Dateline: Sept 6
Dateline joins Malaysia's religious police as they arrest transgender Muslims under Sharia Law.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under Programming
As Malaysia cracks down on transgender Muslims, Dateline joins the country’s religious police as they carry out night-time raids and arrest people in the streets, finding a community living in fear.
Malaysian woman Serafina is transgender and has identified as female her whole life. But she is forced by her government to carry an ID card saying she is a man.
She is from Negeri Sembilan – a state where it is a crime for a trans woman to even leave her house in women’s clothes.
Part of Malaysia’s Muslim trans community, she faces constant persecution from its religious police.
“The police don’t really care about trans women,” she tells reporter Marcel Theroux. “They just shrug and say ‘she-males’.”
Malaysia has a dual justice system, with two sets of law; basic civil law, which applies to everyone in the country, and Islamic law, which applies to the country’s Muslim population and covers some of the most intimate aspects of their lives.
Under Islamic law in Malaysia, Muslims can be prosecuted for “close proximity” offenses. Even simply being alone with someone you’re not married to can mean up to 2 years in prison.
Dateline joins a religious police squad in the capital Kuala Lumpur, whose job is to arrest people for transgressing the country’s Islamic laws. They go to hotels in the city and look through booking registers, scanning for Islamic names and checking if couples who book rooms together have marriage certificates.
“We suspect that they are going to do something immoral between them,” a police officer called Akmal says.
“Obviously if they are not married we’ll arrest them and bring them to our office for further investigation.”
“A man obviously must be man. A woman must behave like a woman. We have to follow the divine laws and Sharia law.”
Despite Malaysia’s place as a modern economy, the country is becoming increasingly socially conservative. Several trans women tell Dateline that raids have become more frequent and that police are using cunning methods to ‘catch’ people.
9:30pm Tuesday on SBS.