A few years ago a roommate abruptly decided to move out to live with her boyfriend, and I ended up spending half a year sharing an apartment with someone I had never met before: an Egyptian girl with very limited English.
She was confused by my appearance and asked me “boy or girl?” It took me a while to understand what she was saying, but eventually she got the point across, and I told her that I was a girl. She seemed unsatisfied, and I explained that I was transgender. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t know the word.
We ended communicating by typing our respective sentences into Google Translate. Unfortunately, whatever the Arabic word for “transgender” is, it wasn’t a word she knew either. Eventually I ended up typing in “I used to be a boy but it made me unhappy so I decided to be a girl.” She stared at it for a moment then asked “You are happy now?” I said yes, and she smiled and looked thoughtful.
A couple hours later she came up to me and said “You and me, we are sisters,” and gave me a hug. “You say you are girl, you are girl.”
