Religious views of trans people in Iran are particularly interesting. Though it is an Islamic theocracy where being gay is explicitly against the law, being trans is narrowly accepted. Gender reassignment surgery is legal and formal gender recognition after the procedure is supported by the theocracy. The fact that being gay is potentially punishable by death can lead to people choosing gender reassignment rather than execution. The government’s strict belief that there are no sexual minorities in the country leads to an oddly absolute acceptance of the gender of trans people.
This reminds me of Japan. I’ve not confirmed this myself, but it jives with my understanding of the culture. Binary trans people are generally less ‘disruptive’ to society and less of a perceived ‘problem’ to the mainstream because hey we can fit you into a box and its associated social roles. They really like their boxes and roles. But if you are queer in other more visible ways, like gay people trying to get married or be accepted socially, then that gets frowned upon for upsetting the apple cart.
Why do I care what the apple identifies as? I’m also not shaming people that are clearly stupid and claim they have a brain and the intelligence that goes with it.
Ickplant I feel bad for you. You keep trying to make wholesome posts but you end inadvertently triggering discourse. First pit bull discourse and now hijab discourse.
It would be against Islam for a woman to show herself (without a head covering) to a man she wasn’t married/related to. This isn’t true for woman and other woman. This person is trans and their friend treated them, through religious tradition, that she accepts her friend as a woman.
Which means, in effect, that their friend is saying “My belief that you are truly a woman is at least as strong as my belief in my god,” which is an incredibly powerful way to validate someone’s identity.
In your opinion, is someone going through a transition considered them putting themselves through a mental illness by choice?
If you would say these people already have a mental illness, and are just choosing the wrong solution for it, what do you mean by “mental illness should not be condoned?” How would someone go about solving their problem?
Whatever mental or physical effects they are experiencing that they feel they need to alleviate. I also allowed for the idea that they falsely believe they have a mental illness.
Simply though, can you clarify your position on what is really happening and what people should be doing (or not doing)?
I wonder what her Imam would say to that. I haven’t heard of a Muslim sect that accepts transgender people under their chosen gender. But maybe they are out there, if anyone knows of one I’d like to know more.
I’m not sure in which direction your sarcasm is actually going there.
I wouldn’t say they are a monolith, with all those different sects and the fatwas where you basically have to choose which person or group of muftis you trust to issue binding ones.
On the point of brainwashing… well depends on how you define it, I’d say. I think all Religion at its core is supposed to influence your thinking profoundly and most religious people are brought up into their belief system. What is just socialisation and what is brainwashing I don’t know how to distinguish.
In Iran, gender reassignment is legal, and they’ll even change the birth certificate to match, from what I learned a decade ago.
Homosexuality, however, is a capital offense, so many gay people are pressured to transition.
Some conservative societies seem to have the attitude that it’s better to go from one role with rigid expectations to another than it is to fail to meet the expectations of your original role.
And who can judge about the purpose? And who has the right to judge about the purpose? And who has the right to arbitrarily forbid the one and embrace the other over his perception of the purpose?
It all boils down to white people, in particular white men thinking they are superior to muslim women and they get to decide what is best for them. That is deeply ingrained racism.
Nobody here is telling women what not to wear though. “You are doing the same like thlse forcing a hijab?” jose1324 isn’t killing people for wearing them
By saying “fuck that this gesture is possible” the conclusion is that it shouldn’t, which means that women wouldn’t wear hijab in the first place. But as they choose to do so, that means infringing on their choice.
And it should be very telling that in places like Iran women face repression if they want to not wear hijab, and the western countries working towards the opposite sentiment of repression for wearing hijab.
No, nothing about what Jose said implies that they wouldn’t want women to be allowed to wear a hijab. This gesture is possible because Islam forces women to keep their head covered when they’re around men. If they were allowed to uncover their head around men, then this gesture would hold no weight.
in places like Iran women face repression if they want to not wear hijab, and the western countries working towards the opposite sentiment of repression for wearing hijab.
Stop making these stupid comparisons. Iran imprisons women if they choose not to wear hijabs. Western countries offer women the option not to.
Earlier this month a women in Germany was banned from court service for refusing to take of her hijab. The EU court ruled that banning women from wearing scarfes in the work place is legal, if it is embedded in a “neutrality policy”
If secular doesn’t mean to separate state and religion but to suppress freedom of religion then absolutely yes. Because a theocratic state is doing just the same.
Also it is always ironic when states claim to be “secular” while having christian holidays as public holidays because “culture”.
Fuck right off. Not being allowed on a beach or to work in jobs that necessitate no favor towards any particular groups is not the same as being fucking tortured and imprisoned.
Which i never said. But this is the direction we are heading, if we don’t stop it know. If you take a care to look at history you will see that repression never was just flipped on and off. It is always a gradual shift and it needs to be stopped in the beginning and every increase of repressions need to be seen in the context that there is a threat of it worsening. And oh boy will it be worsening with the current traction of fascist and far right politicians in the West.
This is the same reason why we need to defend all marginalized groups and their rights and not be selective. If it becomes more okay to repress Muslims more, it will become more okay to repress LGBT more again. It will become more okay to repress Black and Brown people more again and it will become more okay to repress Jewish people more again.
Thank you. And those who continue to don such symbols of oppression when they do have a real choice are choosing to express violence against their subjugated peers.
There’s a reason why every free society rejects universal dress codes, and I for one will choose to stand again them whether they are for church or middle school.
And you know that because you spoke with so many of these women, or you know that because you think being from a white western country entitles you to know best for everyone in the world?
That shows how ignorant you all are. Anything that covers the hair and neck is a hijab. You all delude yourself into believing it is some special kind of garnment or some special way it has to be put on. And that is because it has to fit your narrative of what you believe muslims are or how muslims life, with a lot of white supremacy sprinkled on it.
In modern usage, hijab (Arabic: حجاب, romanized: ḥijāb, pronounced [ħɪˈdʒaːb]) generally refers to various head coverings conventionally worn by many Muslim women.[1][2] It is similar to the tichel or snood worn by Orthodox Jewish women, certain headcoverings worn by some Christian women, such as the mantilla, apostolnik and wimple,[3][4] and the dupatta worn by many Hindu and Sikh women.[5][6][7] Whilst a hijab can come in many forms, it often specifically refers to a scarf wrapped around the head, covering the hair, neck and ears but leaving the face visible.
Literally the first picture in the Wikipedia Article shows a women with her Hijab in a style that you could find women in eastern Europe to wear too.
Because I spoke with some of them, lived in different countries and my readings are not limited to information about my place of origin. What about you, do you come from a place that lets you know better about the world than mine, or your argument about having knowledge limited to your origin doesn’t apply to you?
I imagine because in, “civilized” nations… women are just sexual objects. Watch the ads, the movies, the cartoons, the magazines… all industries pertaining to women are sexualized. You must do this, that, wear this, that in order to be acceptable.
I like how you wrote “civilized” as if I made some comment disparaging primarily Muslim nations. By “the rest of the world”, I simply meant those who aren’t pressured by their culture to wear head scarves.
Actually, I believe Muslim majority nations are more civilized than civilizations with Democracy. Democracy ultimately divides and creates disgruntled citizens. I quoted civilized in my initial comment as a sarcasm.
I am sorry, but please educate yourself before making such nonsensical statements. Veiling has been a part of culture and religion outside of Islam for millennia. And if you look at the second source, you’ll see that veiling also has been a mean of liberation and that banning it is part of a long history of oppressing women
“Choose” is a very loaded word here. Yes, technically, they have a choice between wearing a hijab and an alternative, but what is that alternative? For someone in a conservative Muslim community, there is an extreme stigma against choosing not to wear a hijab, so it’s a choice between wearing one or being shunned. If it’s a theocratic country, it’s a choice between wearing one and death. Yes, technically a choice, but no more of a choice than being robbed at gunpoint and “choosing” to empty your pockets to not be shot in the head.
The flak you’re getting for this is bizarre. There are tons of women who wear a hijab by choice. It’s self expression, hell people even do pinups/porn in them so it’s not like the religious association is absolute or binding.
Women should not be forced to wear a hijab, but they also shouldn’t be forced not to. Feminism is about choice, the choice between embracing traditional roles and rules or eschewing them with equal acceptance.
You can upload literally anything on this site and it’ll be downvoted. Sometimes even for the content, usually just because creeps will go back through your history and downvote everything you’ve posted for a week or two.
Nothing speaks for women rights like banning and harassing women who want to wear a peace of clothing.
If you actually talked with hijabi women you would know that most of them choose to wear hijab and are very much not opressed. But the white liberal understands solidarity through white supremacy where he knows what is better for everyone else.
Imagine saying “support Jews ans their rights but fuck the kosha rules. No one should be kept from eating pork.”
If you really want to support Muslims and their rights, then talk with them and don’t let white supremacist propaganda shape your idea of what you want to support.
There isn’t much analogy with kosher practices. Do you know the explicit religious purpose of the hijab? It’s to maintain one’s modesty so as not to tempt men. Fuck that. Men are responsible for their own behavior. The religious purpose of the hijab is straightforward victim-blaming sexism. I won’t support a conservative, backward, oppressive practice just because it’s done by a member of a persecuted religious minority. That’s not white supremacism, that’s a basic commitment to progressive values.
I’m not saying we should ban it. In a free society people should be able to wear what they want. But we absolutely should not support it either.
Do you support high heels? Makeup? The stereotype of women wearing dresses usually, that social standard, that gender norm? It’s not as though lots of things in western society aren’t basically on the same level, or don’t basically stem out of the same set of things, set of religious oppression. The problem isn’t the opposition to those things, it’s the double standard, it’s seeing the muslim version of oppression as being unique because it’s unfamiliar and alien.
If your argument is that dresses are the same level of subjugation as hijabs, you’re either trolling or are completely ignorant. It’s not really even comparable in this day. There is basically no pressure for women to only wear dresses anymore. And it’s also not something that’s imposed by a religious rule. It was more of a general patriarchal society issue, which we also have issues with.
I was gonna write a longass comment in response to this but I’m kinda burnt on that because it’s 11:54 and nobody ever tends to read them, so I’m just gonna link one I previously left that’s pretty much on the same topic. Tl;dr, uhhh, I dunno. Just read the post, I’m just gonna end up saying the same shit at the same length if I try to summarize it.
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit
No one is trying to take anyone’s freedom. But that freedom includes participating in coercive, sexist, patriarchal practices designed around oppression, which is all that religion is. It doesn’t make it a feel good or wholesome story. Religion is inherently bigoted because it enforces obedience through manipulation
In any case, it’s sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah’s witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites
No, ALL christianity is shitty. It’s inherently shitty because its entire purpose is to subjugate through threat of eternal damnation (let alone literal threats and violence). There is literally no other purpose. And this isn’t specific to christianity. It’s inherent to all religions
Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.
I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit, and which women might partake in voluntarily as it’s a part of them practicing their faith. There’s not really a lot of oppression that comes about as a result of wearing the headdress alone as like, a kind of stylistic or ritual choice, it’s most everything else that goes along with it, that entails the oppression.
It’s more complex than lib vs non lib, or, freedom vs non freedom. Freedom can’t be the highest value, there, there has to be something more at the core there. Freedom is usually just a proxy for whatever other value you’re implicitly substituting. One person says, I need the freedom to have my guns, for self protection. Another person, they say they want the ability to be free from a society in which gun ownership is seen as necessary for self-defense, or is common. You hear boo boo platitudes like “my freedom ends where yours begins” and shit like that as an attempt to cope with it, but it’s totally meaningless. There has to be a core value there.
In this case, the core value is basically just the belief that islam is a false religion, and is bigoted and oppressive. Possibly correct for many muslims, perhaps the majority, but still, would be a generalization, and would still be based on a very specific reading of the text, just like it is with christianity, or extremist violent folk buddhism that people in the west don’t usually get exposed to, or, hinduism, which is where the basis for their caste system comes from.
The idiocy, I think, so far as I see it, is that they decry the religion itself, because they see it as all being the same, rather than decrying this or that specific practice as being bigoted. Not even the hijab necessarily, but like, the patriarchal aspects. Much harder to decry these on the basis of the religions themselves if you’re not versed in the religions themselves, too, which is a pretty hard sticking point.
In any case, it’s sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah’s witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites. But then they don’t realize it also entails liberation theology, rastafarianism, the ethiopian church, or even just small unaffiliated churches, and shit like that. Smaller in number than the oppressive megachurches, and still exist within an overarching system in which religion is kind of oppressive, but still, I think, retains some value as a cultural or ritualistic practice, and retains it’s link to history and tradition, which, despite, you know, the common post-historical liberal cries, you know, the idea that the west is post-enlightenment, we have no need for tradition, yadda yadda, is still something that people find really appealing. We still see that with people wanting to return to some idealized version of the 50’s that never existed where everyone was able to afford a suburban home and 2.5 kids, without understanding that those things were not available for everyone, weren’t sustainable, your wife was on opioids, you worked a 9-5 in a steel mill, your kids went either unsupervised or helicopter parented every day, and the indoors were full of smoke while the outside was full of leaded gasoline fumes. The appeal to tradition, to belonging as part of an in-group, is extremely powerful, even if it doesn’t tangibly exist for someone in physical reality. It’s escapism, but it’s escapism through which someone travels with it back into the real world, a changed person.
That’s all to say. Uhh. Yeah, islamophobia is bad, probably. The middle east is still pretty fucked up. So is the west, which is mostly not much better, despite the cries in opposition. Our freedom loving leader, their despotic dictator, etc. I’m sure liberating all that oil from iraq and killing a million people helped that one out plenty, helped them be more progressive, helped civilize them, right? I’m sure the like. US foreign intervention and fucking with the arab spring really helped everything out. I think it’s libya or syria that still hasn’t recovered, right? Don’t know. This video goes out to the brave mujahideen fighters, is what I’m saying.
No one’s talking about removing choice. But not all choices are equally valid. And many choices are coerced due to religious patriarchal structures which are not actually true choices
So you’re saying this post is bad because the focus is entirely on the positive interaction, and nobody is screaming the fact that one of the people in the story wears a hijab and going out of their way to slam Islam over it? 🤨
In the same way that posts about kids donating their money to pay off others kids school lunch debt, or charities paying for cancer patients care are bad because they focus on the positive to that specific person instead of the shitty situation that causes them to be in that position in the first place, yes
If you wanna make broad generalizations about large groups of people with diverse beliefs, you don’t get to turn around and exclude another group from broad generalizations just because you’re included in it.
Just wanna add in case people haven’t encountered these nuanced interactions: my cousin and her husband are both atheists that think being gay is a choice and trans people are mentally ill. Religious beliefs or lack thereof don’t guarantee someone will be ethically or morally upstanding
Despite your down votes I agree with you. I’m always conflicted about voting on something that appears to be clearly deceiving so usually I abstain from voting entirely but someone who cares more about this can easily justify a down-vote.
You were there? It’d go a long way were you to provide proof.
The wiki page is a famous illustration of how it’s absurd to put the burden of proof on the people who are disapproving and it should always fall on people making the claim.
Stop destroying prejudices against Muslims! How can you show them to be self confident and intelligent people that don’t need a white savior to explain the world to them?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very against conservative Muslims, as much as I am against conservative Christians, ultra-orthodox Jews etc…
But it’s clear that there’s nuance, so like one can be a Christian and also be accepting of gays and trans people, one can be the same while believing in Islam. The ones I can’t stand are those that use their preferred book to put themselves on a pedestal and be terrible to other people, but this trait is not limited to one specific religion, or even to religion itself.
Half of my family is Muslim. I’m currently partnered with the trans alliance in my city to build their new housing co-op… I’m well versed in both sides of this and what’s stated above didn’t happen LoL. It’s a fairytale or as known in the Muslim community… teqqiyah.
This isn’t too far fetched. I recently saw a video of a woman who is Muslim explaining why she personally wouldn’t take her hijab off in front of a trans woman. Which is the opposite of the op story
BUT… it’s obvious that figuring out how trans women fit into their religious beliefs would be a discussion among Muslim women. Just like Christianity, there are going to be different interpretations, person to person even, of what is ok and not. Seems to me like this would actually be a really easy way for a woman to show her support to a friend.
My op was removed LoL. I guess you’re not allowed to introduce reality into these fairytales. Half of my family is Muslim, this is absolutely a fairytale LMFAO.
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