I was confused for a man in Morocco…

I’d just arrived in Marrakesh from Porto, and like most of the early flights I’ve had in my lifetime, I hadn’t managed to get much sleep the night before. I felt even more anxious than usual, probably because I’d spent much money on baggage. I wasn’t just going on a weekend excursion; I was leaving Europe for good this time. 

I couldn’t miss that flight.

Aside from my luggage cart getting stuck in the automatic revolving door at five in the morning, the check-in and flight went relatively smoothly, probably because I’d spent the past few weeks mulling over all the possible things that could go wrong—a missed flight, overweight baggage, oversleeping—and enacting measures that would counteract those possibilities. 

While waiting in line at the Marrakesh customs - I thought I would pass out.  I’d contemplated jumping in the scant line for pregnant women- but I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast and thus lacked a proper bloat. To top it off, the airport internet wasn’t working, and the veiled woman and her son behind me had no concept of personal space.

I made it through customs unscathed despite hastily switching lanes at the last minute and tacking on an extra five minutes to my wait time. I found my bags and loaded them on an empty luggage cart, and then found my boyfriend amongst the sea of taxi cab drivers holding pickup signs even though he had a rather dumb phone, and I was still unable to utilize the smartness of mine. We picked up the rental car, and my spirits started to lift. I was hungry for besara, a creamy pea-like soup drenched in olive oil that Moroccans favor for breakfast, but it was already lunchtime. Not to mention, I wanted to put as much distance between me and dirty, smelly Marrakesh as possible. The last time I’d been there was a few months prior while passing through on a road trip with my boyfriend. It had taken us two hours to make it through because of the detours caused by the earthquake-induced road closures. I’d cried twice. 

“Never again,” I declared, wiping my tear-stained cheeks as the memory of Marrakesh faded in my rearview mirror.

And yet, here I was again. This time, though, I’d added my Moroccan boyfriend to the list of drivers so he could safely navigate us to a windy village outside Essaouira, where he’d recently moved. 

Along the way, he’d pulled off to a roadside cafe. While waiting for our steamy tagine to arrive, I noticed a young man staring in my direction. I was used to being stared at in a country where a woman’s place was typically in the home. When Moroccan women leave their abodes, they are usually covered head to toe with draping cloth. I was too tired to care and too hungry to focus on anything other than my rumbling stomach. A sheepish man draped in carpets slowly passed our table and quietly asked if we wanted to buy some of his wares. At least that’s what I gathered, he said. 

“Naw, I’m good,” I murmured, flashing a quick smile to let him know I wasn’t bothered by the ask. 

A few moments later, the young man staring hard marched up to our table and began chatting with my boyfriend in a language I couldn’t have followed even if I had slept properly. I knew quite a bit of German, could follow along and sometimes engage if  Spanish was spoken, and, well, I was pretty good at English, too. Still, as for Arabic, Berber, or Dirja (the unique Moroccan dialect) -  I could only speak a handful of words. 

When the young man left the table, my boyfriend had a smirk on his face.

“What did he want?” I asked curiously.

“He wanted to know if you were a man or a woman. He and his friend were debating.” 

“What?” I choked out in disbelief. 

I was tall and lean, dressed in a stylish yet low-maintenance airplane outfit - baggy jeans, an oversized tie-dyed shirt, and a black ball cap on my long blond hair. Homeless, maybe. Hippie, definitely. But a man? I didn’t think I looked like a man. I laughed at the absurdity of the situation, but then our food arrived at the table, and my grumbling stomach couldn’t be bothered with dissecting this young man’s misguided assumptions any longer.

I dismissed the absurdity as a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” and began to stuff my face. 

A Few Weeks Later

While meandering through the dirt roads of the quant village where my boyfriend lives, we passed a group of adolescent boys staring. I smiled at them, knowing I was a fish out of water. Unlike the major cities in Morocco or the popular tourist destinations, this village wasn’t used to seeing foreigners. This was the real Morocco. That meant I was often the only woman and the only unveiled woman anywhere - in the market, on walks, at the shops, in shared taxis, and on local buses. 

“They were debating if you were a woman or a man.”

“What?” I said, confused, “Again?” 

I looked down and saw that I wore a similar outfit: baggy jeans, an oversized shirt, and a ball cap. I pulled out my phone and examined my face in the camera. Much to my relief, the person staring back at me looked like a beautiful damn woman. 

“I don’t look like a man!!” I yelled emphatically.

My boyfriend laughed, “You don’t. Maybe I look like a woman, and they are confused.” 

A few days later, I attempted to piece together what happened.

Women in rural Morocco are tucked away, and many never leave their family compound. They spend their days doing the family’s wash, crushing argan with stones in sheds made of cement blocks, baking flat bread pounded in between the palms of their hands on an open fire, and rearing children. It’s the men who do everything else: sit in loud cafes watching football and sipping tea with their male friends, go to the mosques, buy and sell goods at the noisy markets, drive taxis, buses, donkeys, and camels, shepherd their flock back home at dusk and play cards in dingy roadside “bars.” 

Despite the traditions my boyfriend’s family follows, I prefer not to be contained to the confines of the family compound, a land shared by his two uncles and their families. 

“I need to be able to walk on my own. If I can’t take walks alone, I don’t want to be here,” I told my boyfriend one afternoon after he tried to convince me to wait for him to take a walk.

“Is it unsafe for me to walk alone, or is it just not common?” I asked curiously. 

His uncle - whose veiled wife rarely left the compound- had seen me walking alone the day prior and whispered some words of influence into my boyfriend’s ear. I would read later that in some Islamic beliefs, it wasn’t acceptable for a woman to leave home without her husband or familial guardian except for rare occasions.

Despite my own engrained fear of navigating the world in a female body, a fear from which I had been working so very hard to distance myself over the years, my determination prevailed, and I set off on a defiant walk alone—although I admittedly stayed close to the house.

First, I glanced down at my outfit and ensured it was not too revealing. Then, I realized why I had felt so comfortable in my oversized uniform the past weeks: It prevented setting off any male gaze alarm bells, thus targeting me as a haram-seeking harlot. The unintended result? Being mistaken for a man. 

When returning the rental car to Marrakech, my boyfriend had to catch a taxi to the bus station. Despite no shoulder, a taxi cab pulled over to the side of the bustling road and rolled down his window. My boyfriend asked him in Arabic how much the five-minute ride would cost. He looked at me and then spouted “140 Dirham” (about $14).  I’d been in Morocco enough times in the past year to know this was an absolute rip-off. I had also learned the art of haggling. 

I refused the offer and told him I would prefer to walk; it was true. My tired boyfriend felt differently and began to haggle. After a moment, he turned to me and said, “50 Dirham, OK?” 

“No!” I said absolutely. 

That’s when the driver intervened: " OK, 40, is 40 OK?” I begrudgingly accepted the offer and hopped in the back—except the driver wouldn’t let the topic go. 

“Are you happy now?” he teased me through the rearview mirror. 

“No, I’m not,” I replied honestly. You saw that I was a tourist and tried to rip me off.” 

He averted his attention to my boyfriend, “She’s the man, huh?”

It stung. Yet again, I was confused for a man. Except this time, it wasn’t my presence in the outside world but my defiant attitude. In a land where women are second-class citizens, where daughters only inherit half of what their male relatives receive, perhaps being confused for a man was a compliment?

Many things about spending time in rural Morocco are easy to accept and embrace—the slower pace of life, the delicious cuisine, the kindness of the people, and the disconnect from hustle-and-grind culture. Some things that have been reasonably harder to take are the blatant gender inequality. 

+ I respect anyone’s choice to worship what or who they want. 
+ I will continue to turn my music down during the call to prayer that plays out on the loudspeaker from the village mosque five times a day out of respect.
+ I will even refrain from wearing t-shirts that accentuate side boob or shorts that hug my long legs. 

But I will not hide myself away simply because I am a woman. 

Maybe it’s because I lived the past nine years in Berlin, the city where everyone is a little bit gay, where gender is as fluid as the 62 lakes and 127 canals that are scattered throughout, and the morning-after pill is as easy to obtain as a kebab - or maybe it’s because I was raised by a single mom who subtly and not so subtly engrained in me that “women can do anything men can do.”  Either way, I did not come this far to pretend that scrubbing sheep shit out of dungarees and pounding wet dough into flat discs would be enough to fulfill this wanderlust feminist.

I like to imagine that the brave and resilient women who came before me are cheering me on from above, for I am one of the first women in my ancestral line to have the choice to create a life she wants, not passively accept the one her husband, religion, or government thinks is best, a privilege I do not take lightly.

While walking through Essaouira a few days ago, the wind was whipping around furiously, and sand was brutally smacking my face, neck, and hands.

Amidst the chaos, I yelled to my boyfriend, “It’d be a great day to wear a burqa.” He didn’t hear me because the wind was so loud, but I smiled while trying to remove the tiny sand particles that had blown violently into my eye.

I meant it.