Egyptian Women Are Still Being Asked to Prove Their Virginity

A former member of the Egyptian parliament sparked nationwide outrage after proposing mandatory ‘virginity tests’ for female students upon their admission to university. Ilhamy Agina, who was expelled from parliament in 2021, proposed this mandate in a recent interview after formally announcing his candidacy for the upcoming parliamentary elections. 

The former lawmaker first floated the mandate in 2016, the same year he vocalized his staunch support for female genital mutilation.

Although his remarks drew condemnation from both conservatives and liberals, he remained in his parliamentary seat for another five years. When Agina finally lost his parliamentary seat in 2021, it was for different reasons entirely.

Agina is only the latest in a long line of hardline figures who trade in provocation — and often manage to command attention precisely because of it. His demands to “virginity test” women and children were criticized by the general public and were even denounced by state-institutions like the Egyptian National Council for Women (NCW).

The concern goes beyond this unconstitutional, misogynistic proposal — and even beyond the public outrage that followed. It rests in the deeply entrenched and enduring belief in the notion of “virginity” within Egyptian society.

While many of Agina’s critics condemn his proposal as inhumane, they nevertheless accept its core premise — that so-called ‘virginity testing’ rests on scientific grounds. They just think young unmarried women shouldn’t be subjected to it without a valid reason. 

‘Virginity testing’ is not a sanctioned practice in Egypt; it was even ruled illegal in certain official contexts. The Egyptian Constitution (Article 51 and 54) protects the “sanctity of the body” and human dignity: any forced medical procedure is a direct violation of these articles. But the reality on the ground is different. Many doctors still perform these tests outside of a strictly regulated forensic context, for parents who suspect their daughters have had sex before marriage. 

This obsession with surveillance is often baked into the training of the very professionals meant to protect women. Mariam, a third-year medical student in Egypt, recalls her parents—both gynecologists—sharing a disturbing ‘lesson’ passed down by their mentor.

“They were taught that you can tell if a girl is a virgin just by how she carries herself during the exam,” Mariam said. “If she opens her legs without hesitation or doesn’t try to ‘cover up,’ she’s definitely not a virgin.”

Outside of medical practice, many families still celebrate their newlywed daughters with a bloody white cloth; proof that the bride was a virgin until marriage. If the white cloth that is laid down on the newlywed’s bed isn’t drowned in blood at the end of the night, the family’s so-called “honor” is at stake. In many Egyptian households, a family’s sense of “honor” is believed to rest—quite literally—on the blood of its daughters.

It is doubtful that ‘virginity testing’ will ever be mandated on young Egyptian female students, but Agina’s statements are symptomatic of a much larger issue for women in Egyptian society—the widespread need to control women’s bodies. 

The former MP’s floating of this proposal so soon after announcing his candidacy suggests his catering to a very real demographic of traditionalists that value women’s so-called ‘virginity’. But there is a final, crowning irony in this national debate: the ‘science’ Agina relies on does not exist.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations, backed by the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, have repeatedly clarified that ‘virginity’ is a social and religious construct, not a medical one. There is no physical examination that can reliably prove a woman’s sexual history. The hymen, the very tissue at the center of this obsession, is not a ‘seal’ that breaks; it is a flexible, elastic membrane that varies wildly from woman to woman.

Agina isn’t just proposing a policy; he is weaponizing a medical myth to keep women in a state of perpetual surveillance. When we allow the debate to be about whether a test should happen, rather than acknowledging that the test doesn't work, we give men like Agina exactly what they want: the power to define a woman’s worth by a standard that doesn't exist in nature.

The danger in Agina’s rhetoric lies less in the likelihood that his proposal becomes law. Even state institutions such as the Egyptian National Council for Women have publicly denounced so-called ‘virginity tests’ as unconstitutional and a form of violence. The deeper threat is that as long as we keep the ‘hymen myth’ alive, we keep the gate to women’s autonomy locked from the inside.