Last week while waiting for the B54 bus at JayStreet-Metro Tech I spotted a figure in a chador crossing the plaza. Not an usual sight in Brooklyn with its sizable Muslim community, however this person’s gait was unusual for a woman and I realized that they were trans-gender. They weren’t wearing a veil and their face was male. I was surprised but also happy that this person was strong enough to be their self, considering rampant American transphobia and Muslims’ hatred of sexuality other than male or female.

I wanted to approach this brave soul, however respectfully refrained approaching them.

This sighting was a first, but perhaps not, since many Fatwahs have been issued by Mullahs on the sexual diversity in the cause of social justice. The Koran reads in Surah 42 Ash-Shuraa, verse 49-50), “The dominion of the heavens and the earth belongs to Allah. He creates whatever He pleases. He grants females to whomever He pleases and males to whomever He pleases or grants them a mix of males and females, and causes whomever He pleases to be barren. He is All- Knowing, All-Powerful.”

Fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran have led to the persecution of gays and transgender people through the Muslim world as their Christian counterparts seek to criminalize transgender and gays throughout their realm, going as far as Uganda seeking the death penalty for the violation of their Transgender God in a MuuMuu’s Ten Commandments.

Based on Al-Tabari?s understanding of the Hadith, he at first, acknowledges that the Prophet did not forbid the hermaphrodite and mukhannath from entering the women?s quarters until he heard them giving a description of the women in great detail.

There was an understanding which rejected the belief that Allah never makes a mistake.

As an Atheist I reject such blind judgments by a mythical Supreme Being and vow as I have always to protect those without protection. I used to use violence to do so, but I am a seventy year-old man with a recent liver transplant. My anonymous donor was a forty year-old woman weighting three-hundred pounds and who might have shot herself in the head. I took it on myself to call them Paula whose final sacrifice granted me life.

We are us.

We have no gender.

We do not reject others with multiple genders.

We are travels of eternity and eternity only exists in the Now.

Resist all attempts to make us ‘them’.

There are no absolutes.

And bonne courage to that brave soul crossing the plaza.

please read the June 2020 article: Countering Islamic conservatism on being transgender: Clarifying Tantawi’s and Khomeini?s fatwas from the progressive Muslim standpoint by Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8726683/