How this advocate fights gendered Islamophobia in medicine

Read the Full Transcript

• Judy Woodruff:

  Muslim women in the U.S. often experience discrimination in many aspects of their lives. And that includes health care.

  Through her work at a national nonprofit, Sahar Pirzada is working to curtail that mistreatment and advocate for reproductive justice.

  Tonight, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on gendered Islamophobia.

• Sahar Pirzada, Advocacy Manager, Heart:

  I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to an Islamic school from second to eighth grade.

  And 9/11 actually happened when I was at the Islamic school, and I was quite young at the time, so I don't think I had the language to really make sense of it. But our school was shut down for like a week because we were getting death threats and bomb threats.

  I was still in a bubble, though. I was still sheltered from kind of the day to day microaggressions and discrimination that I know a lot of my peers and community members were facing at the time. It's also become so much more normalized to experience Islamophobia on a daily basis.

  At HEART, I am the advocacy manager. HEART is a national nonprofit, and our mission is to advance reproductive justice and uproot gendered violence by promoting choice and access for the most impacted Muslims in the United States.

  As I was doing my research, I came to learn a lot about how, during the time of the prophet, peace be upon him, people used to ask a lot of very explicit questions about sexual intimacy and sex in general, because it was part of their responsibility of taking care of themselves and taking care of the people that they're in relationships with.

  There were records of people asking questions about rights within a relationship when it comes to pleasure. And so you could have sex not just for the sake of reproducing. And that is something I think is really beautiful and sex-positive.

  At HEART, we are a religiously informed organization, but, at the same time, we're a public health org, right? So we are not going to shame people for the decisions they make around sex, but we are going to be there as a resource for them.

  When we're thinking about reproductive justice, it's including living in communities that are free from violence. And when you're looking at the Muslim community, we're also specifically looking at gendered Islamophobia.

  I myself am so passionate about this work because I have experienced gendered Islamophobia when trying to seek services for my reproductive and sexual health. For many years, I lived with sexual dysfunction. I went to several gynecologists, who all disregarded my pain and said stuff around, well, you just need to relax, you need to have more sex. Maybe it's just because of your religion or your culture.

  And that was because of the narratives they were fed about me as a Muslim woman, who could never be a person who is sex-positive. And it wasn't until three years after that I got diagnosed and then started to receive treatment.

  I think this is a common experience for women of color in this country, where our pain is invalidated. Culturally, there aren't enough spaces where we can have these honest conversations in safety and in affirming ways.

  I think we can disrupt these cycles of generational and institutional silence by creating the spaces that we have always wanted for ourselves.

  My name is Sahar Pirzada, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on gendered Islamophobia.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.