I'm not sure this anon will be comprehensible but here goes. I guess I just wanna get this off my chest. Good thing you have big chests to carry it, heh.
I'm a trans woman from and who resides in the middle east. And it is really hard to believe that I will survive.
Besides the obvious dangers, being in a desert of any queer people at all really makes you feel as though you don't exist. You can't exist. You are reduced to an object. If you express any little bit of yourself, you are immediately hated and considered disgusting, or victimized. And when you don't, you become genuinely mentally disabled because of how strong the depression is that comes with being not you. To the point you're reduced to a poor soul that is so useless and lazy but also should be prayed for because clearly "he" is sick and twisted by the devil.
Having to migrate not only through countries but entire continents also fucks you up. There's no blue state or accepting province. There's no country in this region I could feel okay in. You have to get far away from home/not home. You have to swallow those visa requirements and the racist beaurocracy. You have to make escape plans from the age of 13. Well, at least they call me mature for my age now.
I'm left out. I have no company. No one to eat or study with. There is exactly one person who I trust with my identity, a cis girl who constantly chooses her other friends over me and who hasn't genuinely hung out with me in over a year. I can't help but wonder if there's transmisogyny there, may be nonsensical to think about, but being trans makes you desperate for all signs of danger. Because there's no relief.
And let me remind you that that's at a place of relative privelege. I'm lucky to go to a damn private school where at least someone is educated enough to be like that. To hear my name, look at me as what I look like, and not ridicule me or call me sinful or whatever. Most trans kids in the middle east are just found as vulnerable, raped and then killed or abandoned and/or very often trafficked. Especially the case in my home country, Egypt, where I guarantee the reason some of those homeless kids that try to survive in the street were thrown out was because they just had the stench of faggotry on them. And it'll be detectable in the streets too, only ending when they end.
All of this leads to the fact that even tho I'm in my late teens, I feel old. I feel as though I've lived too many lives, but I haven't lived any at the same time. I feel like I'm coming towards the end. Like I'm even approaching the day of final crisis where I'll just, finish. Only as another body, never seen with enough grace to be a tragedy. That, or my family mourning me for the man they've lost, someone who didn't exist, and completely ignoring the girl that they HELPED to kill.
Basically, I'm not sure if I even exist. I feel more like a mannequin given life than a human. Or a ghost that possessed the body of a "poor young man who doesn't have it together."
Actually I'll tell you what it feels like.
One time my parents slaughtered a sheep in the hopes that distributing the meat would be an act of charity which they could then use to ask for something from God, to which they wanted to ask to cure me.
They made me watch the slaughter and told me this while I looked at the sheep being held down and cut by the throat on the side of the street. (Yes it was on the side of the street. It's more normal in Cairo)
And ever since then, I think I can define how I really feel.
I feel like a sheep. Just waiting to be slaughtered. My life objectified into meat. I am slaughtered to save a non existent life, they kill the real me in order to save a fake me that they never treated well anyway. My true self is only a sacrifice. And if I can't be sacrificed, they'll slaughter me anyway. I don't know what I did to make them. God knows they would find my meat repulsive anyway and burn it. But they will.
I think that's all. I don't know what you should take from this. Just. Please. Don't forget about queer lives in the middle east. Don't flanderize us as "the good ones who are being victimized by their savage society and place of origin!" Please don't let that happen to this ask. But also, don't forget how much we're killed. And how to us, the idea of experiencing queer life is a dream. And for us, an early trip to hell isnt a nightmare, it's just the most realistic outcome. And please, as I imagine most of you are westerners, make sure your spaces are welcome to queer POC immigrants.
Also, free Palestine and free Sudan.
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