Diana’s Little Corner in the Nutmeg State: A New Sport In Kuwait

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

A New Sport In Kuwait

On my morning search for news I came across this article…

Kuwait Mass Arrests For ‘Vice,’ ‘Immorality’
Care2
By Paul Canning
May 29, 2012

149 people, including at least four gay men and two transgender women, have been arrested in the latest raids on parties in Kuwait.
[…]
She said that since Islamists won a majority in Kuwait’s parliament, there had been a crackdown on a wide range of behavior and people, but that this has disproportionately affected LGBT people.

And what caught my attention was…

In January Human Rights Watch published “They Hunt Us Down for Fun,” an examination of discrimination and police violence against transgender women in Kuwait.

So I looked up the report and found the press release…

Kuwait: End Police Abuses Against Transgender Women
Law Against ‘Imitating the Opposite Sex’ Leads to Torture, Arbitrary Arrests
Human Rights Watch
January 15, 2012

(Kuwait City) – Kuwaiti police have tortured and sexually abused transgender women using a discriminatory law, passed in 2007, which arbitrarily criminalizes “imitating the opposite sex,” Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The government of Kuwait should repeal the law, article 198 as amended in 2007, and hold police officers accountable for misconduct.
[…]
Police have free rein to determine whether a person’s appearance constitutes “imitating the opposite sex” without any specific criteria being laid down for the offense. Transgender women reported being arrested even when they were wearing male clothes and then later being forced by police to dress in women’s clothing, and the claim made that they arrested them in that attire. In some cases documented by Human Rights Watch, transgender women said police arrested them because they had a “soft voice” or “smooth skin.”
[…]
Despite an official recognition of gender identity disorder (GID) by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Health as a legitimate medical condition, the law criminalizing “imitating the opposite sex” makes no exception for people who have been diagnosed with GID. The law leaves them at the mercy of officers in an unmonitored police force who transgender women said have refused to recognize, and sometimes have even torn up, medical reports and GID diagnoses that transgender women present to them upon arrest.

Sometimes we don't know how good we have it here in the U.S.

1 comment:

Kwizgiver5/30/12, 4:42 PM
Oh, that's horrifying!
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Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

A right delayed is a right denied.Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

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Martin Luther King Jr.

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You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
You've got to be taught
To hate
And fear
You've got to be taught
From year
To year
Its got to
Be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to
Be carefully
Taught
You've got to be taught
To be
Afraid
Of people
Who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade

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Songwriters: Oscar Hammerstein II / Richard Rogers