June 13th, 1999

Princess who wants to live happily ever after as a boy

FOCUS 2 A royal runaway hoping for a sex change cannot return to the Gulf for fear of death by stoning
By Ros Wynne Jones

Anyone who met Taff al-Khalifa, in casual clothes and crew-cut, would see a polite young man, small for his age.  He calls himself Taff now and dresses in the men’s clothes he has felt drawn to since he was a small child.

But three weeks ago things were very different.  Then Taff was Princess Latifa of Bahrain the niece of one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

Brought up to follow royal protocol and Islamic law in the oil-rich kingdom, Latifa, 21, tried everything to reconcile what she knew was expected of her and the inner voice that told her she was transsexual, a boy born into a girl’s body.  Three weeks ago, as the pressure for her to marry became unbearable, Latifa ran away from her family while on a visit to London and created herself a new identity - Taff.

Accustomed to luxury, Taff has nothing now, except his friends.  He has no papers or passport and no means to sustain himself.  He is trying to regularise his status as an asylum seeker with British immigration but it will be a long, slow process.  His family who consider him mentally unstable, have had him tailed by a private detective and he has fought off an abduction attempt.

If Taff is returned to Bahrain he faces the death penalty.  Islamic law would consider him gay, a crime punishable by stoning.  Tampering with his body - as he has done through testosterone injections and as he intends to do through gender reassignment treatment in this country - is taboo.

“As a member of the royal family you are supposed to set the example for everyone else,” Taff explains.  “The way you behave can give permission to everyone else to behave that way.  That is why what I have done is so serious.” He laughs, sadly.  “The King was always my favourite uncle.  But there is no way he can tolerate this.”  He has felt for as long as he can remember that he ought to have been born a boy.  “I also knew, even as a child, that I wasn’t the only one in the world feeling like this,” says Taff.  “When we were abroad on holiday I was always looking out for people like me.”

It wasn’t till 15, when a friend told I him what a transsexual was, that Taff realised what he felt had a name.

While he always played the role of a Bahraini princess at royal functions, Taff’s upbringing was different from that of his cousins.  His mother, the King’s sister, is a divorced businesswoman who is extremely liberal by Middle Eastern standards and refused to allow her three girls to grow up like spoiled little princesses.  Taff knows she will be blamed for having brought up a transsexual for a daughter.

He grew up, as Sheika Latifa, working on his mother’s farm.  “When you are a child in Bahrain, you grow up like a male until you reach puberty,” he says, “but then, at 11 or 12, girls are suddenly separated from boys and they clamp down on you.  There’s suddenly a mould you are supposed to fit into.  I found it shocking to have to suddenly behave as a female and be separated from my male friends.  In a way I expected to grow up and become a man.  At puberty it was like my body was rebelling against me.”

At 12, Taff was sent to Weston Birt, a girls’ boarding school in Gloucestershire.  Although the family could have afforded any of Britain’s top schools, they chose a minor one to stop Latifa acquiring airs and graces.  Peer pressure made it impossible not to have a boyfriend.  “It was like an experiment.  I was trying to fit in,” he says.  At 16, on his return to Bahrain, Taff announced he intended to join the army.  This was always the next step after school for princes.  For a princess, it was unheard of.  In the end, the King agreed.

“It was the happiest time of my life,” Taff says.  “It was a great release.  Some I of the men were surprised at first but in the end they just treated me like one of the boys.”

One year on he was recommended for elite officer training at Sandhurst - one of 90 women out of 400 soldiers - where he flourished.  But at times he felt isolated.  “At Sandhurst, women are kept separate from men and I found this odd after having served alongside men,” he says.

He yearned to serve alongside men as in Bahrain and, because, it is illegal to be gay in the British army he could not tell anyone about his dilemma.  After Sandhurst, Taff was obliged to return to Bahrain and join the infantry, which involved carrying heavy weapons.

“It was impossible,” he admits.  “I wasn’t able to take the physical stress because my body wasn’t built for it.” After a hip injury, he was medically discharged last year.

Now he needed to find a way to put off his family’s increasing insistence that he find a husband.  He found himself a boyfriend who he was eventually able to tell about his fears of being the wrong gender - but all the time pressure was building to be more feminine, to settle down.  “A couple of times I was suicidal,” says Taff.

He became part of an underground gay scene in Bahrain, so it was possible for him to start having girlfriends.  Even there he had to pretend.  “I used to pass as a lesbian because I knew the gay community did not accept transsexuals,” he says.  A couple of times he was picked up by the police’s Ardab (discipline) squad but, recognising a princess from her ID card, they let Taff go.  “I knew no one would tell the King because they would be afraid to be the messenger of such news, but I was shaking in my boots every night when my mother came home in case someone told her something,” he says.

Three weeks ago, Taff came to London to visit his married sister.  “I thought I could tell her what was going on,” he says.  “She’s very open and I love her to bits.  But I didn’t get the reaction I wanted.  She is religious and there was no way she could embrace what I was telling her.  She said, ’I knew you were different, but not like that’.  She thought I was mentally unstable and called the police, saying I was on drugs.”

Taff ran away but was enticed back by the promise of a job for life in the Bahraini army, with a promotion.  His passport, money and clothes were taken and he realised that being allowed out to say goodbye to his friends for the last time was his last chance to escape.  A private investigator employed by his family tried to abduct him.  “There was a fist fight,” says Taff.  “I decided then never to go back.”

He will miss his home and his family but there is little option now for him except to seek asylum in Britain.  “I’ve gone too far now,” he says, “and if I have any form of surgery I will never be able to go back.” In the next few weeks he has to evade possible further kidnapping attempts, begin the process of seeking asylum and - having given up the fortune he was due to inherit and any hope of a royal lifestyle - find a way to support himself.

But he is looking forward to starting treatment as for most of his life he says, he has felt as if his body is a prison.  In Britain, he says, he may be poor but at least he can choose who he wants to be.