This year, LGBTQ Pride month coincides with the holy month of Ramadan, and I am commemorating both as a queer Muslim woman. LGBTQ Pride month commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprisings against the long history of police brutality on the LGBTQ community. For many Muslims around the world, including myself, Ramadan is a period of peace, spiritual connection and engaging more deeply with our faith.
In the days following the June 12 massacre at Pulse night club in Orlando, queer Muslim identity has been experiencing hyper-visibility in media. Many of us are being contacted by media to talk about being both “Muslim” and “queer.” Yes, we exist!
These days we are being faced with two particular challenges in American society: homophobia and Islamophobia. We are grieving the loss of 49 LGBTQ — primarily Latinx — community members murdered in Orlando. And yet the reality of Islamophobia in this country hinders our mourning. When I heard about Orlando, I was in shock. Then I braced myself.
I asked myself, what was next? Will our local mosques be attacked? Will law enforcement surveillance and FBI entrapment increase in our communities? Will U.S. imperialism gear up for more violence in our homelands? It’s an anxious place to be in. We lost so many queer and trans people of color. I see the faces of my own community reflected in the faces of the 49 victims, even though I didn’t know them personally. Looking at their faces — and learning about their lives, their friends, families, lovers and the survivors of this horrific violence — brings me to such despair. How does this happen?
To answer that, we need to look at homophobia in American culture and politics. As of April, there have been more than 100 homophobic and transphobic active state legislative bills across 22 states. We are seeing this here in Washington with Initiative 1515, which would take away the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people to safely use public bathrooms. These laws perpetuate homophobia and transphobia and are just as guilty for the violence in Orlando as guns are. We need to talk about why LGBTQ people of color experience much higher rates of hate-based violence compared to our White LGBTQ community. We need to talk about why trans-women are murdered at a rate that activists are calling an epidemic (21 trans-women were reported murdered in 2015, most of the victims were women of color). We need to talk about how increasing law enforcement presence in our communities harms LGBTQ people of color rather than making us safer. LGBTQ communities, particularly communities of color, have historically been over-policed, harassed and neglected by law enforcement, with little to no accountability. In 2015, 126 survivors of anti-LGBTQ hate violence reported police misconduct.
We also need to talk about toxic masculinity: “a militant, weaponized form of masculinity that hetero-normative patriarchal society pushes onto every man,” as writer Qais Munhazim described it in a recent article on muftah.org. We also need to examine institutions that perpetuate the American culture of violence, such as the police, immigration enforcement agencies, the military and privatized security companies. The shooter, Omar Mateen, was employed at G4s, a private security company.
Islamophobia is a convenient distraction from the real problems we are facing in the U.S. Sure, we need to talk about gun control. But the gun control bill congressional Democrats recently staged a sit-in for furthers discriminatory practices of law enforcement surveilling the Muslim-American community. Use of the racialized “terrorism” watch-list ignores the fact that the majority of gun violence in our country is perpetrated by White men. Many civil rights activists, including the ACLU, are opposing this proposal and raising the issue that there are many ways to pass gun control laws without legitimatizing and furthering these racist post-9/11 policies.
Right now, we need to focus on the victims of Orlando. Our queer and trans Latinx community who lost so many people in one night. As I write this, the Supreme Court just put approximately 5 million undocumented parents back at risk of deportation through its non-action on dapa (or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.) Meanwhile, abusive immigration enforcement agents operate unchecked: raiding refugee families, brutalizing people near the border and putting people into inhumane detention centers and deportation proceedings. With the recent massacre of mostly Latinx LGBTQ community members, some of whom were undocumented, are we talking about the various issues threatening Latinx communities’ safety and breaking apart families? How can we really stand up in solidarity with Orlando and not call for a moratorium on deportations?
Anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies perpetuate violence. If you want to stand with the LGBTQ Latinx and Muslim communities right now, you have to also stand with us in our struggles against policies that wreak havoc in our lives every day.
Samira Shifteh is the office manager and bookkeeper for Real Change, as well as a member of Noor LGBTQI Muslims of Seattle, and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.