A Blind Justice? Investigating Judicial Discourses on Legal Gender Recognition in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract Academic legal scholarship regarding legal gender recognition for transgender individuals in Arabic-speaking Middle East and North African (MENA) countries is scarce. This lack of scholarship has created a scholarly gap that this article seeks to address. Within the MENA region exists a legislative and policy vacuum concerning legal gender recognition, which grants the judiciary the authority to issue judgments based on Islamic Sharia and societal norms. Sunni Jurisprudence (Fiqh) pathologies transgender individuals as mentally ill and recommends that they should only receive therapy rather than surgery, as they are already biologically within the binary. Consequently, numerous Courts have adhered to this Fiqh and denied legal gender recognition. However, other Courts in the region have deviated from this Fiqh and allowed it. This article explores these judicial discourses surrounding legal gender recognition in MENA countries in order to establish a legal theory based on practice that can fill this scholarly gap. To accomplish this, this article identifies and analyses six Court cases: three cases with positive outcomes from Iraq, Lebanon, and Tunisia and three cases with adverse outcomes from Egypt, Algeria, and Qatar. This article outlines the methods and rationales employed by the Courts to either grant or deny legal gender recognition applications. Furthermore, it compares the similarities and differences between cases that resulted in favourable judgments and those that did not.