Trans woman in Morocco incites homophobia by encouraging her followers to use dating apps to hunt down and out gay men

Terror has been unleashed among gay men in Morocco after a beauty influencer instructed her very many followers to use gay dating apps to identify them, in a country where homosexuality is illegal and violent homophobia is rife.

Naofal Moussa, also known as Sofia Talouni, is a trans woman based in Turkey who – before her verified account was deleted on Friday – had more than 627,000 Instagram followers. Starting on Monday last week, she used her nightly Instagram Live series – watched by over 100,000 people – to instruct the straight women following her to download gay dating apps from the app store and use them to find gay men in their vicinity.

Any form of same-sex intimacy – including kissing – is illegal in Morocco and punishable by up to three years in prison. There is also no law against harassment or discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Multiple gay men have reportedly described how they are now living in a state of absolute terror: watching other gay men get outed on social media, beaten up by their families, kicked out of their homes, disappear and, in several, unverified, cases, die by suicide.

All while wondering if they will be outed next.

In now-deleted Instagram Live videos, Moussa – who is mainly known as a beauty influencer – says: “I feel bad for those f****ts but I don’t care. So girls, you will go on the app store. You will type in the word ‘gay’. And then a lot of gay apps will show up.”

Screenshot of the Instagram Live video in which Naofal Moussa urges her followers to find gay men on dating apps.

She continues: “These gay apps will show you all the people who are near you. But you girls should create fake profiles and choose that you’re bottoms, which means you want someone to fuck you.”

Telling her followers that the three “famous” gay dating apps are Grindr, Planet Romeo and Hornet, she added: “Listen girls and women that think they have manly gay husbands and sons…. these apps will show you the ‘gay’ people who are near you. 100 metres, 200 metres or even one metre. Just near you in the living room since everyone is home now. It could even show you your husband, your son. It could show you your neighbour from next door. It could show you your cousin, your uncle. Everyone.”

Naofal Moussa did not explicitly tell her followers to use the information she shared about gay dating apps to hunt down and out gay men. But that is exactly what happened.

Last week, pictures of gay men began circulating in closed Facebook groups, with homophobic captions.

And in a later Instagram Live, Moussa held up her phone and showed screenshots her followers had taken of gay men’s dating app profiles.

Messages sent to gay men on dating apps, from people who had tracked them down using Moussa’s instructions, were extremely homophobic and threatened violence.

“If I catch you, I’ll cut your throat,” one message read. “You f****ts are ruining this country.”

Other messages sent to gay men on dating apps, from people who claimed to be women, read: “You got caught, f****t”, “I’ll deal with you later” and “I’m just trying to find all the f****ts in my neighbourhood”.

Screenshots of messages received this week by a gay man in Morocco on a gay dating app.

“I woke up to my friends’ and people I know’s pictures all over Facebook with the most horrible and homophobic captions,” a 19-year-old gay man living in Morocco told Pink News. “I was in a constant state of fear and panic wondering if my pictures were there too, and when will this reach my parents.”

He explains that he lives with his parents and has hidden his sexuality from them ever since the day they found out he had commented on a picture of a gay Moroccan man.

“They beat me up because I was engaging with ‘deviant’ people,” he said, “and from that day on I’ve hiding everything about my sexuality.”

A friend of his who was outed has not replied to his messages for three days. Others, he says, have also disappeared from social media after being outed. And out queer people have received death threats, he adds, while the number of gays rumoured to have been kicked out of their homes onto the streets – during national lockdown – is growing.

“She has ruined the lives of so many people just in the past four days,” says Nassim (not real name), a gay man who lives in Casablanca.

Nassim knows of at least 40 gay men who’ve been exposed and kicked out of their homes in Casablanca alone, as a result of Moussa’s videos.

“You can imagine how dangerous that is during a lockdown,” he says. “They basically will have nowhere to go.”

Nassim, who is closeted, explained how dangerous it is in Morocco to be outed as gay: “If our parents know that we’re gay, they will immediately kick us out, abuse us or if you’re very lucky and your parents have a little bit of humanity in them, they will keep you but your life will never be the same. They will always see you as sick, and they’ll keep constantly trying to talk you into changing and maybe go to a therapist.”

The queer community in Morocco had been “living in peace for a while”, he said, because “as long as nobody knows you’re gay, you’re fine”.

“But because of Sofia [Moussa] now, there’s hundreds of Facebook groups run by Moroccans just to find gay people and expose them… Moroccans hate gays with all their hearts.”

Hamza Makhchoune, an openly gay Moroccan photographer, has filed a report with the public prosecutor’s office in Casablanca about Moussa’s videos.

“The dangers that the live stream resulted was exposing many homosexuals who are still in the closet or still not yet sure about his sexual orientation and trying to figure that out,” Makhchoune says. “Some people got threatened on messenger by neighbours and others are getting blackmailed.”

Makhchoune says he knows of a gay youth who is being “tortured” by his family, who are also beating him up and spitting on him, after he was outed in one of the Facebook groups. Because the boy is under 18, the queer community is unable to help him, Makhchoune says.

“Sometimes I wish I am the one to be exposed instead of others such as the teenager,” he continues.

Details about the number of the gay men who have killed themselves in the past week as a result of being outed remain unclear, but almost every gay man Pink News spoke to was aware of at least one person who had died by suicide.

If they were kicked out and killed themselves without speaking to anyone, then “it is hard to know what happened”, Makhchoune says.

Why did a trans woman target gay men?

Makhchoune said: “I think that considering what Sofia [Moussa] has passed through in her life and it was not easy for her that her father does not accept her and she has not seen him for about 20 years. That has created a dark stone in her heart. She was angry and she did what she did. Maybe she wanted not to be the only one rejected and kicked out.”

Nassim added that Moussa “always wanted to be accepted by the Moroccan public”.

“In order to gain that acceptance from that, she sold us out and started giving them every way possible out there on how to find gay people and expose them and ruin their lives, and because also it increases her following and also brings her financial gain, since she lives in Turkey and she has a beauty/cosmetic business over there.”

View this post on Instagram

To whom it may concern, We are urgently writing to ask skateholders, organizations, associations and institutions to take immediate action by informing the concerned authorities about an active social media influencer, specifically on Instagram in order to take steps against her/him. The Instagram user’s account is named : Naoufalmoussa The person’s name is Naoufal Moussa that is known in Morocco as Sofia Talouni. Moussa is a Moroccan expat living in Turkey. He/she has got a large number of followers on her verified Instagram account, where he/she has recently began to broadcast live videos of herself that aim to expose the identities of the Moroccan queer people. Many of those people live with their families, especially nowadays due to the quarantine. Sofia clearly attacked and underestimated the Moroccan civil society associations, especially the AIDS fighting associations that are making a great effort and work really hard for the safety and well-being of the LGBTQA+ community and the Moroccan society as a whole. While homosexuality is illegal in the Moroccan law (Article 489 of the Penal Code of Morocco criminalises "lewd or unnatural acts with an individual of the same sex") and seen as a great sin by a large number of Moroccan people, homophobia is a very common act which the LGBTQA+ community suffers from here. Therefore, publically exposing the identities of the Moroccan queer people puts them at risk. Moussa has intentionally outed a lot of queer Moroccans on her Instagram live videos, as he/she has shown his/her homophobic audience the social platforms that queer people use. Such as, Grindr, Hornet, Planet Romeo…etc and encouraged them to create fake accounts to look for LGBTQA+ people there. This process has been really dangerous and harmful to the LGBTQA+ community. We urge you to contact the concerned authorities to instantly suspend the Instagram account Naoufalmoussa pending review. Then, ban him/her from the platform due to the policy of hate/speech and violence.

A post shared by NASSAWIYAT (@nassawiyat) on Apr 16, 2020 at 3:12pm PDT

Please report this woman's IG
She's been using her platform to out gay people in Morocco and introduced many homophobes to apps such as Grindr to hunt down gay ppl
It's disgusting and sad bcz she herself is trans and knows how dangerous it is in Morocco to expose such matters pic.twitter.com/wS991J56F2

— Ms. Bloue (@MsBloue) April 15, 2020

Moussa’s Instagram account was taken down on Friday after efforts from Moroccan queer and feminist groups, as well as international queer organisers like Adam Eli.

But the damage and violence caused by her videos continues.

“She basically announced a war on gay people,” Nassim says. “We’re really scared and she has ruined the image of the queer community forever.”

The 19-year-old gay man, who had to remain anonymous for safety reasons, said: “This means a total loss of our underground queer culture. We are wondering if there is any safe space for us to go to after all of this ends.”