Kuwhat?!

Transgender Hunting In Kuwait

LGBT – Kuwait City – Kuwait is a dangerous place in general, but it’s a totally different story when it comes to the country’s transgender population. Under a 2007 discriminatory law, Kuwait police have justified their acts of torture and sexual abuse on transgender women. The law literally criminalizes “imitating the opposite sex.”

A 63-page document detailing the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of transgender women is painfully titled “They Hunt us Down for Fun: Discrimination and Police Violence Against Transgender Women in Kuwait,” a name that, unfortunately, barely breaches the surface of the country’s LGBT issues.

Because of the law’s purposeful ambiguity, Police can determine whether a person’s appearance is “imitating the opposite sex” without any criteria from which to compare. As a result, transgender women are being taken into custody even when they’re wearing male clothing, and are often forced by police to dress as women upon arrest in order to solidify their prosecution. Human Rights Watch reported some arrests that were made upon the suggestion that the violator had “smooth skin” or a “soft voice.”

Sarah Leah Whiston, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch commented, “No one, regardless of his or her gender identity, deserves to be arrested on the basis of a vague, arbitrary law and then abused and tortured by police [...] The Kuwaiti government has a duty to protect all of its residents, including groups who face popular disapproval, from brutal police behavior and the application of an unfair law.”

Human Rights Watch is currently battling for the fair treatment of transgender women as they have called upon the Kuwaiti government to repeal the amendment of article 198—the one that specifically criminalizes “imitating the opposite sex,” because there is NO excuse for such a stipulation.

Read More at HRW.