Egyptian trans woman fearlessly speaks about her transformation
"I left Egypt as a boy, but I had a dress in my luggage."
She fled Egypt as a male assigned at birth, to become a confident woman in Germany married to a man she loves ... Carla Massoud does not shy away from talking about her past.
The Egyptian woman has taken the internet by storm ever since she began sharing her transformation story from male to female on social media.
She was recently featured in a video with BBC Arabic, in which she speaks about her journey from Egypt - where her father and schoolmates physically abused her for identifying as female - to Germany, where she now resides with her husband.
"Since I was a child, I never felt like the other boys," she says in the video, explaining that she never felt comfortable playing with her male classmates. "I felt like I was different."
When she confessed to her parents about her true identity, her father did not take it well, as he attacked and aggressively assaulted her. "It was the worst day in my life," she says. "His reaction was very violent."
Her father subsequently sent her to several doctors, and tests revealed that female hormones dominated her body.
Her mother, however, was the only who supported her. "Whether you are a he or a she, you're still my son or daughter and I will never give up on you," Massoud quotes her mother as saying.
With her father refusing to accept her female identity, Massoud underwent hormone replacement therapy and was administered with the male hormone, testosterone, at nine years old.
Still, by the time she became a teenager, she developed breasts and hips, making her a target for bullies at school, she says.
She encountered her first harassment incident in seventh grade when students attacked her and tore her clothes off to check her private parts.
"The students wanted to know if I was a girl or a boy," she explains.
In 2013, with the help of her mother, Massoud traveled to Germany and applied for a protection program for transsexual individuals.
"I left Egypt as a boy, but I had a dress in my luggage," she says, adding that the first thing she did when she arrived in Berlin was take off her masculine clothes and put on the dress.
There, she transformed to female and filed a lawsuit to have her gender and name changed from Curlis to Kirillos.
She has since gotten married to a German man called Robert Zimmermann, whom she often shares pictures with and expresses love for on social media.
For the past two years, Massoud has been active on social media, fearlessly speaking about being a transsexual and calling out people who do not respect the LGBTQ+ community.
"Our Arab communities, or those governed by traditions, consider [LGBTQ+ people] one of two things: either deviations or kofr (infidels). But in reality, it's neither," she says on her Youtube channel.
"Under all the labels, there's a human [...] who has the right to live in a safe community."
StepFeed has reached out to Massoud for comment.
Not the first inspirational Egyptian woman to refuse to let society stand in the way
Several transsexual women have made waves in Egypt.
Renowned Egyptian transsexual actress Hanan Al-Tawil, who died in 2004 under mysterious circumstances, is credited with being the first openly transsexual Arab.
In 1988, Sally Mursi (née Sayyed) caused a stir in Egypt and the Muslim world after she went under the knife to become Sally, even leading the Grand Mufti at the time to intervene.
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy released a fatwa at the time making it spiritually legal for a transgendered individual to change to his or her appropriate gender.
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