#76 - On Gender Dysphoria and Transgenderism: Contemporary Challenges

In this episode, Br. Mobeen Vaid and I discuss the Islamic perspectives on gender-reassignment surgeries as well as the ripple effects of the modern day transgender movement.

What are the major Islamic fatawa regarding sex-reassignment surgeries within Sunni and Shi'a Islam? On what grounds were such fatwas issued to begin with? Do communities like the Hijras in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as the Warias in Indonesia represent legitimate "third gender" communities? What are the ripple effects of the modern trans movement on family units, schools and academia, Muslim scholarship, as well as our mosques and  places of worship? These and other questions are explored in this episode.

References used and resources mentioned in this episode:
- “And the Male Is Not like the Female”: Sunni Islam and Gender Nonconformity (Part 2) by Mobeen Vaid and Waheed Jensen
- When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment by Ryan Anderson
- Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier
- The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism by Michael Bailey
- 4thWaveNow website

Chapters

• 0:37 Episode Introduction
• 1:19 On Sex-Reassignment Surgeries: Religious Perspectives
• 45:20 On the Transgender Movement and Its Ripple Effects
• 1:35:00 Final Words
• 1:37:24 Ending Remarks

Transcript

Waheed  00:37
Assalamu alaikom warahmatullahi ta’ala wabarakatuh, and welcome back to “A Way Beyond the Rainbow”, this podcast series dedicated to Muslims experiencing same-sex attractions who want to live a life true to Allah subhanah wa ta’ala and Islam. I'm your host, Waheed Jensen, and thank you for joining me in today's episode. In today's episode, we will focus on contemporary challenges pertaining to gender dysphoria and the transgenderism movement, and Br. Mobeen Vaid is joining me again, and we will be focusing on sex change surgeries, as well as the modern transgenderism movement and its ripple effects. So, let's get started, inshaAllah.

01:19
Welcome back, Br. Mobeen! Assalamu alaikom.

Mobeen  01:23
Wa alaikom assalam, jazakom Allah khair, Waheed.

Waheed  01:25
Wa iyyakom. It's always a pleasure to have you, jazak Allah khairan for joining me today. The episode today is going to be focused on contemporary challenges. So, we're going to be talking about sex-reassignment surgeries, and we're also going to be talking about the current trans movement and the ripple effects that we are witnessing nowadays because of that. So, starting with the first section of the episode, we're going to be talking about sex-reassignment surgeries from a social perspective as well as a religious perspective. So, can you tell us a little bit about the particular positions or famous cases from the previous centuries when it comes to the Islamic positions and the fatwas as far as sex change or sex reassignment surgeries are concerned? So, in the article, part two, you had mentioned the position of Khomeini from Iran as well as Jād al-Ḥaqq, and the case of Sayyid/Sally, and you elaborated on that a lot. So were these fatwas in relation to the intersex persons, or do these fatwas also deal with individuals who have gender dysphoria but do not have any underlying physiological etiologies? 

Mobeen  02:34
I think the best way to address this question is to start off by making the distinction between Ayatullah Khomeini, and then Jād al-Ḥaqq with Tantawi. I think that's sort of one stream of fatawa on this topic, and the other stream relates to Khomeini. I will say that, collectively, all of them appear to be cases of what we refer to today as gender dysphoria, what used to be called gender identity disorder, and so we're talking about cases that are psychologically grounded, for the most part, and I'll return to that as we explore a little bit the two strains of thinking. 

With respect to Khomeini, and I'll start with him, because I think that that particular development is a very interesting one for a few reasons. I'll say that, firstly, in the aftermath of not only that fatwa, but I'd say, in recent years especially, we have had a number of Shia thinkers, scholars and others, that have seemed to deny that Khomeini ever endorsed sex change surgeries in any capacity, and they insist that that fatwa was only speaking to the khunthā, which is the intersex person or individual, and that people who have propagated this idea of him endorsing sex change surgeries or sex reassignment surgeries for individuals with gender dysphoria have misread, misappropriated and misinterpreted his views. I have to confess, I'm not sure how much of that is borne out of embarrassment and just an attempt to sort of recover his reputation, because they don't want a great scholar in their own tradition to be associated with that particular position, especially if it's something that they just instinctively don't like. And the reason I say that is because the actual texts of Khomeini's on this issue, which are not solitary, you have a number of masa’il, or questions and answers, that he responds to, explores, and discusses, as I recall them, at least, that make it quite clear that he's speaking of someone that has some sort of internal condition through which they get surgical adjustment, and from there have to now reconcile themselves to the Shari’ah and understand what their responsibilities are vis-à-vis the gendered aspects of Islam. 

Now, there are also stories out there within alleged backstory. This alleged backstory has to do with a man, that had what we call today, obviously, gender dysphoria, began dressing as a woman and took on a female name. Khomeini apparently disapproved of this until he eventually met this “trans woman”, spoke to him, confronted him quite a little bit, but they apparently had some sort of a sit down, and this was a trans woman that came across or was, and Allah knows best, quite pious, reverential towards the Imams, the Shi’a Imams here, etc. And upon meeting this figure, it is said that Khomeini changed his mind on the subject. I have not investigated the issue deeply enough to know whether or not the story is accurate, so I can't speak to the veracity of the story. I have come across it in a few sources. So, I don't know for certain what to think of it totally, although that's a story that is mentioned. Now, in the aftermath of the fatawa, hat Khomeini gives, you do have the analysis, which is also included in that section of ʿAlī Akbar Siyāsī’, which distinguishes between the internal state of an individual, the batin, and the external, physical form of the individual, or the zahir, what is apparent.

Waheed  07:04
And for the listeners, just for them to know, ʿAlī Akbar Siyāsī’ was a prominent psychologist in the time of Khomeini, correct? 

Mobeen  07:10
Correct, and I believe he continued writing after him. But what you have as a result of the discourse and intellectual train of thought and legal rulings that they advanced was the emergence, especially, I'd say over the past few decades, of a new type of deterministic view on gender, which is to say you're still either a male or a female intrinsically, gender is not fluid. What they're doing, however, is that they are giving a place of primacy to the internal self over the external one. So a biological female, for instance, someone born female, who is internally male, is not an internal male who is externally female, but that is a male, for all intents and purposes, and the question of transitioning surgically is a must, it is not an option. In this reading, it would be an obligation on this biological female to go through surgical transitions, and it will be sinful to refrain and to remain a female, and that remaining a biological/physical female, someone that other people look at as female, would be the equivalent of allowing a man into female spaces, and so that becomes a sort of violation that has to get remedied. Which is why Iran as a country, in general, conducts a huge amount of sex change surgeries and sex reassignment surgeries, in terms of numbers, almost more than any country in the world, they’re top three for sure. For a number of years, they were number one. In fact, the state, the government of Iran subsidizes sex change operations. So, they happen quite often. 

And I should say that many transgender advocates oppose the Iran model precisely because it undermines this notion of choice. It undermines this notion of gender fluidity. It doesn't allow for things like social transitioning, it seems very heavy handed and far too deterministic for them to want to get on board with. Again, I am not an expert on Shi’ism, so these are things that I think someone from the Shi’a tradition could probably speak to with a bit more insight, and probably a lot more detail, but this is at least what we've seen in Iran, and what we've seen with legal developments within Shi’ism. 

Now, if we set the Shi’ism question aside and we just focus on Sunnism. We have two critical fatawa that tend to come up from highly reputed and well regarded scholars: Jād al-Ḥaqq, who was Sheikh al-Azhar, so we're talking about a man who held a post that is considered a very, very senior position - the grand Imam, if you will, of al-Azhar University, which is one of the preeminent schools of Islamic learning in the Muslim world - so very prominent post, and Sh. Tantawi who follows in his footsteps later on. Jād al-Ḥaqq‘s fatwah and Sh. Tantawi’s fatwa are effectively identical in wording. In fact, Tantawi takes Jād al-Ḥaqq’s fatwa and just regurgitates it. If you do a side-by-side comparison, you're getting the same fatwa. 

So the Tantawi fatwa is really offered in a very particular context, which has to do with this Sayyid/Sally case that we write about, and people who want to know more about it can read the paper. But sort of the high level points or the broad strokes about this story is that you have a student in al-Azhar who goes and consults and, you know, begins to adopt a female identity, takes on the name Sally, travels to some other country, gets a sex reassignment surgery, comes back, and now wants to be accepted as a female in al-Azhar. This fatwa gets surfaced up to Tantawi, and it actually becomes a very prominent story in Egypt. This sort of Sayyid/Sally figure, is someone who gets reported on in the news, and in the papers, getting a lot of coverage, it was a major and big deal. 

And so it becomes a whole issue of, okay, well, what do we think about this as sort of scholarly tradition and all of that? Jād al-Ḥaqq and Tantawi’s fatawa are interesting in that they leave a lot of people dissatisfied. That's what they do. And that happened at the time insofar their fatawa tend to bring up a lot of general ahadeeth about “For every illness, there's a cure” (إن الله لم ينـزل داءً إلا أنزل له شفاء), things like that, or as the Prophet (PBUH said), that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala has never brought down an illness or ailment except that He has made available for it a cure. So you have these types of reports and narrations about seeking out cures and the importance of that. You also have quite a bit that is clearly and unambiguously talking about physical corrective surgeries, that through medical consultation, through discussions with doctors, if there are situations where you need to get a physical/physiological corrective surgery done, there's no issue with that Islamically. Tantawi is quoted elsewhere saying, that this is a طبية علاقة, this issue is a medical issue, meaning that if someone has some sort of physiological abnormality that can be corrected through surgery, then it should be done through the consultation of medical professionals. 

Not only do they not speak to the psychological transition of somebody who is internally something and physically something else, because they're dealing with really physical ailments. Not only did they not speak to the psychological thing, they explicitly say that just the changing of someone from one thing to another, a male to a female, and vice versa, is impossible, and they just reject it in the same fatwa. Now, what sort of happened, as far as I can tell, is that you had an academic paper that was written, I want to say it was published probably in the early 2000s, I forgot the figure’s name who wrote it, but he translated the Jād al-Ḥaqq and Tantawi fatwa, he provided the backstory, and I think he actually did a decent and fair job when it came to glossing out the details of the fatwa. I think there's certain aspects of it that evinces a lack of understanding of fiqh from the person who translated it - which is tough, I mean, if you're not sort of really entrenched in fiqh, especially on issues like this, you're liable to misunderstand things. So the mukhannath, for instance, is translated as the hermaphrodite, even though [the mukhannath] is the effeminate male, that's not the hermaphrodite, [whereas the hermaphrodite] is the one that's the khunthā not the mukhannath. There are things like that that are glaringly obvious mistranslations in English. But, in general, I think he captured a lot of what the fatwa was saying, and the author of the article - I'd have to go back and double check the author's name, I forgot - he makes quite clear this point that not only they don't consider this whole notion of sex change, they just reject it out of hand as even a possibility. 

You have a number of a later academic scholars that end up referring back to that paper and saying, well Jād al-Ḥaqq and Tantawi endorsed sex change surgeries in Islam, and it becomes something that, from that point forward, really gets regurgitated in a number of academic works. So if you're reading Western academic works, you'll come across this assertion that Jād al-Ḥaqq and Tantawi endorsed sex change surgeries, when, in fact, their fatawa don't ever endorse that at all, what they seem to endorse more properly is the notion that a person can go through a corrective surgery, if, in fact, there is a deformity, disorder of development, abnormality of some sort that can be corrected or is amenable to surgical correction. So that's really what that case ends up being about. And I should say that even after Tantawi’s fatwa, I believe that al-Azhar kicked out this Sayyid/Sally figure from the Jami’a (university). 

Waheed  16:30
Subhan Allah. It’s very interesting how things progressed throughout the years, subhan Allah. Indeed, yeah. So what are the ripple effects of these fatwas that we can see today? 

Mobeen  16:40
Yeah, well, I think I mentioned some of them, which is what's happened in Iran, right? Obviously, the growth of sex change surgery, the subsidizing of them and all of that. I don't know that the Jād al-Ḥaqq and Tantawi fatwa really had a huge sort of earth shattering impact, to that major extent, simply because it didn't seem to really come out on the issue of transgenderism itself. You have had other fatawa and other scholarly committees that have weighed in on the topic, including the Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Scholars, etc., and all of them have offered their thoughts, which is why in Sunnism, you really have a much more unified discussion on the prohibition of sex change and sex reassignment surgeries, whereas that's not the case within Shi’sm, where there appears to be some difference and certainly a much more different paradigm through which this whole issue is being looked at. And Allah knows best. 

Waheed  17:43
Indeed. So, for those of us listening, we have this question, and we're like, “Okay, so what is Islam's formal position on sex change operations, and on what grounds can we say that Islam prohibits or permits these kinds of surgeries?”

Mobeen  17:59
Yes, that's a good question. Well, there are a number of proofs. I'll start off by just saying plainly that the position of doing a sex change or sex reassignment surgery, and I'm being a little deliberate with continuously mentioning both, only because language keeps changing, right? Sort of what is the surgery doing? Is it just assigning you a new sex? Is it really trying to change that sex? Now they're talking about sex confirmation surgeries, right? That's like the new verbiage.

Waheed  18:27
Affirmation, yeah.

Mobeen  17:28
Yeah, exactly. There's all this linguistic sort of, you know, and there's so much buried and nested in all of this, that I'm kind of mentioning both. So that's because, obviously, the language keeps changing so much. But in any event, the general ruling on that is that it is prohibited, and the grounds for this are based on a number of proofs. For one, you have a verse of the Qur’an where Iblees/Shaytan speaks about misguiding humanity, and one of the things he says is, (وَلآمُرَنَّهُمْ فَلَيُغَيِّرُنَّ خَلْقَ اللَّهِ) – “I will order them, and they will alter the creation of Allah” (Qur’an, 4:119). So changing Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala’s creation is seen as something obviously that is outright prohibited, and something that is, in fact, subject to a great prohibition and moral consternation and repudiation. 

You have other ahadith as well from the Prophet (PBUH) where he curses (المغيرات خلق الله), and this is speaking to the women for certain things that they did where they’d change the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. So, attempting to change Allah's creation this way, this particular surgery, is seen as falling underneath that umbrella. You also have curse in general terms of impersonating the opposite sex, and we had spoken about, the curse of Allah's Messenger is on the effeminate male and the masculine female, who are, obviously as we said, that's someone who is affectively doing so to impersonate, as opposed to someone who has some intrinsic qualities they were born with, in which case those people aren't blameworthy, although they can't go beyond that. 

And so, you know, all of these rulings, or all these proofs are general that remind us that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala created us a certain way, (وصوركم فأحسن صوركم ) - that Allah subhanah wa ta’ala fashioned you and shaped you, and He perfected you in that shaping and crafting of you, and making you who you are. So this is where the prohibition comes from, and these are some of the core proofs that are mentioned, they’re not all of them. But it perhaps gives some insight into the type of thing that scholars think about when they actually think about this question of surgical adjustments vis-à-vis a person's sex and genitalia, top and bottom surgeries and all of that. 

Now, the second part of this, is there a differentiation made between intersex individuals compared to individuals with gender dysphoria? Absolutely, there is. Well, it depends on the type of intersex individual obviously, when we talk about disorders of sexual development, in general, if any of those disorders are amenable to surgical correction or improvement, then most scholarly councils that I've come across permitted them without qualification or concern. Likewise, with the situation of the hermaphrodite, you know, someone that has both genitalia or something like that, if there's surgical corrections that can be done to remove the additional appendage, then, again, most scholarly councils that I've read have not had any issue at all with that. If there's something that is being done in a corrective capacity for a disorder of sexual development or physiological abnormality, then no problem. But if we're dealing with something that is merely or purely psychological, then that is something that requires a psychological treatment and address as opposed to something that should be medicalized. And Allah knows best.

Waheed  22:46
Jazak Allah khair. And everything that you said right now is kind of different from the position of Shi’ite Iran, when it comes to the distinction between the nafsāniyyāt (relating to the self) and the badaniyyāt (relating to the body) that you touched upon earlier. So it's kind of legalized in Iran. But it's also very important to mention at this point that, you know, there are a lot of Shi‘a scholars and individuals who don't really follow the Iranian discourse. Because there's a misconception that “Oh, in Shi’a Islam, this is allowed!” No, it needs to be clarified that this is particularly done in Iran, and even within Iran, there has been a lot of backlash or disagreements among the Shi’ite scholars, correct?

Mobeen  23:32
Correct. Again, it seems as though, as I said, it's Khomeini who has his own fatwa on it. There are others that have commented on this, and I haven't really surveyed them in a great amount of detail, like for example Ayatollah Sistani, who is also considered a very highly regarded scholar, Ayatollah Shirazi as well. So, I suggest, if someone is Shi’a, they should probably consult with a scholar on this from their own tradition that can give them some details on what position is endorsed or endorsable. And, again, you know, the sort of impression that I've seen, based on my own readings, is that even if someone takes a Sistani fatwa, at that point, there is not even an option, you are deterministically for the rest of your life going to be the opposite sex – rather, you are that sort of internal, nafsāniy, whatever is within your batin, that is who you are, and that has to be adjusted, and that's for the rest of your life. And so it is, in some ways, quite heavy handed. Allah knows best. That's just the impression that I have.

Waheed  24:50
Indeed. And another question would be, we know that “third gender” communities exist in Muslim countries, like in Pakistan and Bangladesh, there are the Hijras, and in Indonesia there are the Wari’as. And you spoke about this in particular in part two of the article. So what would be the Islamic understanding or position with regards to these particular communities? How do we view them, and what are their “rights” within Islam, so to speak?

Mobeen  25:20
Yeah, that's a good question. So, I think these are complicated questions, especially when we start dealing with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the sort of Hijra phenomenon there. I think, on the one hand, people will be quite surprised if they've never been to these countries by the presence of what seems to be a fairly sizable, I mean, large enough that it's noticeable on the streets in different locales, some neighborhoods, it's known to have more Hijra individuals - we're talking about biological men, usually adults who impersonate women, they dress like them, they wear makeup, wigs, things like that, and are quite flamboyant and brazenly feminine behaving. Indonesia's Warias are sort of different types of community I'll get to, but I should say that I think, and this is just based on my own readings, I think what you see in the subcontinent of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, is an outgrowth of a particular socio-economic circumstance of widespread poverty, widespread human dispossession and the emergence of a particular type of dysfunction that seems to offer people a way to live in a society that they may not otherwise survive in. 

Many children are conscripted and abducted into a life of Hijra for the rest of their life. Sometimes they're even castrated at such a young age, so it's quite tragic in terms of the stories themselves. And these Hijras end up subsisting through a couple of means: one is through simple begging on the streets, and they oftentimes have a mode of begging that can be quite provocative, sometimes they'll also use profanity, and things like that. I recall a few years ago coming across a state department report from a diplomat or someone who had been stationed in Pakistan or India for a couple of years and came back and actually wrote about this. They actually commented on just how profane and inappropriate some of the language can be from the Hijras, I think they do that so people just kind of throw them money to get them away. So, it becomes a way for them to at least make some money doing that. 

The other thing that happens or has happened is that there are many, many superstitions that revolve around these figures. So good omens and bad omens. When you have a child, that child can have a good life if a Hijra comes to the home after the birth and recites a few prayers, and things like that, and does a few ceremonial activities. So many of them are contracted to do these types of things. There are also things that are considered bad omens, like being buried in the same cemetery as a Hijra. In fact, many of the Hijra janazahs (funerals), when one of them would pass away, they would do the janazah prayer at nighttime and they would bury them, or sometimes they wouldn't even do the janazah prayer, they would just bury them at nighttime in cemeteries by a handful of people, so people wouldn't see it happening, because of all of the superstitious notions surrounding them. 

There’s also the very active part of the Hijra life, which is simple prostitution. Many of the Hijras do make a fair amount of money prostituting themselves out for men who are otherwise married with kids, but, you know, perhaps have this side life that’s hidden from their family and all that, where they basically prostitute out Hijras, and acquire them for anything where they can manhandle them and have sex, and this and that. As I said, they're quite traumatic stories, there's some stories where Hijras were interviewed, and they talk about how often they end up actually being raped and not even paid. Things like that. I mean, it's a very, very tragic situation in a lot of ways. 

So, the Hijras are, in many ways, qualitatively different than what we might think of, in the West, with gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria, which is a larger cause, it's sort of a celebrated cause. It is a liberation program, a program of human liberation, identity formation, and identity acquisition. It is also the expression of the internal self and living your truth and all of that, right? That those are all things that are baked into the discourse and concept of transgenderism in the West, whereas the Hijra phenomenon is not really that, and most Hijras don't really conceive of themselves as women in the way we would think about it. They're not saying “We are, in fact, women, you know, Hijra women are women” or trans women are women. That's very much a Western notion. That's not what Hijras are going after. 

Now, because of just everything that's going on, there's a lot of mistreatments towards them as well, and there have been efforts that have been made, especially in recent years by the governments of some of these countries, to help remedy the general state of things. Some of those remedies revolve around things that are really not terribly controversial, but I think have been scandalized, partly because they've been covered by left wing Western media outlets, that have reframed those efforts as trans-affirming rights movements in the Muslim world, and once things get covered that way, you get a counter reaction that tends to oppose those things in those countries. And it’s quite unfortunate the way that the West can totally contaminate everything it touches, especially media outlets, it’s just so incredibly dull and dumb, that you have these activist reporters that cannot seem to read and understand other societies and cultures outside of anything but their own predefined, prefabricated, and westernized ideals of what is taking place. There's no sensitivity to the idea that these people are just not like you, their culture is not yours, and to continue to refract Western culture on their society, in fact, is profoundly problematic, right? And that's why you know, Huffington Post and all these people will cover these stories in ways that totally distorts what is, in fact, being done. 

You know, whether those efforts are done by scholarly councils or governments are sometimes very rudimentary things, the idea that Hijras shouldn't be attacked and shouldn't be subjected to violence, and to have their basic rights, or something like that, in society, and those types of things are being done often in response to the fact of dispossession and oppression, street violence and all of that. That's not a terribly controversial thing, and yet, here it comes out as this big movement and big positive development for trans rights. And the reason that many of these groups are so eager to draw on these communities and what's going on in these countries is that they want to use them to try to portray transphobia as something that is uniquely Western, mostly white, mostly colonial, mostly patriarchal, right? They have that whole discourse that “that's all it is”, and anybody that has moral reservations around transgenderism is really some sort of a bigot, and “Look at these very enlightened people who are nonwhite and non-colonial, etc., they're able to be at peace with trans figures in their community and even advance rights that the West doesn't recognize”, and all of that. 

And some leftist Muslims in the West will leap onto these stories very quickly, especially Western Muslim academics, they seem to be the worst culprits in this regard. Although they're certainly not alone. A lot of Muslims will try to prove they’re sort of trans-affirming bona fides by drawing on these communities, instead of recognizing that, in many respects, it's actually quite tragic what's going on, and in others, you know, we're talking about a social issue that is much more deeply seated and is not what we think of when we think of the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner story of transgenderism, which are quite prominent here. 

In Indonesia, the Waria community is a bit different, I don't know as much about them. What I do know, however, is that when the largest scholarly committees in Indonesia have been pressed with questions about the Waria, they responded firmly and in principle with the Shari’ah, that that being as takhannuth, effeminacy being prohibited, and that the Waria community itself is engaged in sin. That's what they've written. So, when it comes to religious views and verdicts, scholars have generally been in lockstep, we don't really have any departures from this for major ‘Ulama councils or major scholars. And Allah knows best.

Waheed  35:15
Jazak Allah khairan. While doing the research, when we were writing and drafting part two, I came across the late Sh. Fayṣal Mawlawī’s position, and I remember I was talking to an individual who struggles with severe gender dysphoria and history of suicidal attempts, severe self-harm and a lot of mental health issues, and that individual told me that when they read the fatwa, they felt seen for the first time. And I'm just going to read the fatwa, which we added as a footnote in part two of the article, and it was by the late Sh. Fayṣal Mawlawī from Lebanon, who issued a fatwa in 2002 permitting sex change surgery for someone with severe gender identity disorder. He proffered this permission as a last resort in the interest of preserving life, foregrounding significant psychological and psychiatric interventions as a precursor to surgical consideration. It should be noted here that this fatwa is without precedent in the Sunni tradition and that it endorses the specious notion of gender (as a psychological state) having priority over biological sex. In this, Mawlawī did not regard sex change surgery as a dispensation born of necessity (ḍarūra) but instead as a permission akin to that of treating superfluous organs, viewing the dysphoric individual the same as a patient with an extra toe on his foot or finger on his hand. Mawlawī’s fatwa was originally published on his website, which is no longer active, but the fatwa has been cited by several secondary sources. And the gist of it is that if the person has tried psychological interventions, medications, support, and for a long period of time that has not helped, and they underwent medical evaluation, and they're at the risk of self-harm or suicide, then in that particular, very narrow case, which is a minority within a minority, then sex change surgeries may be permitted. Now, given all of this, how do we see it - is this considered to be a minority opinion within the Islamic discourse? How do we view that? 

Mobeen  37:20
Yeah, it's a good question. So, I'll say a couple of things. I think that, first of all, the Sheikh’s fatwa itself seems to have more to do with how do we actually determine whether or not someone has gender identity disorder, how do we get to determining that? Well, we have to go through many, many means, we have to have independent evaluations, etc., and once that thorough process is done, at that point, can we make a conclusive decision about sex change surgery. It has less to do with the sort of ḍarūra-based circumstance of someone literally being on the edge of life or death; it has more to do with trying to arrive at a reliable determination as to whether or not that person is really, really suffering from gender identity disorder. That seems to be my read of it, which is, I think, again, a bit of a different type of fatwa than someone who says, “Well, if someone's really on the edge, and, you know, they're in a place where they're going to take their life, and this is the only alternative to save their life, we can provide them this dispensation on a contingent basis for individuals that literally have no other option.” That seems to be a different type of fatwa than what he was getting at. 

Having said that, again, I think there's a couple of things here. Sh. Fayṣal Mawlawī (may Allah have mercy on his soul), with due respect to him, I'm not sure that his opinion would really rise to the level of being considered a minority fatwa. And I say this because he was a scholar, I think he passed away in 2011, may Allah have mercy on his soul, and I have spoken to his students about this fatwa and him, in particular, as well, and I think, in fact, they've even said that he's not someone who would fall in the same category of the others that we've discussed here, i.e. Khomeini, Tantawi, and Jād al-Ḥaqq, people can differ with those scholars in important ways, but they were independently authoritative enough to furnish fatawa that, on issues like this, i.e. nawaz’I and contemporary matters, that come to be seen as a sort of introduction or incorporation into the major scholarly discourse of this issue. 

I think Sh. Fayṣal Mawlawī, in fact, was a very activist scholar, which isn't a bad thing, I'm not using that term in a negative way. He came out of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was very focused on political issues, in fact, many of his speeches - I think he went on al-Jazeera a couple of times – they were all focused on sort of Muslim political affairs, which he was heavily invested in, heavily invested in the Muslim European experience, subsistence of Muslims in there. He wrote a couple of books. So, again, his life was not focused on the in-depth scholarly activity of some of the other scholars that we might look at today, like a mufti Taqiy or someone like that, where thier life is bound around writing, researching, and doing rigorous scholarly work and producing books, and all of that. So, the question is, can a figure like this produce a fatwa that can stand on its own two feet? And the real issue is, well, it really requires someone that has a bit more stature to them, or has been produced through a council that people can look at and say, “Well, you know, this scholarly council produced something that is really important and rigorous when it comes to scholarship, and something that really needs to be reviewed and taken into consideration."

And so I think that really hasn't happened in this fatwa. In addition to that, I’ll just say that the fatwa itself is not included in any of his books, it's not included through any of his formal publications. It is, you know, discoverable on certain websites. And so it seems to be the type of fatwa that was really never engaged with, which also makes it a challenge insofar as we're talking about a phenomenon that the Sheikh may or may not have understood to various degrees, and that really didn't bring his sort of fatwa in that situation and integrate a conversation with the scholarly community around such that it could be reviewed and spoken about, and things like that. So, I think it's difficult to really take that fatwa on its own and assert it as representative of a major minority position. You know, in the Islamic tradition, we have the notion of a scholar may have a shaz/شاذ view, or a strange/eccentric/odd view, a solitary position. But even when we talk about things like that, we tend to talk about those things with major authorities, like Ibn Taymiyya (may Allah have mercy on his soul), Ibn Hazm (may Allah have mercy on his soul), these sort of towering figures and polymaths who can do ijtihad. And even then, more often than not, those solitary positions are actually not accepted. Sometimes, there will be people that endorse them, but that is increasingly rare. More often than not, there's sort of an understanding that these people were a bit Maverick in their careers and with their writings and their thought, and that, a lot of times, their positions come from a place that doesn't necessarily subscribe to traditional forms of ‘usul, or legal propriety, or whatever the case may be in. So, in many cases, even when they are sort of on an island when it comes to their positions, they're not necessarily the types of positions the scholars will necessarily want to get behind, simply because they represent the solitary view, although in other cases, people say, “Hey, look, this is a solitary view, but it's a solitary view from Ibn Hazim, or from Ibn Taymiyyah, or from a great scholar X.” In that case, you know, we can endorse it for our times and places, or at least make mention of it as something that needs to be considered more broadly.  

That tends to not happen with figures that really didn't cut the same sort of presence on the scholarly stage, and so, you know, again, I think there are a lot of questions here. In fact, you know, one of his students mentioned to me, he said, “Look, I'm not even sure that I would necessarily gloss it, only because the fact that the Sheikh could not or did not himself really have the opportunity to discuss this issue, nor do we know how he would have necessarily responded to that in an environment and climate where transgenderism has become a really popular public and international topic.” I think in that situation, to them, it almost seemed a bit unfair to attribute something to him solely on the basis of what may have been a sort of fatwa given in a very casual environment, something that he responded to, without really having done a tremendous amount of due diligence. Again, we don't know all of the factors that surrounded it and how it came about, but we do know that it's not something that is extremely long, it does certainly seem to give some thought to the question, so I don't want to treat it as if it's just like this perfunctory whatever. But at the same time, it wouldn't fall in the same category as the Muslim World Assembly of Scholars producing a fatwa on this, or the scholars of Dar al-‘Uluum coming together, or the Islamic Scholars of Indonesia, and others producing fatawa on this. And Allah knows best.

Waheed  44:58
Jazak Allah khairan. I'm going to revisit this topic, inshaAllah, in the next episode with Sh. Mustafa Umar, but I wanted to get your general opinion on this. 

Mobeen  45:04
No, no, and he's definitely a good person to talk with this around, I think he will probably have some good insights too, mashaAllah.

Waheed  45:11
Barak Allah feek. 

45:20
Now we get to the second half of the episode, and we're going to be talking about the transgender movements nowadays and the ripple effects that we see. So, earlier on in the season, we have spoken about the gay liberation movement that rose in tandem with many radical feminist movements and how we are witnessing a lot of the ripple effects of their agendas. My question to you is, how similar and how different is the trans movement in terms of its origin and lobbying, in comparison with the gay liberation movement, if you want to talk about the radical feminist movements, or even the sexual revolution? And what is the end result in mind, if there is any end result? Because we're seeing the ripple effects, and they're huge. So what would you say in terms of that?

Mobeen  46:07
Yes. So, I think that there are different contentions or ideas about when did the transgender movement kick off? Or when do we really look at transgender advocacy as having been a thing? Some people would say that it dates back to the ‘80s, or perhaps even earlier, and that what we're seeing in the current space is just a continuation of a long and hard-fought movement that continues to struggle and try to assert and discover and find its own rights and public affirmation, similar to the gay rights movement. I think that's a bit of a specious assertion, I don't know that that is really sustainable through any historical reading of what's taking place or any objective reading of what's occurred. 

The transgender movement that we're seeing today really picked up after the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner case. So, we're talking about something that has been especially acute over the past decade, maybe decade and a half. In terms of similarity to the gay rights movement, it's very similar in terms of its advocacy and program. In fact, it's following that playbook almost to a tee. So, we're talking about the initial stages of asserting something as immutable, constructing the public identity which has already been put into effect, the cultural program which is an aggressive part of the movement today, the reconfiguration of language, so changing the way we think about terms or inventing new terms. This is a well-worn script, and I think what we're seeing here is just that script repeating itself, even the notion of biological rootedness, all of that's coming up again with transgenderism, simply in a different way, although it's all following the same trajectory, as far as I can tell.

Waheed  48:02
Right. And also the way that they've influenced pop culture, the media, even educational systems, and therapy and psychology, it's the same thing happening all over again, when it comes to that. 

Mobeen  48:12
Oh yeah, no question. In fact, what they've done in the past decade and a half certainly trumps what the gay rights movement was able to do in the first 30/40 years of its existence. It actually took much longer for them [i.e. latter] to get celebrities “coming out of the closet”, it was sort of the Ellens and Elton Johns of the world that began that, or the accommodations in schools, that has just happened in the last couple of years. For transgenderism, it’s already there, with far, far less time and availability, it's almost just riding the gay rights coattails, and that's kind of what they’re doing right now.

Waheed  48:55
For sure. So the gay liberation movement, in other words, actually paved the way for the trans movement, and kind of made it easier for them to go ahead with their own agendas, so to speak.

Mobeen  49:04
Absolutely. I mean, in the public eye, they’re a single thing, “LGBT”, either you’re pro-LGBT or not, and there's no “LGB”, there's no way to just look at it that way. So if you're going to be an ally, if you're going to affirm something like the LGBT movement and really stand on their side, you got to stand on the side of the whole movement, such as intersectionality and allyship protocol, everything else that comes into effect here.

Waheed  49:33
It's all-or-nothing. Absolutely. What sources would you recommend for individuals who want to understand the trans movement better? We know that there aren't a lot of sources available, they're either already pro-LGBT, but not in a sense of, you know, we want like an objective understanding of the matter from well, I wouldn't say from an Islamic lens, because I doubt there's anything out there.. But rather to understand this movement better, from your research, what would you recommend? 

Mobeen  50:04
Yeah, well, you know, I think what's tough about that question is that the discourse on transgenderism has moved so far along that even websites and figures and scholars that are sort of trans critical, are not trans critical in all respects, in the sense that they do not foreclose or outright reject possibility of sex change surgery, they don't seem to approach this issue from a deeply moral perspective, they don't really have any substantial consternation or reservations around people going through sex change surgeries if they have to. And that's what they look at. Their objection and concern as well is when do they have to? And they do have a lot of reservations over what's going on in schools and the targeting of children, and the inducing of gender confusion, and the reflexive idea that surgical adjustments or modifications are uncritically positive, and the only way is in which people can be affirmed, or that affirmative therapy is the only right approach. So, they're critical of many things within the transgender movement, but they're not, you know, outright opposed to the whole idea of transgenderism. In many cases, they just say, “Look, we think, if it is more organically being accommodated, it would be a very, very rare, very small, very minority phenomenon, as opposed to something that really is getting shoved down the throats of everybody, and it's rising to very high levels.” 

And so there are some people who have written on this, but again, they write on it from the perspective of its advocacy arm, more so than an outright opposition to transgenderism as an entire category of thought, right? So those people who have written on it from sort of that vantage point are many. You do have some sexologists and psychotherapists in this space, like Ray Blanchard, Ken Zucker, and Michael Bailey who are interesting figures to read. Lisa Littman as well. You also have recent books that have been written, you have Ryan Anderson from the Heritage Foundation who's written When Harry Became Sally, which is an interesting read. You also have Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, I think it was delisted from Amazon, and that actually might be true for Ryan Anderson’s book as well. So, you have a couple of books that have been written in that vein. 

There are a couple of websites as well that are pretty decent. I think there's one website, it’s called 4thWaveNow, it's managed by someone who goes under a pseudonym - I can't remember the pseudonym that they write under - but he/she actually publishes a fair number of scholarly discussions on it, as well as others. Again, it's not fundamentally and outrightly totally opposed to transgenderism, but it's really, really critical of the activist arm, the way in which it's targeting children, the way in which it is targeting many girls and trying to address their different insecurities by pushing them into a life of social, surgical, and medical gender transitioning. And so there's a lot of opposition to that, and those are some of the resources if people are interested, they can check them out. 

I think, in general, the “part two” we put together, actually, that article is, in fact, a very good resource, if people want to get a set of literature on this topic and learn more about it. It's a very detailed article, obviously, we brought a lot of material together, in terms of, sociology, psychology, medicine, I mean, it is not just “Hey, here's halal and haram”, it's not a Jeremiad against it. I think it's pretty careful in the way it addresses everything, and I think for people who are looking to understand this, I think it does a fair job, more than a fair job in providing a very lengthy and detailed treatment of the topic for Muslims who really want to understand it.

Waheed  54:29
Yeah, I’d say so myself, absolutely. Alhamdulillah. Jazak Allah khairan for your answer. Now, speaking of pop culture, we see nowadays the normalization of drag queens, for example, right? It's becoming more and more mainstream, you go on YouTube, you find them. You watch a movie, they're there. The story of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, which, as you've mentioned here and in the article, it was sort of the spark that kind of allowed a lot of things to happen and to normalize the trans movement. Most recently, the famous actress from Canada, Ellen Page, she was known to be a “lesbian”, and then recently she underwent transitioning into a male, “Elliot page”, and other examples of that. 

We also see, other than pop culture, the effects on the school curricula where kindergarteners and primary school students are taught that gender is fluid, there are multiple genders, you know, the gingerbread man, for example, and even drag queens are coming to read stories to little kids. The trans movement is also influencing laws, like the bathroom bills, sports even, who gets to decide who's male and female at the Olympics, etc. So, we see all of that. Now, if I were to ask you, in your experience, how are these and other manifestations of the trans movement influencing society and impacting Muslim communities, in particular, when we talk about family units, schools, academia, Muslim scholarship even, and our mosques and the places of worship? How would you respond to that?

Mobeen  56:08
Well, I would say when it comes to families, schools, and academia, Muslims are no different than anyone else in terms of the types of impacts and challenges that we're dealing with. What we're seeing with this overwhelming and public trans movement is a radical rise in the rate of gender dysphoria. I mean, something that used to happen at a very low rate of occurrence, we're talking about very low percentages, and was almost exclusively a phenomenon that occurred for adult men. So, point zero zero something percent or point zero something percent of adult men would experience this, is now being experienced by almost 2%, and especially teenage girls who are now the majority of those that are coming out as gender dysphoric. That is a tremendous shift, especially when you add on to that the rise in childhood gender dysphoria, we're talking about children who aren't even sexually developed to have a sort of more deeper concept of being a gender, they're not even developed enough to have that idea, and they're being indoctrinated by this gender confusion at a young age and the urge to take on the sort of social transition by parents who have been led to believe that they're helping their children when they're doing this, and by schools, counselors, and teachers who want to provide an affirming space. And so all this is being done in the name of empathy and care, and providing support. But what it's really doing is advancing various forms of dysfunction and exacerbating transgenderism overall and proliferating its presence.

So, for families themselves, we're getting many, many more cases where parents or families are finding themselves in situations with gender dysphoric children or gender dysphoric family members. And within schools themselves, you have policies now that explicitly state and urge teachers, counselors, and others to work with children in schools who have gender dysphoria, and to help them if they need to transition, because everyone has to stand behind affirmative care and affirmative therapy, and that they not only don't have to tell the parents of anything that's going on, most guidance and policies that's being provided explicitly states not to, they're encouraged not to do so. They are told in no uncertain terms that if you tell parents that their children are transitioning in school or going by a different name and all of that, within the safe space confines of our institutions, well they could end up homeless, they could end up on the street, they could be subject and victim of violence, and so why would you want to be responsible for that? And you are under no legal or moral or other obligation to tell parents, and some schools will hold teachers responsible, who do tell parents. So that's a really, really scary and radical situation where you can have teachers that basically work with students, and counselors and therapists that work with young children to float ideas of gender transitioning by them, work with them to transition. So they sort of plant the seed, they work with them through it, they give them a new name, they construct all of this, they produce this setting in school, all of this can take place, and everybody can be in on it, except for the parents themselves. 

And so, we're not only talking about the challenge of, you know, the restroom issue, which is a challenge, or athletics, or just Jimmy coming to school one day as Sarah and dressing like a girl and everyone in school suddenly having to support and affirm and all of that, and parents would be in on it. But we're also talking about something that is so draconian and also relies on and traffics in a great deal of concealment and deception when it comes to its own relationship to parents and the rights of parents. So it's quite extreme there in those respects. So, that doesn't even begin to talk about the incorporation of trans and LGBT teaching into curriculums. So, you know, when I was growing up in public school, we were taught about homosexuality, just about everybody in my generation was, and it was a pro-homosexual teaching, it wasn't something that was taught in a way that was stigmatized. At the same time, it was taught as part of a single module. So, we learned about in high school, it was taught as part of Family Life Education, parents were allowed to opt their children out of that class if they wanted to, and a number of parents did. Again, it was one module, it wasn't the whole year, so you wouldn't be missing the whole year of school, you'd be missing a few classes and given alternatives, and usually that class was done during PE. So, if you weren't in there, you'd be in PE playing sports and all that. So it wasn't something where you were academically disadvantaged or stigmatized or alienated on account of simply being held out of a couple of classes or not being put in a couple of classes. 

Today, what's happened with the LGBT curriculum integration is now something that nests itself and integrates itself into history, science and English. So, what literature are you reading at school? What literature are you being assigned? How is biology being taught when it comes to men and women? Yes, many schools are now teaching gender identity, that is that. When it comes to history, now we’re talking about trans-history and queer-history, that is now part of the civil rights struggle, or as part of greater world movements. So, all of these things now, you know, whereas you used to be able to, as a religious family that has moral objection to homosexuality and transgenderism, used to be able to say, “Look, I just want to opt my kids out of that module”, and you know, that happens in high school, and for the most part, I can sort of work with my child to reinforce our values in the household and make sure that we're doing everything right here, and that can help them through it, and the only other challenge they have outside of school’s doing is the friends that they're making, and other kids at school and all that, well, schools can't control that, we sort of understand that, right? But for the most part, it seemed to be something that was at least somewhat more manageable, to now something that, well, this is going to be a sustained part of their educational existence, starting at a young age, you're going to have a full administration and set of teachers who are very, very pro, stridently LGBT, and it's just going to keep a recurring and recurring throughout their academic years until they graduate from high school. And it starts at, as we said, really young ages. 

So the schools themselves have become a major, major challenge, and “challenge” is just putting it mildly. I mean, I think certainly in many Western countries, we're coming close to a situation where I think for religious families that have deep, deep moral reservations and disagreements on these types of issues, you're going to have to start thinking very hard about homeschool and Islamic schooling or religious schooling of various sorts, just to keep your kid away from it. Because, you know, in a public school, you really are in a situation where you're taking a very, very high risk, you're taking a huge risk on an issue like this. So what alternatives do we have now? Especially given the fact that these things don't seem to be letting up, and they only appear to be getting worse, and we're just finding ourselves in the middle of a social and cultural context, where this is a culture war issue, and everyone hates each other, and they're going to fight about this forever, and if you try to come out and say, “Look, I don't want to be in the middle of this, like a vicious fight. All I want to do is make sure that my kids can be raised with our morals and values, and I don't want school to subvert that or impose their values or the value of the state on my children.” I should have the right to teach my kids about sex and gender and everything else. I don't want schools to try to take on that type of responsibility. I just don't. I want my kid to be able to use a bathroom in accordance with his/her own sex, right? That doesn't seem like it's a lot to ask, and there doesn't seem to be a way to actually have that type of discussion without getting into really, really emotionally intense discussions, where people are starting to throw out or have been throwing out words like “bigot” and “hate” and “transphobe”, and everything else. Suddenly, now, you're on the ropes looking like a sort of modern day Nazi because of something like that. So I think these school issues are very, very critical right now in terms of where we are. 

As for Academia, I guess it just depends on what one studies, I think in religious studies, you're definitely going to come across this, the humanities, liberal arts, etc., I think the natural sciences have still sort of, not all of them, but a lot of them have still kind of kept it at bay to a certain degree. I think for other fields, you're probably going to come across this in corporate life. So even if you're an accountant, or you do IT or something like that, you're probably going to come across this in whatever corporation you end up working for. So, I think people should be prepared for that. But in some respects, you're more of an adult by then, so hopefully, you can compartmentalize better. For children, obviously, and the school stuff, I see that as quite damaging, and really almost at a different level of challenge. 

Now, your last question about Muslim scholars and scholarship. Obviously, when something is this hot of an issue, when it's a lightning rod for controversy, what happens is that many Muslim scholars don't want to write about it and don't want to speak about it, and there are so many concerns about, “Well, if I speak about it, what happens if my clip or a recording comes out, takes what I've said about it, and suddenly gets circulated and makes me look like a bigot or discriminatory or something like that?” In European countries, there have been scholars that have lost their job, and some have been deported because of rhetoric and statements that they've said against homosexuality or transgenderism. That's happened in France, that's happened in Belgium, that's happening in countries throughout Europe. So, it's not a trivial concern. In the US and Canada and some of these countries, I think in the UK as well, the larger concern is less of a legal one and more of a social concern, right? What's the social fallout going to be? What social cost am I going to pay? And for a lot of Muslim scholars and others, I think they make a calculation which says, you know, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. It's not worth coming out on an issue like this if it means that I and my community are going to be pilloried, and we're going to be in the crosshairs of these aggressive leftist activists, and then even like conservative Republican ones who de facto hate Muslims and are going to jump on it too, and suddenly, you know, there's like a bipartisan movement of hostility against me. So there's a lot of fear that gets baked into this, and so what happens within mosques and places of worship is that these things just don't get spoken about. 

The last thing I'll mention briefly, as brief as I can, on what we're seeing and how it's impacting mosques and places of worship, that in recent months, especially, and I can say this firsthand, as I've been in contact with a number of Imams on this, and for people who aren't familiar with this term, they should go ahead and read the paper. But you've had more what appeared to be men who are autogynephiles, who are smitten with the idea of living as Muslim women. So they're interested in Islam from the perspective of someone who wants to wear a niqab and wants to be this very domestic, modest, and shy woman and play that role in society, and they're more interested in that than they are in things like the Akhira (Hereafter) or the pillars of Islam, or the actual creed of what Islam says, right? So, the beliefs of Islam itself are actually less important, they'll say, “I want to become Muslim and wear a niqab and hijab, if I convert, can I start coming to the masjid and sitting in the sisters’ section? Will your Masjid allow me?” Like they're starting from the position of wanting to be a “Muslim woman”, and less from the position of “I want to actually be a Muslim." 

Waheed  1:09:52
Right. And for the listeners to just know that autogynephilia which has been mentioned in the part two article is when a biological male is interested in the living experience of a female, not necessarily transitioning, but rather living as a female in terms of wardrobe and behavior, and it's not necessarily limited to an Islamic context or religious context, but rather having that experience. And that gives them some sort of a pleasure, it's more of a desire at the end of the day. So just an FYI, for anyone who doesn’t know.

Mobeen  1:10:24
Yeah, it's sort of an outgrown fetish. It's sort of embodying the female and taking on female embodiment. So, there is that, and those situations can be quite strange, because I think the impulse of most scholars is to say, “Well, you never want to prevent somebody from converting to Islam, even if they have some sins in their lives that they're doing.” If someone comes and says, “I want to be a Muslim” and they still drink alcohol, for instance, I would say, “Okay, you’re Muslim, and later on, we'll work on your alcohol issue or work on this issue.” You don't have to drop everything you're doing day one, right? Sometimes it takes time. Islam is a process, it's not an event. But this seems to be different insofar as many of these people seem to be less interested in Islam itself. They seem to be less interested in the Qur’an, less interested in the Sunnah, less interested in the Prophet (PBUH) and far more interested in the ‘abaya, more interested in the hijab, more interested in the niqab, more interested in being with the Muslim women, right? Like that seems to be where the desire is, and in some ways, it's understandable, because of the way in which Muslim dress can allow these people to integrate themselves as women in a way that's more convincing and does not elicit as many questions. Because when you're wearing niqab, no one really knows what you look like. So if you are not somebody that can afford really expensive plastic surgeries, and doesn't want to go out, and many of these people go through some surgical alteration, you start wearing makeup, you do all that, and you still kind of look like an in-between, you don't look convincingly female, you still seem to have many masculine characteristics and features, and so it's difficult, even after hormones, you may still have facial hair coming in, and it's really tough to just rid yourself of your biology in this way. It feels like you're constantly fighting this uphill battle, and it becomes a major source of anxiety and despair. You're sort of trying to tell people that you're a female, but you don't really look it, and you don't feel it individually, and you recognize that other people aren't convinced and don't look at you that way, and so that can be quite isolating, alienating, and it can lead to depression and trauma, and all of that can build up. 

And so, wearing the niqab can, in many ways, resolve those problems, right? Because all of that leaves the equation, all that's gone. We can take all that and put it out the window, and all we're doing is walking in, “I don't have to put in all of this effort just to be accepted as a woman, I can just loosely throw on an ‘abaya, a loose robe, cover my face with a niqab and just walk right into the sisters’ section and be one of the sisters!” That prospect itself is a very attractive one. So that is something that we're seeing more and more of and trying to figure out how to confront and really deal with situations where those types of people are coming to the community and saying, “I want to be part of your community. I want to come to your masjid.” And I think that that's become really a big challenge now.

Waheed  1:14:02
Jazak Allah khairan for elaborating on all of this. The prospects are really scary, what's happening nowadays is just crazy. Subhan Allah, may Allah help us, all of us. Ameen. I wanted to ask you something, I will talk to Sh. Mustafa about this, inshaAllah, in detail, but given your experiences, I wanted to ask you, how do you personally deal with the push for full affirmation, so to speak, in your community, what you're seeing in the States, for example? Because we know that you have kids, for example, in their schools, or in your workplace, etc., we know that, nowadays, anything short of full affirmation is considered to be bigotry or transphobia, or whatever else, and within your community, the Muslim community, what are we doing, if anything, to actually be dealing with all of that?

Mobeen  1:14:53
So I can only speak for myself, obviously, in my family, we homeschool our children. All of my children are homeschooled. If we weren't homeschooling, we'd probably put them in an Islamic school, that would be the alternative. But we homeschool our children. My kids are young, and so that’s how we deal with it when it comes to kids. In terms of workplaces, there's only so much you can do, right? At a minimum, you don't want to risk your job on it, for the most part, I work in IT, and so, in a lot of ways, it's not an ever-present issue, most of your day-to-day is just working with technology and talking to people about technology and not really talking to them about LGBT issues and stuff. That way, your day-to-day sort of career, it doesn't have to be just saturated in this pool, I think that's different for people who may have jobs where diversity, equity and inclusion is just a bigger part of the role and is an inescapable part of their day-to-day. I think that's different, obviously, for them. But you know, you just kind of maintain your own resolve, your own commitments, your own principles, and that's kind of it. I mean, in day-to-day, you try to be a good employee, a good coworker, try to execute on the things that are asked of you, and be a person who's productive, hardworking, respected, and treat others with respect and care, and that's all you can be in the workplace. 

In terms of community more broadly, in terms of the Muslim community, I think many communities in the West, especially in the US, are still like very much behind the eight ball on issues like this. Most of the communities that I've seen have not even begun having discussions on these types of issues. Many of them are scared, they're scared about how they're going to be viewed, they're scared about how they're going to be seen, they're confused, many of them don’t, especially a lot of our parents who migrated here from other countries, I think many of them don't fully understand or get what's going on. And so there's that as well. And so it's going to take time, you know, there's a hope certainly that many of them would begin to develop the metal needed to maybe take a risk on issues like this and absorb the costs, and recognize that our principles and our faith and the transmission of Islam generationally is more important than some bad PR. 

So, we need in Muslim communities organizations with figures that are willing to speak out on issues like this, we do have a few, we just don't have very many. We need a lot more than what's going on right now from within our communities. That is fact. And it's complicated by the fact that most Muslims, especially activist younger Muslims, but even Muslim communities in general, politically have gone fully to the left or are very much embedded the Democratic Party and all that. So, you know, how much is an issue like this going to jeopardize all of that? It probably will, and so many people are not desirous to compromise or jeopardize their allyships and the type of public and political support that they've grown accustomed to enjoying. So, again, there are a lot of issues that have to be peeled back and dealt with. And I think some of those are uncomfortable discussions and difficult ones for us to have, but we have to have them, we have to have them honestly and forthrightly. We don't have to be contemptuous or hostile to one another, and we can, as brothers and sisters in our community, come to the table as people with shared beliefs and values, and to really think through how we can address this, because we owe it to our children, we owe it to ourselves to really try to get this right. 

In terms of will we get to a point where our religious freedoms are outright denied if we don't agree with them? Probably, I mean, potentially, it really depends, right? I mean, look, the question is, what does that mean? I mean, there's always probably going to be the sort of Amish option, right? Fine, you can be this isolated, un-integrated community that lives in the middle of nowhere and doesn't care to be part of public society or the public square, in which case, you can hold on to whatever values you want. But, you know, don't try to be in the midst of our social, corporate, vocational, political and cultural spaces, and advance ideas and values that are so backwards and out-of-date. And so, whether it is explicitly or de facto prohibited for people, or is just something that is so socially stigmatized that people would never utter those types of views and positions, I think the net effect could potentially be the same and pretty much will be that people won't talk about LGBT except in the most affirming ways. That's really the concern. 

You know, the more silent you are, the more accustomed you get to not speaking on things, the more you basically tell your community that you're scared of even letting people know that you're having a conversation on this, or that you have disagreements about these types of issues, the further along that process is going to go, and you're going to very quickly find yourself at a point where you can't, right? There was a time where you could have, you didn't do so, and now you can’t, and you have to live with those consequences, because you were so scared and imperiled by public scrutiny, that you just didn't do what was necessary to actually defend your own rights as an individual. And Allah knows best.

Waheed  1:20:40
Absolutely. Indeed, Jazak Allah khairan. And the last question that I want to ask you today pertains to the last part of part two article, the conclusion, and I'm just going to read this part, where in the conclusion, it says, “The reality is that for the vast majority of people in the Muslim community, including imams, therapists, physicians, and parents, the topic of transgenderism represents uncharted waters. The majority of counselors and therapists in the Muslim community attend to domestic disputes such as rocky or failing marriages, child–parent tensions, eating disorders and related anxieties, and domestic violence. Some may occasionally find themselves dealing with Muslims who struggle with same-sex attractions, though even this bears little correspondence to individuals who have come to hate their own bodies, their genitalia, their identity, and how God made them—a boy or man whose few moments of ease arise when he wears makeup or dons female undergarments or begins to wear hijab outside the house, a girl or woman who agonizingly “chest binds” to suppress the protrusion of her breasts in order to appear more masculine. How can we minister to such people in a way that does not aggravate their alienation, trauma, and personal despair without violating our core commitments as a moral community or entrenching their dysphoria further? Herein lies the million-dollar question." 

So, my question to you, which is the million-dollar question, what do you think is necessary to help our communities cater to individuals struggling with gender dysphoria in these very turbulent times? How can we help people struggling with these matters find their peace and their “home”, so to speak, what would be recommended? 

Mobeen  1:22:21
Yeah, as I said, I don't know that there is an answer in the sense that, you know, here's just what we need to do. There are probably approaches we can take, there's no perfect solution to these problems, because of how complicated they've all become. You know, intellectually, these aren't difficult problems, right? In some ways we can, you know, just even at the surface level, we can talk to people on sort of a rational basis and say, “Well, hold on. If you're telling me gender is fluid and it's constructed, how can you also tell me that it's so immutable, that this has been your sort of internal agenda from birth, that it can never be changed?” Right, those two things are inherently contradictory. I can ask a question like that and have a rational discussion with people. I can ask somebody, “Well, you know, if you're non-binary, and you're a female, why are you getting a double mastectomy done? We know that men don't have breasts. How do we know that non-binary people don't have that? Who defines what a non-binary person is?”

I mean, we can ask questions about this whole activist thing, what's going on in the name of transgenderism to problematize it intellectually. The problem, however, is not the intellectual part of the problem, as we sort of mentioned here, it is the social issue of individuals who are dealing with really acute forms of psychological despair, and how to tend to them, how to really give them a form of engagement, treat them as individuals to bring them to a place of wholeness. It's possible that some of the lessons we've learned through trying to help Muslims with same-sex attractions can be useful here. And I think they can, because there is a lot here that potentially is intersected by trauma. There's a lot here that's potentially intersected by fractured relationships, or potentially, or possibly, very traumatizing events that occurred in a person's childhood. We really don't know. That's certainly a potential that can be explored. 

There's also the question of how to help people find wholeness. There's also the part of this which relates to identity, right? And all of those things are very deeply intertwined and share considerable overlap with how we've had to and continue to have to really work with people who have same-sex attractions. Now, this is going to be a more minority phenomenon, although for a time potentially going forward, the numbers could be very similar in terms of the number of people who are reporting things like same-sex attractions, and people reporting gender dysphoria, not all of them are going to be the same, right? However, you know, I think that we can try to bring all those lessons and try to employ the best of them, and there's going to be learning along the way, there's going to be trial and error. I think that, as a community, we do our best. We tie our camel, and we put our trust in Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. That's all we can do. 

And I don't think we can allow fear of making the wrong decisions stop us from trying. I think that, you know, usually when people are so overwhelmed with concern, they usually give up, and then what you have is a sort of fatalist defeatism that ends up occurring, because, well, it's just going to happen anyways! No. We have to at least put our best foot forward. And many of these people who actually are reporting gender dysphoria in the Muslim community are coming to Muslims, coming to Imams, coming to Masjids, and they're looking for help, and if they're looking for that type of assistance, we have to at least have a decent way to try to help them, whether it's perfect or not. 

I don't know what that path is going to be. I would hope that there would be people who are confident enough to be trans-critical in the way that affirmative therapy is taught today and say “Look, that's not the framework, that's not the paradigm we're going to operate with. Instead, we're going to evaluate, read the relevant research and studies on these issues, we're going to bring our morals and values to the table and try to adopt something that could potentially become a model for Muslims elsewhere”, and we're going to revisit it, we're going to have a council, and we're going to have groups of people that are in constant conversation, and along the way, we're going to tweak this, we're going to improve on that, we're going to be in dialogue, and we're going to try to form support groups, and we're going to try to do events, and we're going to try to do things to help people along the way, so that those people can find wholeness with who they are, and to find comfort in their own bodies. To get them to realize and recognize that they are perfect as Allah made them, that there's nothing wrong with their physical shape, and that, you know, Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala created them in a way that they can be content with, they can come to love their own body and recognize that there's something profound and beautiful about the human experience, and to recognize that, what they're dealing with when it comes to sort of the internal - there's so much that's within us, right? The heart, the state, the locus of our spiritual existence. That is where we find personal contentment. That's where we find a sense of tranquility. It is in the remembrance of Allah that the hearts find tranquility, right?  

The Prophet (PBUH) said that “in every body is a morsel of flesh. If it is sound, then the entire body is pure, and if it is corrupted, the entire body is corrupted. Indeed, it is the heart.” (ألا وإن في الجسد مضغة إذا صلحت صلح الجسد كله وإذا فسدت فسد الجسد كله ألا وهي القلب). And so, trying to focus on [the fact that] Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala doesn't look at your outer forms, nor does He look at your body, but He looks to what? He looks at your hearts and your deeds. (إنَّ الله لا ينظر إلى صوركم، ولا إلى أموالكم، ولكن ينظر إلى قلوبكم وأعمالكم). As Muslims, we actually have something I think to offer these people within our faith to really get them to reorient the way that they look at who they are internally, their spiritual state, their piety, their uprightness and sense of virtue, the morals and ethics that they're living with. This is how we become people of merit and value, these are the types of things that identity should be grounded in, not in the far more subjective forms of, or actually I should say, far more contentious forms of, “Well, you know, this is my identity, and I want everyone to affirm it!” and things like that. Allah knows best. 

I think a lot of this still, there's a lot of work that has to be done. I don't know that I have all the answers, and I do think that this is one of those areas where a lot of the work that's already been done for those with same-sex attractions can provide us a lot of help and lessons learned, and potentially provide us a starting point, a baseline, that we can work from. And Allah knows best. 

Waheed  1:30:11
Agreed, indeed, and if I were to add to what you said, MashaAllah, beautifully said, Jazak Allah khair. But the work has to be holistic and multidisciplinary, particularly when it comes to individuals with gender dysphoria, and by holistic, I mean looking at the mind, the body, the soul, and the heart as well as the social connections, because Allah created all these five faculties which we need to take care of, and at the same time, multidisciplinary in the case of gender dysphoria, we, as a Muslim community, need to step up and have Imams and scholars talk about this to address the spiritual and the religious aspects, we have to have Muslim therapists who are trained in trauma therapy and other forms of therapy to help those individuals, we have to have physicians, because this topic is intertwined a lot with intersex and the disorders of sexual development. So, we have to have physicians who are well trained in these areas to also combat the agenda that's targeting the medical community as well. As well as parents to raise awareness about these particular topics and to speak about this within the Muslim community. Because if we don't do that, from a multidisciplinary perspective, then the work is not, for me individually, as a person who has been dealing with same-sex attractions, and doing the research and speaking about this, we have to do this, otherwise, it's always going to be deficient, wa Allahu a’alam (and Allah knows best). But this has to be [the case].

Mobeen  1:31:37
Yeah, and you know this better than me, I mean, unfortunately, if a brother were to come to me and say, “I'm struggling with same-sex attractions, is there a therapist that you would recommend I go to in the Muslim community?” I probably wouldn't know where to direct him!

Waheed  1:31:55
Yup! Agreed, unfortunately! 

Mobeen  1:31:59
I wouldn't know where to direct them. I might even discourage it outright. I might say, “Look, just abandon the whole Muslim services!” Let’s just try to find the right person who can help you. Maybe that's probably not where you want to go. It might, in fact, make the situation much worse.” And I've spoken with Muslims who have same-sex attractions who talk about just absolute horror stories in dealing with Muslim therapists who either just told them whatever any non-Muslim would have told them, you know, in terms of “Oh, it's just who you are, this is your identity, embrace it and get over it”, you know, that type of thing. Or, alternatively, you know, they seem to have very little clue about what's going on, no background in it. Again, this is what I sort of mentioned, that most of these people had to deal with situations of domestic violence or divorces, and people were just depressed, and I think they bring a little bit of that playbook to the table, and it's weird and so problematic, because, on the one hand, there's all this pressure to say, “Well, if you're dealing with an issue like gender dysphoria and you need assistance, you should go to a therapist”, and yet, on the other hand, it's like, which therapist? Can we actually find therapists that can actually help these people out doing anything other than affirmative therapy? Who’s going to do that. Where are they? And where are you going to find that with homosexuality? Where are you going to find anybody who's really well versed in reparative therapy and assisting people and working with them in sort of a different way? We don't have many Muslims in that boat. We don't at all, and I don't know that I would ever counsel somebody to go, just given all the stories that I've heard.

Waheed  1:33:40
For sure, but just to give people a little bit of hope, alhamdulillah, that just to kind of end it on a high note. I mean, despite the deficiencies that we have as Muslim communities around the world, there has been a lot of progress being done recently. The momentum has been picking up, alhamdulillah Rabb Al-‘Alameen, I've seen this ever since the 2020 conference that you and I were part of with Sh. Yasir Qadhi, the EPIC conference. A lot of parents, Muslim therapists, especially in the West, and educators and scholars have been reaching out. They want to learn, they want to get educated on these matters to be able to help their communities, and alhamdulillah, slowly but surely, we're going to get to that point, inshaAllah. We don't know, but we're hoping that bi fadl Allah (through the grace of God), inshaAllah, we get to a point where the Muslims in our community who are dealing with same-sex attractions or gender dysphoria can have the right people to turn to and the proper resources. It's going to take time, but inshaAllah we're hopeful. So, let's keep praying!

Mobeen  1:34:41
InshaAllah. Right, that's actually very good. MashaAllah! And that's actually excellent, that people have reached out. I'm actually really happy to hear that, MashaAllah. 

Waheed  1:34:49
Alhamdulillah. It’s all from Allah subhanah wa ta’ala. We're very grateful. 

1:35:00
Br. Mobeen, jazak Allah khairan, you’ve been a wonderful guest over five episodes in this season. I've learned so much from you, jazak Allah khairan, thank you for all of your efforts and all of your time, I'm sure that the audience has benefited so much from all of your commentary and the resources that you've suggested. We look forward to looking more into that. Any last words that you would like to share with us?

Mobeen  1:35:21
You know, the place that I come at a lot of this from, it's really as somebody who's trying to help Muslims in difficult times. At the end of the day, what we want for everybody is a good Afterlife. We want us all to be gathered with the Prophet (PBUH) in the Hereafter. We want to drink from his hand on the Day of Judgment (PBUH), and to be resurrected as believers. To have a good standing in front of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. And when we start talking about the stakes of issues like this, that's the biggest stake, there's nothing bigger than that. And the extent to which we're able to help anybody come closer to that path is a huge, huge blessing from Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. So if there's any good in anything that we do, we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala to accept from it, and it's all from Him, and that if there’s any deficiencies, anything that I said that's wrong, it is from me and me alone, and my own weaknesses. And so, I always ask people for forgiveness for those for those mistakes, and I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala for forgiveness as well. Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala knows that these are tough times for all of us. No one has it easy. Nobody. Whether the issue is an LGBT issue or something else going on, we're just living in tough times, and Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala tests people differently, and we remind ourselves that this world is dust. This world is a dust. Our responsibilities, as individuals, is to try to weather the storms of the moment, while keeping our Qibla facing Him. And Allah subhanah wa ta’ala knows best. 

Waheed  1:37:05
Indeed. Barak Allah feek, beautiful, beautiful messages. Jazak Allah khairan, wonderful reminders. Br. Mobeen, barak Allah feek for all of your time and efforts. It's been a pleasure and an honor to have you on the podcast. 

Mobeen 1:37:15
The honor has been all mine.  

Waheed  1:37:24
And with this, we have come to the end of today's episode. I hope that you guys enjoyed it and learned from it, inshaAllah. In the next episode, Sh. Mustafa Umar is joining me again this season, and we are going to be spending two episodes together talking about Shar’i perspectives related to gender roles and gender nonconformity, as well as gender transitioning and other contemporary issues. Until then, stay safe and healthy. This has been Mobeen Vaid and Waheed Jensen in “A Way Beyond the Rainbow”, assalamu alaikom warahmatullahi ta’ala wabarakatuh.