We Are Here: A Call for Legal Recognition

We live among official documents that don’t reflect us, and in public spaces that deny our existence. But our presence cannot be hidden, nor erased.

In Tunisia, queer people and trans folks+ don’t live their identities behind curtains or within narrow Molds. We embody them boldly, with colour, with defiant tenderness, with loving rage. We live them openly, in full view of a system that tries to tame us or wipe us from its records. But the truth is clear: the law cannot silence existence, and existence can push the law to evolve.

Changing or enacting laws is not just an administrative procedure. It is a reimagining of how lives are allowed to unfold, so we may move through our country with less fear, without the need to justify ourselves, and without having to fight for every single step.

When our IDs refuse to speak our names, when doctors treat us through narrow lenses, When the job market slams its doors because we dare to live as ourselves, the system is silently criminalizing our existence.

Our demand is clear: Legal recognition of diverse gender identities, based on self-determination, with no complications, no guardianship, and no absurd conditions.

Because this recognition is a gateway:

• To healthcare without humiliation

• To education without bureaucratic violence

• To employment without suspicion or abuse

• To a life where rights aren’t fragile wishes, but guarantees

We’re not waiting for permission.We declare our demands, loud and clear, and present our existence as a living document.We are the truth that unsettles them, because we refuse to be simplified, erased, or tamed.

This is not a symbolic request.It is an urgent call for Tunisia to revise its laws and end our legal and social exclusion.

Between streets that don’t carry our flags and institutions that refuse to acknowledge us, we write our existence in the language of resistance. We speak it together. We stitch it into our bodies, bodies that have endured even when the world tried to smother them.

We are here. And we will keep showing up. We will press, write, organize, and resist.

Legal recognition is not a technicality. It is a restoration of dignity, a key to our futures, and the beginning of a path worthy of our lives and our right to the simplest things.

Author:

Maram Ben Dhafer

Feminist, queer activist, and founding member of Trans Unity Coalition Tunisia