Our story
TALAYAN are we going to be so marginalized, hated, and vilified? TALAYAN will our safety and our means of survival be threatened? TALAYAN are we going to live under repressive colonial laws that oppress us and deprive us of our basic rights? TALAYAN do we have to endure violence aimed at us from the system, from society, and even from each other? TALAYAN will our voices keep being silenced?
Arising from our lived realities as transgender sex workers, these questions have been the starting point for our reflections and our politics, and the inspiration for our name. Expressing our refusal to accept any longer a status quo that is killing us, we raise our voices to ask TALAYAN: “UNTIL WHEN?” ( Moroccan dialect)
Talayan is the first sex worker-led group working explicitly on promoting sex worker rights in Morocco.
Talayan was founded by a trans sex-worker and transgender feminist activist. It began initially as an informal network of Sex workers created for the purposes of mutual support and survival in the context of the Covid-19 lockdowns which had caused sex workers to lose their livelihood overnight.
In this period, a number of sex workers got together and created a community network in order to pool resources, provide housing to folks facing homelessness, and to support each other during a crisis that had deeply exacerbated all forms of violence, policing, marginalization, and precarity they face. The idea of Talayan was born from this context, as it highlighted the need for sex worker solidarity and activism.
Talay'an 