To paraphrase Eve Sedgwick in her essay, “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay,” it is always open season on trans kids (Sedgwick, 1993, 155). Mirroring trends among their conservative white Christian American counterparts, the anti-queer discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers show a growing preoccupation with trans people. In their digital discourses in the past five years, neotraditional Muslim preachers have written open letters, opinion pieces, and fatwas against trans identities and gender affirming care. In these digital texts, these preachers essentialize the gender binary as divinely intended and unchangeable. They also express anxieties over a supposed LGBTQ agenda that they imagine threatens parents’ rights to raise their children with conservative values. Conservative Muslim preachers are opting into an anti-trans rhetoric that simultaneously claims to defend the wellbeing of children while making the lives of trans kids all but impossible.
Reflecting this growing trend, the popular Sunni shaykh, Yasir Qadhi, drafted a fatwa on “Islam’s position on transgenderism” for the Fiqh Council of North America (Qadhi, 2022). In it, he discusses trans identities, same-sex attractions, and intersex people. In line with most Sunni scholars, he opines that while feeling trans is not prohibited, changing one’s gender is. The one exception to the prohibition on gender affirming medical care is for intersex individuals for whom there is established legal precedent in Sunni fiqh. While not diverting significantly from other orthodox Sunni opinion on trans and intersex persons, Qadhi spends a significant amount of digital space reaffirming the same biological and gender essentialism as reflected in the anti-trans discourses of conservative Christian politicians. Significant to both conservative Muslim and Christian discourses, there is a claim that their views and morals do not justify violence against gender and sexual minorities; rather, they argue for pastoral or familial care for children with queer or trans tendencies, ignoring the inherent violence in the policing of gender.
A year later in May 2023, 130 Muslim leaders, imams, and lay preachers added their signatures to an open letter, “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam,” which sought a unified Muslim response to progressive shifts in queer and trans rights (2023). The writers of this open letter express their collective anxiety over legal and social pressures to compromise their conservative Islamic views on gender and sexuality, e.g. “God defined humanity as consisting of males and females.” They worry that society is promoting “LGBTQ-centric values among children through legislation and regulations” without regard to “parental consent,” disrespecting both Muslim parents and their children’s agency to express their conscientious objection to such values (2023). Similar to their conservative white Christian counterparts, anti-trans Muslims understand themselves and their children as victims in the supposed culture wars over gender identity. This remains a characteristic rhetorical move despite the proliferation of anti-trans legislation and the US Supreme Court’s awaited decision on United States v. Skrmetti.
In promoting this narrow interpretation of Islam, these Muslim preachers adopt the same tactics as conservative white Christians: drawing on people’s anxieties about gender and villainizing gender and sexual minorities as threats to religion, morality, and the family (especially parents and children) (Goodwin, 2020). Recently, these tactics have been writ large among certain conservative white Chrsitian politicians in the United States, such as the current president’s executive order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” or United States v. Skrmetti which challenges the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors. In many of these declarations, house bills, and state laws, politicians claim the good intentions of protecting children by marginalizing trans, intersex, and nonbinary children and adults as unworthy of recognition, much less protection.
Trans and queer people of all ages continue to be confronted with “the experience of living with one’s humanity withheld” (Malatino, 2019, 639). As a result of societal pressures and an increasingly transphobic political climate, queer, trans, intersex, and nonbinary children and young adults have suffered an increase in suicide rates (The Trevor Project, 2024). No matter the good intentions claimed by the authors of these open letters, essays, fatwas, bills, and executive orders, anti-queer and anti-trans discourses are inherently violent discourses which justify the policing of gender and the erasure of queer and trans people from public life.
First, this paper draws parallels between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim American preachers and the anti-trans discourses of conservative white Christian American politicians. This paper discusses the similar rhetorical moves, such as an essentialized gender binary and claims of victimhood against an LGBTQ threat. Next, this paper moves to theorizing what use such discourse has for neotraditional Muslim preachers, especially given their adoption of conservative political discourses which are rooted in white supremacy. Although trans people make up a small proportion of any religious, racial, or ethnic group in the United States, transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative communities, religious leaders, and politicians. Since Obergefell v. Hodges, neotraditional Muslims have relied heavily on homophobia and transphobia in defining their interpretation of American Islam. In addition, their conservative white Christian counterparts–with whom they share similar anti-trans rhetoric–are either complicit in or encouraging of a white supremacy that not only marks queer and trans people as threats to society but also immigrants, racial others, and religious minorities (especially Muslims) as threats to the state. This paper theorizes that neotraditional Muslims might further embrace anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric as foundational aspects to their interpretation of American Islam as they navigate social citizenship, a crisis of authority, and the culture wars. Lastly, this paper closes with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation. In a political environment that continues to be antagonistic to religious, sexual, gender, and racial minorities, this paper makes an appeal to researching and documenting queer, trans, and progressive Muslim communities to illustrate modes of resistance, strategies for survival, and what it means to create spaces for human flourishing.
This paper examines the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative religious leaders and politicians to promote their exclusionary visions for religious norms or the state. This paper considers anti-trans discourses as an expression of white Christian supremacy relying on the marginalization of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities such as Muslims. First, it draws parallels in anti-trans rhetoric between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim preachers and the bills and executive orders of conservative white Christian politicians. Thereafter it theorizes the use of discourse for neotraditional Muslim preachers. Lastly, this paper ends with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation.