We cannot find employment, we do not have homes, we cannot get an education, we are marginalized, we are shunned from society, we have no life, no connections, no families. We are rejected from family, from institutions, from friends, from our homes. We go to look for jobs and the first thing they ask for is ID, and when they see I present as a woman, but my ID says male, they won’t hire me. If the government helps us correct our official records, we can go find jobs like any other person and do just fine. Instead, they convict us of crimes and impose laws on our identities. —Carmen, 21-year-old Syrian trans woman, October 21, 2018
We need to be incorporated into society, instead of living in this isolation that they have manufactured for us. —Jumana, 52-year-old Lebanese trans woman, November 15, 2018
Transgender women—people designated male at birth but who identify and may present themselves as women—face systemic discrimination in education, employment, housing, and the provision of health care in Lebanon. They are also at greater risk of arbitrary arrest. Arrests and questioning at checkpoints are often accompanied by physical violence by law enforcement officials. Trans women also face routine violence and the threat of violence by members of the public and are denied police protection, compromising their ability to live in safety and positioning them in a perpetual state of precarity. This discrimination, which emanates from severe social stigma and isolation, is exacerbated by a lack of resources tailored for trans people’s needs and by their difficulty in obtaining identification documents that reflect their gender identity and expression.
While discrimination impacts virtually all trans women in Lebanon, it is often intensified in the case of trans refugees, who are marginalized on the grounds of both refugee status and gender identity.
While Lebanese law does not explicitly criminalize being trans, article 534[1] of the penal code punishes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to one year in prison. This law has been regularly enforced to arrest transgender women who are misidentified as “gay men.” Trans people are also targeted under laws of “violating public morality,” “incitement to debauchery,” and “secret prostitution.”
Most transgender women told Human Rights Watch that social stigma and the combination of vague laws that police morality, regulate sex work, and are interpreted to criminalize adult consensual same-sex conduct, has had an insidious effect on their individual self-expression, forcing them to adopt self-censoring behavior because any suspicion of non-conformity may lead to violence or arrest. The combination of marginalization, laws that criminalize homosexuality and sex work, loosely defined “morality laws,” and the absence of legislation protecting against discrimination and reliable complaint systems severely limits trans women’s mobility.
This report focuses on the systemic discrimination that transgender women experience in Lebanon. It is based on 50 interviews with Lebanese trans women as well as trans refugees and asylum seekers from other Arab countries, all of whom reside in Lebanon.
The cycle of oppression spun for transgender women in Lebanon often begins with domestic violence at home. This violence, in many cases perpetrated by a dominant male figure in the family, goes unpunished, pushing transgender women out of their homes, and in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, their countries.
For Lebanese trans people, living within a geographically small and close-knit society means that family rejection can spiral outward to a sense of rejection by extended families, an entire neighborhood, or even an entire town. Anonymity is rarely an option, limiting the scope of mobility in familiar spaces. For refugees and asylum seekers, not having the family safety net or social networks in a foreign country already marginalizes them, and their transgender identity further exacerbates their plight, especially given the absence of state services or shelters available to them.
When trans women attempt to access medical and mental health resources, they confront ignorance and bias, and a debilitatingly expensive healthcare system. Legally, physicians in Lebanon can prescribe hormone treatment and surgical interventions for trans people. However, these services are expensive and, in most cases, not covered by any public or private insurance scheme, which limits trans people’s access to them. This reality, coupled with the stigma that transgender women face in the public and private health sectors due to their gender expression, impede trans women’s right to a safe, affordable, and inclusive system of health protection.
