Transgender Legal Recognition in North Africa: Between the Hammer of Sharia and the Anvil of the Judiciary

What is it about?

The paper investigates the development of the Sunni Fiqh on transgender identities and its impact on judicial opinions on legal gender recognition in North Africa to theorise the prominent legal and religious discourse on the matter in North Africa. The paper analyses two prominent Sunni Fatwas from Egypt's Al-Azhar and Saudi Arabia's Islamic Fiqh Council. Those two Fatwas form the basis on which the modern Sunni Fiqh on transgender identities is built. The Fatwas transgender people are mentally ill individuals who should be denied gender-affirming healthcare and provided with mental therapy to return to their "true sex" within the binary. North African courts adopted this ban also to mean a ban on legal gender recognition for transgender people. The paper also analyses five case laws from Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt to outline how Fiqh is used in these cases.

Featured Image