Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed against Muslim people in Europe (primarily by policing and border control agents) and that in general most sexual violence is a result of intimate partner violence regardless of a person’s cultural or religious background, there’s something so weirdly insidious about being angry about Muslim men “bringing sexual violence” to Europe when you look at the overwhelming centuries of European soldiers bringing sexual violence to the Muslim world.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I think your request for Muslim feminist perspectives is absolutely the right move. So here’s some recommendations, and I’ve added a bit of a focus on Palestine since you mentioned they were sympathetic to Palestinian liberation (including queer perspectives, which is intrinsically tied to feminism):

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one specifically addresses interventionist Western “feminism”)

Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine - Nada Elia (look at feminist movements in Palestine, and the women’s intifada)

Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism - Islah Jad

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality - Sara Ahmed (this is about the way that culture creates the stranger, and touches on exactly the issue you’re dealing with: a repetition of myth-building about the dangers of a specific out-group. I also recommend a lot of Sara Ahmed’s other books, like Living a Feminist Life, Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Post-modernism).

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Saed Atshan

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times - Jasbir Puar (examination of the leveraging of “progressive” Western values in creating the terrorist body subject to Western violence and dehumanization, and how “feminism” was used as a primary tool in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan)

Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon - Nicola Pratt

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures - Gul Ozyegin

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (kind of an old ethnography, but interesting nonetheless)

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation - Geraldine Moane

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror - Mahmood Mamdani (this one isn’t about feminism, but rather about the way that Islamaphobia has been inserted throughout western society and the shaping of western discourse on Islam. Mamdani has a lot of great books)

Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism, and the Politics of Dress - Stephanie Cronin

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one is more about getting to know the cultural feelings of womanhood in bedouin society)

Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories - Lila Abu-Lughod

Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study - Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (This one is about the weaponization of sexual violence, which is an important piece of understanding how the West are the largest perpetrators of sexual violence against Muslim women, not Muslim men)

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International - Sarah Schulman

Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel-Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude - Saffo Papantonopoulou (quick essay on how Israeli “progressiveness” is leveraged to oppress queer Palestinians and pinkwash Israeli violence)

Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism - Harsha Walia (not specifically what you were asking for, but has a lot of great information about how militarized borders are one of the largest vectors for sexual violence against women; anyone arguing about keeping certain people from immigrating is, de facto, arguing for supporting the funding of militarized borders to keep those people out, and thus adding to the amount of sexual violence)

Working at the (state-owned media) CBC is fine and raises no questions, but working for the (state-owned media) RT naturally casts a propagandistic shadow. Care to comment?

Supporting rebellion in the DRC and wanting the people of the DRC to achieve a revolutionary success is not even remotely in the same category as supporting US-backed militias from Rwanda doing mass murder and the displacement and death of the millions of people whose emancipation Cuba believed in. People aren’t chess pieces in some grand strategy game. Revolution comes from the masses and is to free the masses. Revolution doesn’t come from imperial militias doing murder and everyone starving and dying because the whole place is being ravaged for its mines. And there’s nothing revolutionary about dismissing the deaths of the very people you supposedly believe should have a revolution as inconsequential because Rwanda has “valid reasons” for fucking killing them all.

Supporting American-instigated forever wars because an exploited people aren’t revolutionary is certainly an interesting stance.

My comment was not in defense of China (though bringing up the Khmer Rouge as if that has any bearing on current Chinese foreign policy is wild), my comment is on the material benefit to the US for M23 to be attacking the DRC, which seems a rather important piece of information for understanding how a militia that is armed by the US and Israel and is attacking people to the US’s benefit might be worth criticizing.

But then you made it immediately clear that you believe in collective punishment, as if the millions of people of the DRC should continue to be ravaged by US imperialism because of some nebulous connection that they have as an entire people to the Rwandan genocide, which, frankly, is a troubling viewpoint to take.

May you expand on what reasons would validate taking weapons from the US and Israel and arming militias to attack a neighbouring nation where 7 million people are displaced and twenty years of war and have famine have resulted in millions of deaths?

And do these valid reasons take into consideration that China became the largest stakeholder in the DRC’s mineral mines about a decade ago, which coincides with the rise of said militias using US and Israeli supplied weaponry to murder people there? Or is it somehow coincidence that at a time when China is dominating the EV and green energy market (which relies heavily on imports from the DRC) and the US is openly asserting that they will crush Chinese EV and green energy markets, that US and Israeli supplied militias are just so happening to target the mining operations in the DRC?

Just a funny little quirk that is worth commenting on: my very argument that people are often unable to self-identify because the larger mainstream has decided that their personal identifiers are “offensive” has been demonstrated by the website’s slur-filter.

Transgender, in its conception, was a coalitional term designed as an umbrella for all sorts of people who transgressed against cisheteronormative gender roles. This included transsexual people, but it also included crossdressers, drag queens/kings, stone butches, fairies, dykes, aggressives, removeds, and a whole slew of other identities (many of which would, in our current terminology, be considered “cis”).

It was only in the late nineties and into the early aughts that the term transgender started being viewed as synonymous with transsexual. This has led to a lot of interesting (though often inflammatory) shifts in the language used in queer communities. In the anglosphere, the language of institutionalized queer organizing gained prominence, and street-level identifiers fell by the wayside. There were lots of reasons for this: some identities were considered too niche, or too difficult to parse for cishetero audiences. For some, the terms that were symbols of self-realization in some communities were often considered slurs in others (and this is especially true of identifiers used by racialized and otherwise marginalized communities, as able-bodied, educated, wealthy white queer people became a focus for deciding which language was acceptable and which was “offensive”).

With the prominence of the coalitional term “transgender,” which offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a lot of different marginalized groups under a cohesive banner, transsexual came into a specific sort of cross-fire. On the one hand, you had a new wave of self-identified transgender people making arguments that transsexual as a term was “binary” and “reinforcing gender norms,” which you may recognize as a parallel to arguments that “bisexual” as a term “reinforces the binary.” (This is also a bit of a rehashing of the old lesbian movement’s arguments that androgyny is the “correct” way to do lesbian feminism, and that femininity “reinforces the patriarchy.” Turns out political movements are often doomed to recycle the same tired and divisive rhetoric).

On the other hand, you had transsexual people who did struggle with accepting or understanding the larger coalitional movement, for a variety of reasons. For instance, there are transsexual people who were resistant to the idea that they could be “lumped in” with crossdressers, or queens, because (especially at the time) many people who were openly transsexual lived “straight” lives, and couldn’t agree with the fact of their manhood or womanhood being conflated with queer sexual practices. There were transsexual people who considered themselves to have a medical issue unrelated to queer activism, or who desired to live lives of stealth. There were transsexual people who saw their very identity as transsexual get villainized by other queer activists as “reinforcing the binary,” as though some identities could be inherently radical/more radical than others. There were transsexual people who were having their very specific transsexual needs sidelined under wider discussions of transgender activism and transgender rights.

These were all very real and interlaced conflicts of language, the type that will come up in any coalitional organizing, by the way. Coalitions are great for getting people swinging together, but they can easily end up replicating systems of hierarchy and invisibilize the differing needs of the members within that coalition (check out Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Julia Serano’s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive).

This is all to say that there has been a very deep interplay of competing ideas of what it even means to be transsexual and transgender, that there is no consensus and that there can be no consensus because any consensus would at its heart replicate the very systems of assignment of identity and gender role that transgender activism erupted to combat. There is a very real effort by the bourgeois institutions of queer theory to create a containing and hegemonic ideal of queer identity that can be easily captured and consumed in the commodity market, and this has coloured the way that queer identity is understood and discussed at large. There is no “correct” term for anyone to use, and you simply cannot judge a person based on what words they use to relate to their personal experiences. Language is always in motion, and while often that motion is being directed by the institutions of power, those on the margins will always carve their own linguistic space, and it is incumbent on us to allow people the opportunity to self-describe.

Bhí an ceol go hiontach ar fad!

Tá fáilte romhat! Hope you find something in there that you enjoy, or that resonates. Whipping Girl is one that I bought after reading because after so many years of Stoller’s sex/gender distinction permeating queer theory to the point that it’s often uncritically presented as fact, it was so amazing to read Serrano’s theory of intrinsic inclinations (which she fleshed out further in subsequent writings) which jives much more with my own experiences and works better to apply across different experiences and cultural manifestations of gender

I sort of fell into it by accident. I am the education coordinator for a small grassroots org, and as part of that I started volunteering as a tutor at a local nonprofit that teaches adult literacy. Then that nonprofit started piloting a programme to help adults get their high school diplomas (a thing that no other organization in the city helps with, and until recently was impossible for anyone over the age of 25 as they were considered to have aged out of the high school system). I tutored through the pilot year, and started helping with curriculum stuff, so when the educational authority approved the programme permanently and decided they wanted to roll it out everywhere, this nonprofit became the only place in the city adults can get their diplomas. They contracted me after that to help build the curriculum, and I’ve been working on that and with students ever since.

So basically: if you’re already in education, I recommend looking into whatever organizations in your area actually provide supports for adults attempting to learn. These organizations tend to be overlooked even more than the school districts, and while early childhood education and adult education are not the same, many of the skills are transferable, and a desire to actually be there is already a huge point in your favour. Lots of schools offer certifications (distance courses, diploma additions, professional development) that you can do to bridge the gap in your credentials if necessary, though depending on the organizations needs, that is not always essential to have upfront.

I’ve noticed a couple people mentioning a desire to getting into more reading. I have some recommendations (and am always open to discussing books) that focus primarily on trans/intersex and queergender theory. I also think feministgender theory (absent specifically queer lenses) is an important backbone to queer gender theory, as early feminist writers describing the gender-class distinction paved the way for understanding queerness’s place in the gender-class distinction, but this list would be way too long then. Hit me up if you want some recommendations though. Some of these ethnographs rather than theory, or historical, or a bit more personal.

I can’t say whether this would be a good decision for you to make, and I doubt anyone here could.

However, if education is something you’re passionate about, I might recommend looking into adult education to see if it’s right for you.

I love my job. It’s hard. It’s emotionally difficult. My students have been failed by society at every level: they are in prisons, they live in tents, they are parents, they are addicts, they have learning disabilities, they are adults who cannot read full sentences or do basic arithmetic. They are people who have had every opportunity taken from them, but they are showing up, not because parents are forcing them to, but because they want to learn and grow.

Also, there is much less oversight about curriculum, so I have been able to build a curriculum that favours abolitionist viewpoints (which resonates, obviously, with many of my students who have been criminalized since childhood), Indigenous perspectives, queer ideas, and even Marxist teachings. Who will stop me? The schoolboards truly do not give a shit about these people and have already given up on them, and the educational authority of the state (not being specific so as not to dox myself) is not willing to invest the time and resources into actually providing and enforcing guidelines on my curriculum.

What I do is heartbreaking, and tiring, and deeply rewarding. I just helped a woman get her high school diploma in her eighties, who was a grandmother that believed dropping out of school to work and raise her kids had meant that she would never have that opportunity.

Not trying to proselytize, but education is truly such a powerful part of growing communities, and so if you have a feeling that it might be for you, it’s at least worth looking into.

Thank you for sharing, I enjoyed that

The West doesn’t even have “not being arrested on sight” if you’re racialized. Black trans women get arrested on sight for presumptive involvement in sex work so much that they say they got picked up for “walking while trans.”

“In one American study, the largest-ever survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people, 41 percent of Black trans women reported having been arrested or jailed because of their gender identity” - Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives

It’s even worse if you’re found with condoms on your person, that becomes “evidence” that you are engaged in sex work. So trans sexuality is inherently criminalized, as of course no one would choose to have sex with trans people if it wasn’t some sort of illegal transaction.

Truly the amount that economically secure, educated white queers are disconnected from the realities of further marginalized queer people domestically is astounding, and the fact that this disconnect allows them to position whatever colonial monstrosity they call home as being more “progressive” than the victims of imperialism that they castigate as being queerphobic is endlessly frustrating. But of course, having a vector of oppression such as queerness is seen to render them as pure victim, as completely divorced from the way they personally participate in and benefit from imperialism. As if queerness can wash away the blood that stains our hands.

Endlessly tired of imperial core queer “solidarity” being based around nebulous demands for “human rights” that, to no one’s surprise, often results in siding with the state against its enemies because they’re just so backwards while people in the core are languishing in jail/detention centres and those queers abroad that are supposedly in need of saving get delivered aid missiles and IMF austerity.

I love to recommend books, and so here is a smattering of books about Ireland from a variety of subjects and perspectives (largely focused on feminism as per my area of study).

Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales, Alwyn and Brinley Rees

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Anthony Bradley, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis

LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan

Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, Bronwen Walter

Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M. Smith, Mari Steed

The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, Patrick R. Mullen

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland, Clara Fischer, Áine Mahon

Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity 1890–1914, D. A. J. MacPherson

Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean, Eve Walsh Stoddard

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, Fintan Walsh

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Geraldine Moane

Dedication and Leadership: Learning from the Communists, Hyde Douglas

The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power, Jennifer M. Jeffers

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power, Linden Peach

Literature, Partition, and Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Joe Cleary

Weaving Transnational Solidarity, Katherine O’Donnell

Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Katherine O’Donnell, Mary McAuliffe, Leeann Lane

Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities, Mary McAuliffe (not specifically Irish, but by an Irish author and it does explore lesbian desire in colonial Ireland)

Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music, Tes Slominski

The James Connolly Reader, Shaun Harkin, James Connolly, Mike Davis (a great collection of Connolly’s works including a few that are out of print or hard to find elsewhere, like Labour in Irish History though I think that’s not so hard to get anymore with eBooks)

Revolutionary Works, Seamus Costello

A Literary History of Ireland, Hyde Douglas

Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin

Early Irish Literature, Myles Dillon (also The Cycles of Kings and Irish Sagas)

Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature, Peter Beresford Ellis

A Brief History of the Celts, Peter Beresford Ellis (also The Druids and Celtic Myths and Legends and A Dictionary of Irish Mythology)

Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Thomas Crofton Croker

If you’re looking for someone who is doing some really interesting scholarship on Irish indigeneity, coalition building with colonized Indigenous people globally, and preserving/resurrecting obscure and regional Irish-language terms and idioms, I recommend Manchán Magan.

Ali Kadri’s The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction explores exactly such an economic model. He expands on the theory of waste as the primary commodity of neoliberal capital order in China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism and also its function as the driving force of imperial wars of encroachment in Imperialism With Reference to Syria and Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment.

I cannot recommend his work enough in understanding the way that imperialism under neoliberalism uses the production of waste as its primary mode of accumulation. War and destruction are often seen as the consequences of accumulation by resource theft, but Kadri posits that the waste itself is the commodity and resource theft is a secondary (although still desired and lucrative) goal in war. By de-reproducing labour, that is to say, by collapsing the labour time and resources necessary in reproducing labour to a single moment of liquidation, the entire value of that commodified labour is extracted at one go.

Destruction is not a byproduct of war, destruction is the product of war, and the accumulation of wealth through waste production is an explosive industry with massive profits–and without the drawback of any value being clawed back by labour in their need to reproduce their class. It is the ultimate end of commodified “thingification” (objectification) of labour.

Exactly! Coalitional terminology can be very powerful in building cohesive movements and cross-boundary solidarity, but can serve as a bit of a double-edged sword and lead to a glossing over (or even erasure) of the rich cultural differentiation within (Julia Serrano talks a bit about this in Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People has some really great insights about this, and addresses–in a Canadian context–the way that the dominant trans discourse in Canada is english and thus Canadian legislative and organizational initiatives often reinforce an english framework of transgender that seeks to supplant french transsexualité)

Editing to add: if I’m remembering correctly, Leslie Feinberg’s Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue talks very specifically about the difficulties in forming those coalitional ties in American organizing between trans people and gay people, and the struggle to get gender minorities and sexual minorities to see their oppression and liberation as intrinsically linked.

This was more about queerness in a broader sense (the survey in the article also covered sexual minorities as well as gender minorities). The article lumps sexual and gender minorities together throughout (LGBTQ) and so I was addressing sexual and gender discrimination as a whole as well. I know the title was specifically about transphobia, but there was nothing specifically about gender identity separate from sexual orientation in the article itself, aside from saying trans people were the most discriminated against.

I will also add: there actually are cultural contexts in which “gender identity” is an act, meaning the gender role is, quite literally, the role that is currently being engendered, and not an intrinsic/total way of being, but that wasn’t specifically what I was addressing, I just kept it as broad as the source material I was replying to.

I have a few things I would like to reply with here, but I want to start with assuring you that no part of my analysis is meant as any kind of personal attack on individual queer people; I realize this can be a sensitive topic and at times that can cause people to feel defensive about discussions, but what I wrote about is western hegemony not individual western queers. I’m sorry for any feelings of invalidation you may feel.

Secondly, I will say that there is an implication in your response that I am somehow “outside” of the discussion. That is to say, you imply that you are “actual queer” and that I am not and thus have no place to speak about “actual queers.” I’m not sure what led to this assumption, but it’s nowhere in my text, and any quick follow-up showing the sheer amount I study and recommend queer theory (in this thread and elsewhere) should serve as at least a rudimentary hint that I am very much “inside” the discussion, and don’t appreciate your implication that I have no place to make this analysis.

Now, as to your point: when discussing cultural hegemony, the intentions and the desires of the individual are quite literally immaterial: it doesn’t matter what individual queer people intend with their language. The hegemonic institutions of western imperialism are pervasive and invasive, and whether a settler intends to participate in the perpetuation of hegemony or not is irrelevant to the fact that the settler inevitably and inescapably does participate in it. From the innocuous application of english identifiers to other cultures (like claiming that hijra, or two-spirit, or travesti, or transsexuelles are transgender) to outright purposeful queer imperialism. It doesn’t matter, it all lends to the weight of the cultural hegemony of the english colonial world.

Even within english itself there are hegemonic ideals of queer identity that get reified through repetition: it is no individual’s fault, it is just the way that structures of hegemony function. This is how the word transsexual fell out of vogue, how fairy, dyke and transvestite became relics to mainstream queer theory. And that mainstream is led by white academics and the media apparatus of the bourgeoisie, like it or not.

I also have to disagree with your statement that “literally no gay person in the west does that.” Queer media (including posts in this very forum) are rife with discussions of the coming out narrative, and in the western queer lexicon someone is gay, for instance. Homosexuality is not an act, it is a way of being. That’s not a value judgement, it’s just the way that gayness works in the mainstream (hegemonic) western english culture. The identity tags, while they may matter to varying degrees and for varying reasons to different individuals, do serve the purpose in the mainstream culture of informing a reading of a person’s every action, whether we desire it or not. If a trans artist writes a song, that becomes a trans song. For example: look at UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU by Ada Rook. The first song on the album, “im cis” quite literally says “i say none of my songs are about being trans” and yet the first review published about the album spoke about it being a trans album. (Backxwash has talked about this as well, that her album was largely about immigrant experience, racism, and suicidal ideation, but every article about her when she won the Polaris was about “Trans Musician Backxwash.”)

On the other hand, plenty of queer people, whether enthusiastically, reluctantly, ironically, or earnestly, contribute to discussions/memes/discourse about being gay or being trans or whatever other label. Again, this is not a value judgement, it is just a thing that I have personally observed and studied (and participated in, because, as I said, the way hegemony works is we are all implicated to varying degrees). It’s not inherently a bad thing (and can even be affirming for the participant), but that does mean that the hegemony is continuing to be reasserted. And the real problem is when it gets applied cross-culturally without introspection.

To take it to the way anglo hegemony works: whether you desire it or not, english is the language of the global hegemon. When you use it, when you translate cultural ideas and feelings into english, you are participating in the spread of that hegemony. Things that exist in non-english cultural contexts necessarily undergo transformation to be translated into english to be understood by an english audience. That’s the very nature of translation. However, because of the imbalance in power between english (as the colonial language of the global hegemon) and other languages, this is by its very nature a translation that serves to further cultural hegemony.

The point, I suppose, is that settlers perpetuate hegemony whether they wish to or not, whether they are victims of that hegemony or not, and that goes for queer settlers too. (the colonized perpetuate hegemony too, that is its nature, to become instantiated in the society such that it is self-reproducing)