In Egypt men occupy the top of the social privilege ladder, and a considerable body of laws fortifies this position in terms of polygamy, inheritance, domestic violence, rape within marriage, and adultery.Sociocultural norms entitle men to even more privileges, including freer mobility and more autonomy in their premarital sexual lives, provided these sexual encounters are defined as masculine and heteronormative. However, men with nonnormative sexual orientations or practices, such as gays and men who have sex with men, especially if they are penetrated, or those who express feminine embodiments, do not have such privileges. Instead, the society debases, criminalizes, and punishes them in contemporary Egypt. The police in the General Directorate for Protecting Public Morality, prosecutors, and the courts, mainly in Greater Cairo, capitalize on this wider social rejection by targeting gender and sexually nonconforming people using sophisticated online monitoring techniques and pseudoscientific medical tests.Especially after the Egyptian Army restored power to itself in June 2013, the General Directorate for Protecting Public Morality has been engaged in a vicious crackdown primarily against the users of queer dating applications, namely, gay men, men who practice sex with other men, those deemed sexually suspect in these regards, and transgender women. The average number of people annually arrested on debauchery charges and referred to the court has increased fivefold in comparison to before mid-2013 (Abd El-Hameed 2017, 6).Morality police officers and their informants, all men, mainly employ “honey traps,” in which they create fake accounts on applications like Grindr, Hornet, and Manjam, and open long sex chats with users that sometimes last for months but usually a couple of weeks. The predator methodically lures in victims, encouraging them to send photos, especially of their faces and genitals, preferably wearing makeup and cross-dressed. As he builds rapport, the undercover officer arranges to meet the target in a specific place and ambushes them. Meeting sites include Midan Tahrir and spots in Dokki and Mohandiseen. Victims in police custody are usually interrogated about their sexual history and pressured to offer false confessions that they were raped as children, which is assumed to produce their “deviance” and path toward transactional same-sex relations. The goal is to establish a target’s “habitual practice of debauchery” in order for a charge to stick. Money is involved in many of these cases, which the undercover officer always offers. If money was not exchanged, the police try to fake it to make the case against the defendant more credible. The officers severely beat, insult, and sexually threaten victims in custody. They accuse targets of “failing to be men” and call them “perverts,” “deviants,” and “motherfuckers.” The officers always attach sex chatting texts and photos as evidence in the police report.Public prosecutors usually invoke Articles 8 and 9 of Law No. 10 from 1961. Article 8 criminalizes publicizing materials that incite debauchery or invite its practice. Prosecutors use chats and photos to substantiate this charge. Article 9 criminalizes the habitual practice of debauchery (al-iʿtiyad ʿala mumarasat al-fujur). Prosecutors often refer defendants to the Forensic Medicine Authority, where they are compelled to undergo anal exams to “prove” whether they have “been recently penetrated from behind” (mustakhdam min dubur fi waqt hadith min ʿadamuh), according to the Forensic Medicine Authority report. Most of the physician reports do not find any sign of “sodomy” (liwat), yet each ends with this formulaic sentence: “It is known that an adult can be penetrated with extreme caution, consensually and with the use of lubricants.” Thus, any such report can never be scientifically conclusive, and the forced examination is simply a form of torture, cruelty, and humiliation. Moreover, while the targets are all nonheteronormative men, the exams are only concerned with documenting those accused of habitually being penetrated, considered the despised feminine “negative role.” The courts of misdemeanor and appeals convict the vast majority of defendants. Even when acquitted of “habitual debauchery,” the courts usually convict defendants for advertising and publishing material inciting it. Lawyers who assist defendants in these cases report that photos of effeminacy are effective for turning a judge against a defendant.The targeting of gay men and the use of electronic and other forms of surveillance in some of these campaigns by the Egyptian security state has been a problem since the turn of the twenty-first century. We can only speculate about the reasons for the latest crackdown. Many activists believe that the government strategically employs such attack waves in an instrumental way that aims to distract popular attention from pressing social and economic problems and state repression in multiple domains. Others relatedly theorize that such attacks are a popular marketing strategy that allows the state to promote itself as moral. A number of lawyers working on such cases argue that the latest crackdown on sexually and gender-nonconforming people is part of a massive scale of oppression and online monitoring and censoring experienced by everyone who is socially and politically nonconforming and resistant since June 2013.