A text by Yumn Ammar
It always depends on your luck; from the moment you’re born. It’s up to your family and the community you were born in to decide how you will be going to be living for what might as well be your whole childhood and Youth. After that It’s up to you to decide… unless you were born female in the MENA region, then it’s the law roulette.
Either you’re in a country where the law is on your side, where the law supports your entity as an independent human being and gives you the right of choice. Or in the most cases you’re in a country that considers every woman a minor that needs a male guardian making decisions and choices for her, where the law is literally against you in every aspect, a law that allows your murder in the name of honor and a law that paints you as guilty no matter what you do…
Let’s say you won the law roulette, congratulations! well there is way more roulettes to win: outdated traditions, norms, customs, religious concepts… here and maybe for the first in your life you will have the choice.
The choice to battle the existence of these roulettes and start fighting for your right to choose, for the right to not be discriminated against and for the basic right to be treated equally to men, to be treated as a human being. Maybe you will start identifying as a feminist and learn about the long history of women fighting for their rights even in the “progressed west”. People will call you crazy and delusional, you might get tired of fighting and your life might be threatened every minute but that doesn’t matter because you want the change you want a life for yourself and for other non-cis males, a life in which you’re free… Because you know even if you don’t choose to fight you won’t live in peace in a society that sees your existence as a non-male as a mistake and sees you as an easy inevitable target for every violation that could be done to a human being… because after all you don’t have a choice…