In Egypt men occupy the top of the social privilege ladder, and a considerable body of laws fortifies this position in terms of polygamy, inheritance, domestic violence, rape within marriage, and adultery.
Sociocultural norms entitle men to even more privileges, including freer mobility and more autonomy in their premarital sexual lives, provided these sexual encounters are defined as masculine and heteronormative. However, men with nonnormative sexual orientations or practices, such as gays and men who have sex with men, especially if they are penetrated, or those who express feminine embodiments, do not have such privileges. Instead, the society debases, criminalizes, and punishes them in contemporary Egypt. The police in the General Directorate for Protecting Public Morality, prosecutors, and the courts, mainly in Greater Cairo, capitalize on this wider social rejection by targeting gender and sexually nonconforming people using sophisticated online monitoring techniques and pseudoscientific medical tests.
Especially after the Egyptian...
