and review my convictions and take more positive positions.

Since 2010, my first interaction with the concept of sexual minorities was when I started working in the human rights’ field; I had a very traditional standing point towards the Queer community… I didn’t really know what it consists of, I only knew about homosexuals because they were the most apparent category, and their causes were the most apparent. I adopted a traditional speech, not against nor with, I didn’t see that their causes were a priority to be tackled in the first place, neither socially nor legally.

With time I started to change my ideas… In 2017 I started to be concerned with cases of discrimination as a whole, and started seeing what bases people would discriminate themselves upon, and this got me closer to the causes of the Queer community; I started to see that they were subjected to a wide spectrum of violations, even if I didn’t work on the cause at the time, but I became empathetic.

Until 2018, more than two years ago, someone asked me to facilitate a workshop where a group of transsexual men and women were present; and this was new to me, I didn’t know anything about it, I only knew that there was this thing called sex change operations and my interaction with it was through cinematic works, but I didn’t know more than that. Before agreeing to managing the activity I started reading specifically about transexuality, and from here I started to see all the colors that were in the Queer community that I didn’t know of, and started to know that the cause was much wider than the homosexuals category only, and that the discrimination that members of the Queer community were subjected to was multiple and branched; and at this point I started to consider myself an advocate for the cause, and I have gotten rid of any doubt that this is not a priority… I’ve gotten rid of the idea of priorities as a whole. The moving point afterwards was that I’ve started to build relationships from within this community, from all of its colors, whether it be through the workshop that has led to more workshops afterwards, or through people in my circle of friends who came out to me when they saw my positions changing. After that, I started to consider myself an advocate for the Queer causes in Egypt, not directly working on it, but careful to be considerate of it in my work.

My friends have taught me many things, I mean whenever someone said the word “fags” in front of me in the old days is different from now; now I need to pause, discuss it and talk. I also started writing on Facebook using a more appropriate language from the perspective of my friends… Not only this, I produce researches and studies that tackle violations generally and I present content about local and international laws, and in all of this I try to use language that is friendly to the Queer community.

I have built my knowledge about the pluralities causes via reading through the recommendations of my friends from the Queer community, and via the Arabic resources that have started to be available, like Transat blog and AFE MENA. I remember that when I started using Facebook, 13 or 14 years ago, there wasn’t any presence of the Queer community on it; now there is. Now I am interested in following these pages, seeing their work and interacting with them, and I share my opinion on the positions that are being taken from the Egyptian organizations, and I follow their pages like Mesahat and Bedayaa.

I don’t have any challenges with myself for being an advocate for the cause at this stage, but these challenges were present before in the form of the traditional ideas rooted in me, especially the religious; even if I am not a religious person, but religion is an authentic part of my culture like anyone who lives in Egypt, even if he’s an atheist. But I have faced challenges on the society level because of the culture of violence, not accepting others, and the unjustified fear of difference coming from people who believe expressing your support is preaching for homosexuality and transexuality, and that it would get to their children. The power mechanism itself inside the society portrays that there are specific features for the category in control in the society, Sunni white males, which makes people unable to accept any image different from that.

Also the idea of priorities, which I consider a huge delusion when it comes to the rights movement, relating to that part of the rights movement, sees that there is a missions’ list that we have to work on in order, and the important elements are the political disputes like elections and similar matters… What about women’s rights? No no, it’s not their time… Minorities? No, it’s not their time… although they might not have any issues with the cause, but they think that it’s not the time and it would be a dispersion of efforts, but I consider this a compass that shows if this person belongs to the human rights mindset, or is here for another purpose.

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