Hey everyone, today I wanna talk about why I, as a queer person, support Muslims.
Because I hear from random people on the internet all the time that apparently I’m supposed
to hate Muslims.
Anytime I talk about anything related to Muslims, the comments or the replies sound something
like this, “Muslims hate you because you’re trans and gay!”
“How can you support a religion that hates you?”
“Why do you support Islam?”
“If you went to a middle-eastern country, they’d kill you!”
If you’re a queer person on the internet who’s ever talked about Muslims, you’ve
also probably had some of these questions come up, so here’s how I would answer those
people, and maybe it will help you deal with them as well.
But remember that some people are just determined to hate and nothing you say will be able to
change their minds, so you gotta know when to disengage.
Anyway, let’s start with the first accusation, that apparently Muslims hate me because I’m queer.
I’m just 100% sure this is not true.
I know that because I have friends and acquaintances who are Muslim who have been nothing but positive
and supportive towards me.
So there’s really not much else to argue there.
I know that Muslims don’t hate me because I have met and talked to so many Muslims who
don’t hate me and in fact really support me.
Now obviously, there are probably some Muslims who hate me, but there are also Christians
and atheists who hate me -- plenty of them.
It would be pretty illogical to assume that all 1.8 billion Muslims in the world exist
as a monolith.
To stereotype such a massive group of people with greatly varying beliefs as all anti-queer is ridiculous.
In fact, there are queer Muslims in this world.
There are gay Muslim and trans Muslims -- that’s just a fact.
Are they all anti-queer too?
I find that hard to believe.
It’s at this point that someone usually quotes some verse from the Quran that they
think is homophobic, but like you can find quotes from the Bible that sound homophobic just as easily.
And so many atheists support these huge popular atheists
who are massive homophobes and transphobes and racists.
And so it seems super hypocritical for those Christians and atheists to be acting all high
and mighty towards Muslims when they’re often just as bad.
I just think that if homophobic Quran verses mean I shouldn’t support Muslims, then homophobic
Bible verses mean I shouldn’t support Christians, and homophobic quotes from atheist leaders
should mean I shouldn’t support atheists.
But the truth is, I know there are queer-friendly Christians and atheists and Muslims, and that
someone’s religion or lackthereof doesn’t necessarily determine their attitude towards queer people.
I’ve met super homophobic people and super supportive people from all kinds of religions.
Religions are not political parties, someone’s affiliation with one only tells you what god
they believe in, not what their social or political beliefs are.
For as much as atheists like to rant about being rational and logical, they really love
to throw all of that out the window if it means that they can hate on Muslims.
And the funniest part about these people who say that Muslims hate me because I’m queer,
is that they usually say that right after calling me an anti-queer slur or otherwise
being homophobic or transphobic towards me.
These islamophobes try to position themselves as being better than Muslims because they
allege that Muslims hate queer people, but it’s usually pretty clear that it’s the
islamophobes who hate queer people.
They only bring us up when it can score them superiority points.
When they’re not using us to put down Muslims, our rights mean nothing to them.
Islamophobes feign support for queer people because they think they can turn us against
Muslims, but we really shouldn’t fall for that.
If you’re queer, I promise you that there are Muslims who would love and support you.
Don’t fall for the xenophobic trap of hating everyone who’s different from you.
They will wield that hatred against Muslims and then they will immediately turn around
and wield it against you.
And so let’s talk about that other accusation, that apparently I support the religion of Islam.
The truth is, I don’t. I’m an atheist.
Why would I support a religion?
But supporting Muslims is different from supporting Islam.
I think that islamophobes like to phrase their accusations and bad-faith questions this way
because it turns the attention away from the people and onto the religion.
That way they can say they’re vilifying the religion, and not the people.
It’s a cop-out for them to seem nicer than they are, even though it has the same effect
of vilifying the people.
Plus, it forces people to defend Islam rather than Muslims.
It redirects the conversation away from the struggles of individuals and turns it into
a conversation about the various interpretations of a massive religion.
So, let me be clear, while I don’t support Islam or any other religion, I 100% support Muslims.
Islam is doing fine.
It has 1.8 billion members and is the second biggest religion in the world; it doesn’t need my support.
But Muslims themselves are often heavily discriminated against, especially in places where they are the minority.
A while back, Trump said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the US.
This was based on his xenophobic and misguided fear that all Muslims are terrorists.
When he later found out that was unconstitutional, he reworked his Muslim ban to get around the
laws, instead banning everyone from certain Muslim-majority countries.
Several lower courts struck it down, but this summer, the Supreme Court upheld it.
Trump’s Muslim ban has the effect of separating innocent Muslims their families and denying
Muslims their right to visit or immigrate to the US. It’s a tragedy.
Across Europe, niqab and burqa bans have been going into effect, seeking to regulate what
Muslim women are allowed to wear.
France banned the burkini a while back, a Muslim swimsuit, and recently in Denmark,
when a woman was assaulted and had her niqab torn off, the police arrived not to defend
her, but to fine her for wearing a niqab.
Every day I see new stories of Muslims being the victims of hate crimes in the US.
I don’t know how you can see all this stuff in the news and not see how Muslims are oppressed
and marginalized in so many ways.
I support Muslims because I aim to support all oppressed and marginalized people.
When people are treated unjustly, we should defend them, regardless of whether or not
we believe in the same god.
My ass is atheist as hell, but I would much rather side with compassionate Muslims and
Christians than xenophobic atheist assholes.
And like, trust me, I know what it’s like to be angry at religion.
I got my start on the internet in atheist communities.
I hated Christianity and by extension I hated Islam and all these other religions.
I was not a very compassionate person back then, and I’m not proud of a lot of the
stuff I believed -- but I’ve changed significantly since then.
I saw how the atheist communities around me were disguising their bigotry as a criticism of religion.
I saw how easily they veered into racism and stereotyping and prejudice.
I’m lucky that I got out when I did, and I want to let you know that if you’re dabbling
in that side of the internet right now, you don’t have to stay there.
There’s a whole huge part of the internet that is accepting and tolerant and kind.
I know that you might have some pent-up rage about a religion because of how people from
that religion mistreated you, but I would urge you not to take that hatred out on every religious person.
Trust me, you will meet atheists who will hurt you just as bad, and you will meet religious
people who would be willing to do anything to help you.
The world isn’t as black-and-white as you might think.
In the past, I really thought religion was the root of all evil, and now I know that
I was very wrong about that.
There are atheists who will fight to strip you of your human rights, and there are religious
people who will fight to defend you.
You don’t have to believe in the same god to fight for the same rights.
Now I also want to talk about that last accusation from earlier, that allegedly if I go to a
middle-eastern country, they will kill me.
First of all, most Muslims don’t even live in the middle-east; in fact, the largest population
of Muslims is in Indonesia.
But I never expected bigots to be very good at geography.
Regardless, there are some Muslim-majority countries that I would probably not feel safe
going to because of their laws against homosexuality and other stigma against trans people and
queer people in general. That’s true.
But, there are also some countries that are majority Christian and have laws against homosexuality.
I mean, the US still had some anti-sodomy laws in place until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003,
and Australia just legalized same-sex marriage at the end of 2017.
It’s not like we’re light-years ahead of all these other countries, our advancements
in queer rights have come relatively recently.
And there are still some conservative parts of the US that I wouldn’t feel safe going to.
If queer people being unsafe in a Muslim-majority country means all Muslims hate queer people,
then queer people being unsafe in a Christian-majority town in the US should mean all Christians
hate queer people.
But obviously none of that is the case.
There are progressive Christians who would denounce conservative Christians, and likewise,
there are tons of progressive Muslims who don’t support anti-homosexuality laws.
The governments of a few countries in the middle east do not speak for all 1.8 billion
Muslims in the world, just like how the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t speak for all Christians.
I really think that the reason so many people hate Muslims has less to do with Islam and
more to do with their skin color.
Islamophobes are racists.
They will say they’re not, because Islam isn’t a race, but their criticism of Islam
doesn’t seem to extend as harshly towards white Christians.
Plus, when islamophobes think they’re attacking Muslims, sometimes they end up attacking Sikhs,
which is an entirely different religion, or they attack Arab atheists.
Islamophobes love to cover their hatred and make it palatable by saying it’s about criticizing
a religion, but if you look closely enough, it’s so clearly about race.
They will mock Muslim women for covering their hair while applauding white Christian nuns
for doing the same thing.
White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis love that they can now make their hatred for people
of color marketable to a larger audience by calling it “criticism of a religion”. Don’t fall for it.
These people will always be harder on Muslims of color than white Christians or white atheists
because it isn’t even really about their religion, it’s about their skin color.
So yeah, that’s why I’m queer and I support Muslims.
I support them because I know what it’s like to be marginalized and how vital it can
be to have people supporting you and defending you against xenophobia.
I’ll link to some resources down below about how you can intervene to stop islamophobic
hate, and remember to keep speaking out about terrible policies like Trump’s Muslim ban
or Denmark’s burka ban.
Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.