Karima Tieleman's first 'conversion' was from male to female; six years later she converted to Islam. However, the acceptance she hoped to find has also proved to be sadly absent among her fellow believers. She believes it is her fate to be misunderstood and rejected for the rest of her life. Although she says she's happy with her life, she also admits that she sometimes tires of having to fight all the time.
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Psychiatric clinic
Now aged 31, Karima realised she was a female in a male body when she was around eight years old, but waited until puberty to tell her parents. They were extremely shocked and took her to a doctor. In the 1980s, transsexuality was still a taboo in some circles. She was admitted to a psychiatric clinic at a hospital in Utrecht.
She then fell into the depths of misery. She failed at senior school - she wasn't accepted by her fellow students - and attempted suicide twice. The only person that understood her was her younger sister.
As a man
When she was 17, she decided not to fight the world any more and to go through life as a man. She went to work in the horticultural sector, going to discos in the evening where she'd gaze at girls who she didn't find at all attractive.
She managed to maintain this charade for three years before realising it wasn't going to work. Finally, she chose for her own truth. She went to the gender clinic at the Free University Hospital in Amsterdam and found the expertise and support she needed. It was here, that for the first time in her life, she heard that it was okay and that she could prepare to live her life as a girl. A couple of years later, now aged 24, she underwent the final operation to become a woman. She started working in a shoe shop in Rotterdam. "After that last operation, I really started living".
Always rejected
However, it wasn't an easy life. New friends disappeared as soon as they heard her story and she didn't have much luck with relationships either. Her greatest love betrayed her, and later turned out to have been married all along. Since then she's come to the conclusion that she will always be rejected and no longer wants to have a relationship.
Her second 'conversion' took place last year. Many of the customers in the shoe shop were Moroccan women and she got on well with them. Young headscarf-wearing women told her about Islam. She felt accepted by those women in a way that was totally new to her. That is exactly what makes Islam so attractive to her: "In Islam you are accepted just as you are". She eventually decided to convert. She went to a local mosque and said the Shahadah, or profession of faith.
Hijab
She now has an Arabic name, Karima and lives as a Muslim. In fact, she's become a woman who makes her choice of religion very clear indeed in her choice of dress. Her body - which, after so much anguish, she had altered to reflect the way she truly felt inside - is now fully covered by a black hijab, with only her face left exposed. Even her hands are covered with black gloves.
Rejection continues to follow Karima, only now she is regularly the target of verbal abuse because of her strict Islamic style of dress: "You wouldn't believe all the kinds of insults that get hurled at you", she comments.
However, she also faced resistance from her fellow believers. At the mosque where she first converted to Islam, neither the women nor the men wanted to pray together with her. The imam, who she had won over to a certain extent with her story, came up with a solution: he reserved a special place for her separate from both the women and the men. I kind gesture on his part, yet one that made Karima sad because the place he chose for her was only accessible through the male entrance to the mosque.
100 percent
She then decided to go to a different mosque and to keep her story to herself, but rumours about her were already flying after she had been going there for just a week. Then she was summoned by the imam who came straight out and asked her whether she still had male genitalia. "No", she exclaimed, "I'm 100 percent a woman, it even says so in my passport!."
The imam's response was to say that she was welcome in the mosque and to allow her to pray with the women. They, too, welcomed her in their midst. "You are a woman, because you are not a man," was their reasoning, and that was an end to the matter, or so it seemed. After a while, Karima noticed a growing absence of other women around her when she attended the mosque. It turned out that the women were staying away because their men folk had forbidden them to go to the mosque… because of her. Once again, she decided to stop going to the mosque.
Accepted
Karima embraced Islam because she felt that it was a faith that accepted her, but now she finds herself rejected and even hounded by her fellow believers. How is that possible? Karima has thought about it a lot and has come to the conclusion that there is a difference between Islam as a religion and Islamic culture. The Islamic faith forgives and accepts her, but when it comes to Islamic culture there's a great deal that's wrong.
When non-Muslim Dutch people speak to her about Islam and she's asked to explain terrorism carried out in the name of Islam, she follows the same line of reasoning: "You'll find rotten apples everywhere. But that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Islam in fact says that we are not allowed to do such things."Happy but tired
Karima now prays in a number of mosques in The Hague and Amsterdam, which means she can stay one step ahead of any opposition to her presence. Despite her problems with the faithful, her relationship with Allah continues to be a good one. Sometimes she spends hours in the mosque talking to Allah. She can understand that people may have a problem with her, but that doesn't make things any easier for her.
"I am - praise be to God - happy with my life. But sometimes it makes you tired; it's a daily battle."
Tags: acceptance, change, conversion, faith, imams, islam, man, mosque, muslim, psychiatric, sex, taboo, transsexual, woman