Anal exams: is homosexuality imprinted in the arsehole?

It may happen in Cameroon, in Egypt, in Kenya, in Lebanon, in Turkmenistan, in Uganda and in Zambia. And, also, in Tunisia. The police will take you to a doctor, who will let you in in their office, make you strip down, and lastly tell you to place yourself on the stretcher. You will have to bend at 90 degrees, on your stomach or on all fours, depending on who you happen to meet. Then the doctor will start sticking a finger, several fingers, strange metal objects into your anus. With a speculum he will open up your hole. He will observe, he will palpate, he will touch. You won’t know what signs he’s looking for, because every doctor looks for different ones. You will feel pain, because he will have no consideration. You will feel humiliated, because it will all happen against your will. You will be frightened, because your future depends on this absurd test: if, according to the doctor, a penis entered your anus, you will end up in jail, among the brutality of prison guards and inmates.

A TEST WITH NO SCIENTIFIC VALUE

The madness of clinical examinations aimed at determining whether a person received anal penetration began in the 19th century, when a French physician, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, declared that the mere observation of the anus was enough to identify “pederasts”. According to Tardieu, homosexuals could be identified thanks to six distinctive features: excessive development of the buttocks, conical deformation of the anus, relaxation of the sphincter, reduction of the folds around the anus, extreme dilatation of the orifice, and the presence of ulcers, haemorrhoids or fistulas. Tardieu immediately made his knowledge available to the police and the courts, which, despite having no scientific basis, was immediately successful in France and the colonies.

The Independent Forensic Experts Group (IFEG) recently reminded us of what should be obvious to everyone: “This examination has no value in detecting abnormalities of anal sphincter tonicity that can be credibly attributed to consensual anal intercourse” [IRCT]. Yet Tardieu’s morbid speculations keep getting mistaken for scientific observations to this day in many African and Asian countries: in Egypt, for example, some doctors simply observe the ripples of the anus and check whether they can insert objects large enough to detect “chronic homosexuals” [BuzzFeed].

TUNISIA, A CALL AGAINST TORTURE

The debate on anal examinations is always very heated in Lebanon, while in Tunisia it sparked last September, after the arrest of a boy accused of “sodomy” who was forced to undergo this invasive and humiliating examination [Il Grande Colibrì]. Many journalists, intellectuals and common citizens expressed their outrage, but it was above all the National Council of the Tunisian Medical Association that used harsh words of condemnation: the anal test “is a clear attack to the person’s physical integrity that falls into the framework of physical torture”, it’s “a medico-legal examination that is not permitted and not justified, that affects the dignity and the physical and mental integrity of the person examined”.

Now heavy accusations are also coming from the United Nations Committee against Torture, which has called on Tunisia to completely ban these examinations “which have no medical justification” and which are carried out in theory with the consent of the accused person, who in reality often does not know that he or she can legally oppose them, or agrees because he or she is threatened by the police or for fear that refusal could be interpreted as an admission of ‘guilt’ [Human Rights Watch]. Abandoning this practice would be very important not only for the psycho-physical well-being of those subjected to these tests, but also because Article 230 of the penal code, which criminalises homosexual intercourse, would be much less enforceable without this tool that pretends to provide evidence of penetration.