The Sand Child’s protagonist, Ahmed is his family’s eighth child who was born a female but raised as a male upon the decision of his authoritarian father who, having sired only girls, had no inheritor according to Moroccan society’s patriarchy-based legal system. Going to great extremes to uphold the lie of Ahmed’s existence, his father uses his “son’s” sham male identity to heal his wounded male honor.

Throughout the course of his childhood and adolescence, Ahmed discovers bodies female and male during visits to hammams with each parent. When he hits puberty, his mother, fully complicit in perpetuating her husband’s deceit, binds Ahmed’s chest to prevent his breasts from developing normally. At “his” first menstrual period, Ahmed intuits what’s transpiring by having silently watched his mother and sisters use cotton rags to absorb their flow. As a young adult, Ahmed, bottled up with rage and repressed desire—yet consciously pleased with the power he holds passing as a man—decides to marry his invalid epileptic cousin, Fatima, as a means of challenging his father’s discourse and decisions that have dominated his life. After his father and wife die, Ahmed gradually comes first to recognize then to explore his female body, discovering sexual desire.